Write Like the Masters: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary

From award winner and top 25 bestseller Daren King now writing as James Anders Banks and Jack Law. "An excellent writer. His language moves with great suppleness and easy eloquence." The Telegraph (UK newspaper) "A writer with a completely unique voice." The Independent (UK newspaper) Write Like the Masters: Stephen King's Pet Sematary is not an intellectual critique. This book is more an attempt at reverse-engineering the novel so that other fiction writers can learn from Stephen King's techniques. The phrase "write like" should not be taken literally: I have never encouraged a writer to imitate another writer, aside from on occasion as a jumping off point, a way of developing a style appropriate to the project. Learn the techniques used by the masters of the genre, while developing a style, a voice, that works for you. I have been teaching hands-on writing skills in my work as a mentor since early in 2008—language and voice skills, characterisation techniques, plotting and so on. At the time of writing, ten of my writers have had their books published by conventional print publishers like HarperCollins, Penguin and Scribner. Write Like the Masters: Stephen King's Pet Sematary does not teach lower level skills like how to write a sentence or how to structure a paragraph. The book focuses on story: developing character and theme, conveying mood, inducing emotional responses (such as fear) in the reader, and, perhaps most importantly of all, creating suspense.