Do you read books on the craft of writing?

I read On Writing by Stephen King.  It was pretty good but mainly because he talked about being a drunken coke head. 

One of these days I shall follow poelzig's example and read King's On Writing as well. First because King is a very good writer, but second because it has been recommended to me as one of the best books on the craft.

The only book about writing I've read is "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield, and for two main reasons:

1) He's Steven fucking Pressfield. He has proven he has valuable things to say about writing. He's not one of the thousands of people trying to make a living by instructing other people on how to write, he's a great novelist in his own right.

2) He doesn't romanticize writing. The War of Art is mostly about the fact that writing is work, and if you don't put in the work, you won't produce anything meaningful. No bullshit about divine inspiration, no bullshit about writer's block, no cutesy little quotes, just practical advice for writing.


I have to be honest here, I think the vast majority of people offering writing advice are doing it in a misguided attempt to draw traffic to their websites or to sell ebooks. I am not going to take writing advice from some asshole whose biggest accomplishment is publishing a terrible genre book on the Kindle store.

IMO this entire industry that's sprung up about how to teach people to write is just another way for people to procrastinate, and to engage people who love to talk about writing, and love to identify themselves as writers, but never actually write anything. It's like they're more interested in telling people they're writers than in actually writing.

Thankfully, I've learned to be extremely discriminating in terms of who I will listen to and take advice from. Life is short, and there really isn't time to listen to bullshit artists or anyone who isn't masterful at their craft. Listening to the wrong people can do more harm than good if you pick up their bad habits or take bad advice to heart. It's the same thing with online review groups -- the vast majority of people are not worth interacting with or listening to.

I took a science fiction and fantasy writing class a few years ago and had this classmate who was a complete jackass -- he didn't read other people's stuff, and his critiques made that crystal clear. One week I brought in a story told from the PoV of an unreliable narrator on a derelict colony ship, where a small community of former sleepers was eking out an existence on the ship's remaining resources and limited number of still-functioning systems. The sequence followed the narrator looking for her lost kitten, and illicitly crossing the boundaries into another district of the ship even though she'd been told that exploring deeper into the ship was dangerous. It was rich with vivid descriptions of the ship, internal monologue, carefully dispersed exposition, a companion egging the protagonist on, etc.

And what did this fuckstick in my class offer as feedback? "Uh, well it says here that your main character stumbles on this huge, dusty chamber with a broken tram system, shops and waterfalls. How are there waterfalls on a ship? Like, doesn't the water have to come from somewhere?"

Are you fucking kidding me? You supposedly read the entire chapter, which is about a kid discovering that her parents and other elders had been lying to her, and you're here talking about the plumbing system on the fucking ship?

So yeah -- tl;dr version is, I don't like it when people waste my time, and I'm extremely picky about who I will apprentice myself to.