How to Write Like Stephen King

You don’t need to crank out 70 novels to channel your inner King. Daniel Rodrigues-Martin distills the horror master’s decades-long writing habits into three refreshingly practical strategies that any author can start using tomorrow, no haunted hotel required.

In 2018, George R.R. Martin asked Stephen King at a fireside chat:

“How the f— do you write so many books so fast?”

The audience laughed. I laughed. Stephen King laughed. It’s a great question.

For decades, Stephen King has been held up as a gold standard of productivity. King is one of the world’s most successful living authors with nearly seventy published books to his name since 1974’s Carrie, and he often lands in “top ten” lists of the world’s richest authors.

With a fortune like King’s, it’s been a while since he’s needed to write a grocery list, let alone a novel. Yet by his own admission at the fireside with Martin, King writes 5-6 pages a day every day and has for decades. He does this every morning for four hours before moving on with his day.

For many writers, King’s regimen isn’t feasible. When you’re not being paid to write, it’s hard to avoid little speed bumps like “a regular job” or “kids.”

Despite this, there are methods of capturing the spirit of King’s regimen without succumbing to guilt, exhaustion, or writer’s block.

So here are three considerations, based on King’s proven strategy, for doing just that.

#1: King Writes Clean

When King writes five pages, those five pages are cleaner than pages by someone who’s been writing for six months. Period.

King said at the fireside that when he writes his pages, he “tries to get them clean.” They’ll be edited, but for now, the foundation is solid enough to support the weight of more story. The “flourishes” of exposition, poetry of language, etc., have foundations to cling to because King wrote clean from the start.

If the metaphor were of a house, you could say King builds the foundation and frame first. He doesn’t lay carpet when the house has no roof, yet some writers essentially do just this. They lay carpet when there’s no roof. The rain comes, and the carpet is perpetually ruined and relaid while the roof goes up at a snail’s pace.

So Learn to Write Clean

When wet-on-wet painter Bob Ross first started his Joy of Painting series, folks in the 1980s believed “the magic of television” made it seem that Ross completed his painting in twenty-three minutes. He was later asked how long it really took him to complete a painting. His answer?

“Twenty years and twenty minutes.”

Ross really was completing his paintings in the length of a TV episode. His capacity to work quickly was based on twenty years of practice. He favored the wet-on-wet method because of its simplicity and speed, and he leveraged simplicity and speed because he wasn’t stumbling over basic brushstrokes.

“Twenty years and twenty minutes” applies to writing.

Fecund writers aren’t stopping to rehearse basics. They’re putting down foundations strong enough to bear the weight of walls and a roof. But this assumes the pages are basically clean.

How can you write clean? Study and practice. Develop a regular writing habit. Read books on writing by writers. Analyze why some stories work and others don’t. Swap critiques. Economize words.

Proficiency isn’t born overnight, and as Bob Ross once said: “Roofing is hard work.”

#2: King Sets Attainable Goals

While King surely has to change things up from time-to-time, his daily quota is attainable based on his proficiency and routine.

King doesn’t set himself up for failure by working too little or too much, but this is precisely what many young writers do. They set impossible goals and tell themselves they fail because they’re bad. In reality, they’ve set the bar at the wrong height.

So Set Attainable Goals

Five pages per day might not be a good goal for you, but maybe two is? Even at 250 words per day—about a page—you can complete the first draft of a 90,000-word novel in a year.

The question is: What’s attainable right now?

Determine a feasible quota and stick with it. As your circumstances change, adapt. Work as much as is feasible. It’s better to consistently write fewer words daily than it is to write more words once per week. It’s easier to write fewer words daily, and it’ll help turn daily writing into a habit, which is really the point: attainable goals as part of a habit-building process.

#3: King Knows Why He Writes

King hasn’t needed to write so much as a grocery list for a long time. He’s wealthy enough to pay others to do every mundane chore in his life.

Yet he still writes.

Why?

Because he wants to and he knows why he wants to.

King has a drive to work at his craft when he could milk his fortune forever. He could choose to do that tomorrow, but he won’t. Tomorrow, he’ll be writing five pages of his next book.

What is King’s reason for writing? I don’t know. But he does, and that’s what counts.

So Know Why You Write

Meandering is okay for those who are dabbling or just starting. But for those who want a literary career, meandering won’t do.

If it’s been a while since you’ve wondered why you’re doing this, and if you’re unsatisfied…it’s time to ask “why.”

When you have purpose, you can weather the storms life and the publishing world throw at you and find your way out of the storms.

But you must know why you write.

You don’t have to write seventy books to write like Stephen King. A successful literary career might mean writing ten books, or three books, or just getting a handful of shorts published.

Look at yourself and your life and determine what you must do to get to where you want to go.

How can you write like Stephen King?

Learn to write clean. Set attainable goals. Know why you write.

And get to work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel Rodrigues-Martin began writing in 2004. Since then, he’s become the author of books, articles, essays, shorts, scripts, poems, a master’s thesis, and countless rants. His debut novel, Goddess from the Machine, was selected as one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best 100 Indie Books of 2025.

CONNECT WITH DANIEL RODRIGUES-MARTIN:
Website:  https://danielrodriguesmartin.weebly.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danielrodriguesmartin/
Substack: https://danielrodriguesmartin.substack.com/

GODDESS FROM THE MACHINE

Reese Sadoleto is an ex-slave, genius machinist, and the only companion of the superhuman “Vigilant.” Together, Reese and the Vigilant battle the City of Machindoun’s underground slave trafficking network and force its secret leaders to the brink. But the night the Vigilant plans to deliver the death blow and end slavery for good, he vanishes.

A tense ceasefire settles over Machindoun. Trafficking goes underground and regular folk walk the streets again. With no hero to mend, missions to plan, or gear to repair, Reese determines to forget her past and forge a future all her own. — But the past never forgets.

A year after his disappearance, the Vigilant’s foes return to take back Machindoun, killing one of Reese’s new friends. Fueled by vengeance, she weaponizes her body with cybernetics while playing the city’s criminals, elite, and working class against each other in an escalating game of cat-and-mouse.

Machindoun’s factions go to war, unaware that Reese has orchestrated the conflict. But when her greatest foes reveal themselves as the architects of Machindoun’s-and Reese’s-suffering, she realizes that to kill her past, free herself from the Vigilant’s legacy, and forge her own future, she must sacrifice either her humanity or her life.

Neither vengeance nor her foes will let her escape with both.