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Stephen King has sold somewhere in the region of four hundred million books, which should equip him to offer some salient advice to would-be writers. "On Writing" is a considered and considerate, not to mention compassionate, digest of such advice.

Completed in hospital while King recovered from a near fatal accident - he was struck by a van while out walking - it does have a sense of assessment, of a man reviewing his life. At first sight, it is two books in one - autobiography and a comprehensive analysis of his craft.

The autobiographical section is not that of a dying man looking back on life. It is far more optimistic than that - there's a sense of celebration, of recognition of how far he's travelled. It's not a deathbed testament, it's about beginnings, about his writing apprenticeship.

King vividly yet economically describes his experiences and emotions, from the stimulants to his childhood imagination to his abuse of stimulants. It was his wife's support and encouragement which kept him going in his early writing years - she apparently retrieved his first draft of "Carrie" from the bin and persuaded him to finish it.

Clearly, the accident made him sanguine about the fragility and unpredictability of life. He describes his initial experience of rejection with a sort of resigned optimism. Rejection, for writers, is part of the apprenticeship; it can be brutal and dispiriting at the time, but once you start getting work published you can appreciate it as part of the learning curve, an experience which should strengthen your determination rather than strangle it.

Writing, King makes clear, isn't simply the ability to do joined up words or type at a keyboard. Writing is about pain and experience, knowledge and emotion, understanding and questioning. Writing is about life, and if you want to be a good writer, then you must live to write.

In King's case, the process involved a fight to survive alcohol and drugs, to live on a limited income, and to cope with the loneliness of pounding out word after word, day after day. It's an experience not unfamiliar to a lot of writers. Recovering in hospital, King was well aware that you never know what dangers lie round that next bend. Or what rewards.

It leaves the writer with a disconcerting hunger. Even after you've sold your first story, you're never comfortable, never sure it wasn't a fluke and that the next one won't be hurled back in your face.

The autobiographical section isn't gratuitous or superfluous. It offers a

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