Podcasts Business Ray Edwards Show #093: 7 Lessons From Stephen King [Podcast]

#093: 7 Lessons From Stephen King [Podcast]

Published: Dec. 26, 2013, 7 p.m.

Stephen King. He is the Charles Dickens of this century. People either love him or hate him.

My churchgoing friends are often shocked to learn that I read his work, and admire it. In today's show I share some business lessons I have learned from King. Also on today's episode\u2026

  • Are you a Madman? Or a Madwoman? Copywriters wanted.
  • And the always award-winning, much much more.

Announcements:
  • I am updating my copywriting course\u2026 I will announce our winners next week.
  • Next week's show will be about what could be the most important topic I have ever covered. \xa0Don't miss it.

Conferences where I will be attending and/or speaking:

Tip Of The Week \u2013 Again!

Digital Photography\xa0School. A\xa0great\xa0site for all things photo.

Spiritual Foundations

1 John 4:18: \u201cperfect love casts out fear.\u201d.

Have you ever been told by someone that you should have more of the \u201cfear of the Lord\u201d? The implication is that your Christian walk cannot be correct unless you're constantly afraid that God is going to \u201cwhack you\u201d when you screw up.

It\u2019s true, The Bible talks about the \u201cfear of the Lord\u201d. Let's take a look at what it actually says.

As believers who live under the new covenant, and followers of Jesus, we should let Jesus himself define what the \u201cfear of the Lord\u201d actually is. When the devil tempted Jesus in the desert, and asked Jesus to worship him, Jesus says, \u201cit is written, you shall worship the Lord your God\u2026\u201d. You'll find that in Matthew 4:10.

If you have a modern Bible with cross references, you'll notice that Jesus is actually quoting from the Old Testament. He's quoting his favorite book of the Bible (the book he quoted most often), and the passage he's pointing to is Deuteronomy 6:13. That passage says, \u201cyou shall fear the Lord your God and serve him.

But wait a minute! That's not what Jesus said\u2026 He said you shall WORSHIP the Lord your God. What's going on here?

While there are plenty of theologians who will argue with me, it seems clear that Jesus is explaining what the passage in Deuteronomy actually means. To fear God is to worship him.

I trust the theology of Jesus more than I trust any other earthly theologian. He has interpreted the \u201cfear of the Lord\u201d for me, and that settles the matter.

One last point worth noting: every single time the disciples were afraid of Jesus, he said the same thing. \u201cFear not.\u201d

Seven Lessons From Stephen King

Stephen King\xa0is a writing and marketing machine, having accomplished the unusual feat of being successful as a craftsman, and as an entrepreneur.\xa0 He has sold well over 350 million books, and spawned countless movies and television shows. His latest novel-to-screen adaptation is\xa0Under The Dome. How?

I have written extensively elsewhere about writing for the purpose of strategic influence. I can point to no better model of how to do this right than King.

There are seven key lessons you can learn from Stephen King, and the way he conducts his business (the business of writing). And for those of you who are offended by my saying \u201cthe business of writing\u201d\u2026 perhaps if you thought about your writing as a business, you wouldn\u2019t be so easily offended. Food for thought.

  1. Learn your craft. Whether his subject matter is always to your taste or not, you would have to be willfully ignorant to declare Stephen King anything other than a master of the art of writing stories. He has honed his craft to a fine edge, and without this particular weapon in his arsenal, the rest of what you\u2019re about to read would not be possible. You must master the craft.
  2. Be prolific.\xa0King has stated that he writes every day, including his birthday and Christmas day. He has since admitted that this might be a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. His ethic of working every day is plainly demonstrated by his amazing output. You don\u2019t publish 50 novels,\xa0 five nonfiction works, and over 200 short stories by goofing off.\xa0 you do it by applying liberal amounts of fingers to keyboard.
  3. Be real.\xa0One reason people are often uncomfortable with King\u2019s writing is that he tends to bring heavy doses of reality into his stories. I\u2019m not talking about the vampires, giant spiders, and ghosts, of course. I\u2019m talking about the sometimes embarrassing, sometimes offensive, sometimes infuriatingly irrational ways that people talk and behave. King unabashedly presents people as they really are. And this makes his detractors uncomfortable\u2026 And his fans love him.
  4. Have a personality.\xa0When King began his career, he decided to be exactly who he is. I have no way of knowing this, but I\u2019m pretty certain this was a conscious decision made in the full knowledge that it might backfire financially. He could have been more \u201crespectable\u201d by writing that vaguely named thing called \u201cliterary fiction\u201d, but instead he chose to write what fascinated him.
  5. Be fearless.\xa0Stephen King has never shied away from the potential criticism he might get from atheists, believers, Democrats, Republicans, or\xa0 the League of Decency. He\u2019s written some ugly scenes, and seems that many writers would have shied away from because they didn\u2019t want to be associated with that material. For better or worse, that fearlessness has catapulted him from the mass of mediocrity to the pinnacle of literary success.
  6. Try new things.\xa0King was one of the first to take advantage of the digital publishing medium. He was one of the first to publish a novel in serial form online. He has branched out into music, comic books, and of course films and television. Some of his experiments have fallen flat. Others have been a meteoric success, both critically and financially (remember\xa0Stand by Me\xa0and\xa0The Green Mile?)
  7. Do many things simultaneously.\xa0One of the ways King manages to stay so prolific is that he is doing many things simultaneously. He\u2019s always working on a new book or story, and usually has more than one project cooking in the background (a movie, a TV series, and audiobook, or the radio stations that he owns in Maine).

While you may or may not ever be his equal on the bestseller lists (he has a pretty strong head start on most of us), you definitely can learn from the career and methodologies of Stephen King.

Question: what have you learned about writing, or the business of writing, from Stephen King\u2026 Or any other modern writers? Share below\u2026

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