On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Source: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/On-Writing/Stephen-King/9781982159375 ↗
Half memoir and half writing manual, King's book is the most read and most useful contemporary book about the practice of writing.
The memoir half gives the manual half its weight: King's advice about toolboxes, vocabulary, adverbs and revision comes from someone who has written millions of published words and survived both commercial success and near-fatal injury.
For product direction the book is not directly applicable, but the discipline it teaches — write every day, read constantly, cut ruthlessly, tell the truth — transfers to anyone whose work involves putting words on a page, which is most product directors most of the time.
Read alongside Zinsser for the non-fiction complement and Vonnegut for the shortest version.
Ken Norton includes it on his PM essential list for a reason.
Central argument
King argues that good writing is not a talent reserved for the gifted but a craft built on two foundations: reading voraciously and writing with daily discipline. His central thesis is that the writer's job is to tell the truth — to render experience honestly rather than to impress — and that the main enemies of truth in prose are passive voice, adverbs, and over-explanation. The manual emerges from the memoir: the advice carries authority precisely because it is inseparable from King's own working life, including his years of rejection, his alcoholism, and the accident that nearly killed him.
Critique
King's model of the writer is fundamentally solitary and output-driven — someone who closes the door, hits a daily word count, and resists outside interference — which makes the book quietly hostile to collaborative or iterative modes of writing. This is a real tension: his advice to 'write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open' acknowledges collaboration only at the revision stage, after the essential work is done. For professionals whose writing is inherently co-produced — strategy documents, product narratives, team communications — the model requires significant translation and can romanticise a lone-genius frame that doesn't map to organizational reality.
Why it matters for product
Product directors write constantly — opportunity framing, strategy memos, roadmap rationales, stakeholder narratives — and most of that writing is vague, hedged, and padded in exactly the ways King diagnoses: adverbs substituting for precise verbs, passive constructions obscuring accountability, over-explanation signalling insecurity rather than clarity. King's discipline of cutting ruthlessly and telling the truth has a direct analogue in product communication: a crisp one-pager that names a real problem forces clearer thinking than a lengthy deck that papers over it. The curator's pairing with Zinsser points to the same practical gap — most product leaders were never taught to write for readers rather than for themselves.