Stephen King Doesn’t Need a Notebook. It’s Fine if You Do.

He also doesn’t plot and lets ideas filter through his brain strainer. Sometimes masters are blinded by their own brilliance.

I came across this video of a speech that Stephen King gave at the University of Massachusetts in 2012. In general it’s good. I mean, it’s Stephen King giving writing advice. I’m always up for that.

The problem, for me, comes when you get to about 10 minutes in. He starts talking about how he never plots and he thinks keeping a notebook is the best way to immortalize a bad idea.

And I thought about all those writers sitting in front of him listening, and the 1.3 million (!) people who have watched the video on Youtube — probably most of them writers — and I realized something.

None of us are Stephen King.

If you ask me, that’s a fucking load off. No need to compete with him. He’s somewhere out in the atmosphere and it’s a very good guess that I will never be up there with him.

He says at the start of his talk that he’s just a regular guy, but come on. We all know that’s not true. Stephen King is a genre-writing God and I’m not.

Since I know that and I accept it, then I can accept that what works for him may not work for mere mortal writers like me.

Imagine that you want to play the piano. You have a natural knack for it. You work super hard, you practice every day. You get into Juilliard. You make it to Carnegie Hall or you sign a contract with a record label or you join a rock band. Maybe you win some awards and tons of people really love your work.

But you’re still not Beethoven, who by the time he was in his 40s didn’t even need to be able to hear music to create some of the most beautiful compositions the world has ever known.

It’s like that.

Stephen King might be able to hold a 300 or 400 or 500 page novel in his head all at once. He might have story structure so internalized that he can manage it on the fly. He says that he uses a strainer method — his ideas sift through the holes in his brain like sand and only the good ones stick, or something along those lines.

Well. Good for him. I’m in awe of his talent. His body of work has been foundational for me — not only as a writer, either. As a person.

But the 1.3 million people, plus the writers sitting right in front of him, listening to him throw away the idea of writing down ideas or plotting books probably don’t have those talents.

Me? I can keep Act I in my head. And I can keep Act III in my head when I get there. But Act II? I need a plot if I don’t want to spend a few weeks circling the drain and then finally give up on the whole thing. I need to know how I’m going to get from Act I to Act III — which is half the book. Half.

And I am so right-brained. My brain isn’t a colander. It’s a lint roller. Everything sticks and I can only see the stuff that’s facing front at any given moment.

I need to write things down so that I can sort through them and figure out what’s good and what’s not.

I’ve worked with thousands of writers over the last three years. Thousands. And I’d say that 80 percent to 90 percent of them have wanted to be writers for a long time, years in most cases, but have never finished writing a novel.

Finishing matters more than Stephen King saying that keeping a notebook is a fantastic way to make bad ideas stick.

Digging down deeper into what he’s saying, I think there’s some universal truth to the idea that you can’t let your plot run things. If you get too caught up in writing the book exactly the way you started out to write it, your work will suffer.

I use sticky notes on my plot board to keep things flexible. I start out with a path through my story. One possible path. I need to know that there’s a way through. And I let things change and develop as I go.

I absolutely never know what’s going to actually happen until I get there.

I’ve never written a book that resembled my first plot very closely.

Look. I love Stephen King. If you haven’t read his book On Writing, I honestly have a hard time believing you’re all that serious about fiction writing at all. It’s seminal. (Gods tend to create works like that.) Go read it now.

But his advice about plotting and notebooks is skewed by his own exceptionalness. When he says notebooks or plots aren’t required, he’s assuming that we can all do what he does, the way he does it.

If you can internalize the plotting process as well as Stephen King obviously can — rock on with your bad self. That’s awesome. But if you can’t, I highly suggest you learn how to do it externally.

And if you can keep all your ideas in your brain-strainer without losing the good ones along with the bad ones — that’s fantastic. Do it. But if you can’t, you need a notebook.

Here’s my secret weapon for sticking with whatever your thing is.

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Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She lives in Reno with her husband, three superstar kids, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nationand the upcoming novel The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.