Stephen King was in the news last week supporting the laptop initiative and offering to give seventh graders an online course on writing. Lucky seventh-graders – we should all be envious! But King hasn’t left the rest of us completely out in the cold. We can get some of his wisdom for ourselves by reading his best book, “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”.

His best book? I’m not saying that this is the best of King’s books – I admire his writing in so many ways that it would be silly to make that kind of comparison even if I had read them all. I call “On Writing” “a best book” because it is the best book about being a writer and this gives it three kinds of importance for me. The first is obvious: anyone who wants to be a writer must read it. I don’t classify myself as “a writer” but I do a lot of writing and wish I could do it better. So I treasure King’s advice. The second is less obvious: anyone who wants to be a reader – an intelligent reader – should read it. While I’m reading one of Stephen King’s novels I can’t be thinking about Stephen King. His genius is to draw you into the story so thoroughly that for the moment nothing else exists, not even him. But when I put the book down my sense of wonder is stimulated by asking questions. I find it enriching to remember that someone, a real warm-blooded person, wrote that book.

What did that person have to do to achieve this? How on earth could anyone have learned to do such a thing? “On Writing” is not an impersonal textbook of writing style. It tells in the most intensely personal way how King became a writer, what it is like being a writer and how he keeps in shape as a writer.

“Keeping in shape” is a kind of language more often used for an athlete or a dancer than for a writer. Using it in this context was suggested by my wife, Suzanne Massie, who is a writer and has studied and written about creative people: dancers, musicians and painters as well as writers. She is fond of quoting a great dancer who said something like: if I’ve missed practice for one day I know my performance has deteriorated; if I’ve missed practice for two days my colleagues know it and if I miss practice for three days the public knows it. She senses in Stephen King someone who keeps his writing muscles (I mean the muscles of the mind not of the arm) in perfect trim.

This comparison with people in other fields brings me to my third kind of importance: “On Writing” is a great book about writing because it is not only a book about writing. It is about excellence in any field of endeavor – how it grows, how it is nourished, how it is maintained. I have no ideas whether Stephen King thinks about it in that way, and certainly don’t want to underplay what he says that is quite specific to writing. But being specific and being general are not incompatible. If a student were to ask me to explain what makes for excellence (or anything else for that matter) rather than pouring out abstract words, I’d tell particular even if they are not literally about that student’s field of interest.

A budding mathematician or musician or entrepreneur or fisherman has as much in common with the big lines of King’s story as a budding writer. It is easy to accept some themes in King’s life as fully shared by people with very different interests. The passionate interest in stories that drove him as a kid to find a way, often by hitchhiking, to see every horror movie that came anywhere near; the persistence that kept him writing during tough years with rejection slips piling up; and perhaps above all whatever it takes to make the period of rejection one of learning and growth rather than of discouragement and bitterness.

But, you may say, these are very general features of the work of a writer that obviously apply to everything. What is more surprising is how close his description of the creative process in writing is to how I have experienced it in doing mathematics of science or in observing how gifted entrepreneurs do it in building organizations.

Stephen King writes: “I put a group of characters in some situation and then … watch what happens and write it down. What a creative person creates is not the final product: you create the start of a process and then trust it to grow. … Which doesn’t mean you can’t correct and embellish but you have to learn to give your creation (as you do your children) its own life.”

Seymour Papert is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Distinguished Computer Scientist at the University of Maine and a member of the Maine Learning Technology Task Force. He may be contacted at Papert@midmaine.com.