## Metadata - Author: [[Stephen King]] - Full Title: On Writing - Category: #books ## Highlights - Around 1960, Forry (who sometimes referred to himself as “the Ackermonster”) spun off the short-lived but interesting Spacemen, a magazine which covered science fiction films. In 1960, I sent a story to Spacemen. It was, as well as I can remember, the first story I ever submitted for publication. I don’t recall the title, but I was still in the Ro-Man phase of my development, and this particular tale undoubtedly owed a great deal to the killer ape with the goldfish bowl on his head. My story was rejected, but Forry kept it. (Forry keeps everything, which anyone who has ever toured his house—the Ackermansion—will tell you.) About twenty years later, while I was signing autographs at a Los Angeles bookstore, Forry turned up in line  . . . . with my story, single-spaced and typed with the long-vanished Royal typewriter my mom gave me for Christmas the year I was eleven. He wanted me to sign it to him, and I guess I did, although the whole encounter was so surreal I can’t be completely sure. Talk about your ghosts. Man oh man. ([Location 286](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0SIM&location=286)) - “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.” ([Location 568](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0SIM&location=568)) - Gould said something else that was interesting on the day I turned in my first two pieces: write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you’re very lucky (this is my idea, not John Gould’s, but I believe he would have subscribed to the notion), more will want to do the former than the latter. ([Location 570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0SIM&location=570))