The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White

This was a very quick read and very useful.  It covered about thirty principles of good writing clearly and concisely.  The following are things I need to work on:

- Omit needless words (rule 13)
- Avoid a succession of loose sentences (rule 14)
- Use a variety of sentence types
- Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end (rule 18)
- Avoid weak conjunctions like 'and' or 'but'
- Put statements in positive form (rule 12)

I got my version on the Kindle for only a dollar.  It seems to be quite an old version because they also recommended using hyphens in to-day and to-morrow!

On Writing, by Stephen King

Right after I finished The Stand, I started reading On Writing because I liked the former so much.  Unfortunately, reading the book on how King writes made me like The Stand less!  My problem is that King writes without knowing where he's going.  He starts with an interesting situation and then starts writing, a process he likens to uncovering a fossil.  I think to have a strong theme, you have to know the theme and the ending before you can start writing; the author's job is then to construct the events which lead up to the climax and demonstrate the theme.

King relates how he had a lot of trouble finishing The Stand because he wrote himself into a corner and didn't know how to get out of it.  He finally had a Eureka moment and it all came together.  Unfortunately, the book reads like that too--when the climax finally comes, it doesn't feel like the book was inevitably leading up to that final confrontation.

As for On Writing, I learned a lot from reading it, and I really appreciated King's honesty.  He highly recommended Strunk and White's Elements of Style and I read that next.

The Stand, by Stephen King

I liked The Stand.  It is the first book I've read by Stephen King, and I was surprised that he was such a good writer.  I liked the depth of the characters, the broad scope of the action, and the way King wrote so the reader felt he was in the story.  It was also fun to get inside the heads of his characters.

For me, The Stand was lacking when it came to theme, something about the danger or recklessness of applying technology to warfare.  Or maybe it was that all organized societies drift toward destructiveness, and so we shouldn't have organized societies?  Regardless, the book suffered as so many other well-written ones:  they don't culminate in a meaningful theme.