Useful tips from the "King" of advice

I found the second portion of Stephen King's memoir On Writing to be extremely influential and helpful to myself as a writer. Not only did I find his humorous style on writing refreshing and blunt but there was also specific writing tips that stuck out to me and that I will definitely use in writing and revising my memoir. I found the portion on description to be the especially helpful information because I tend to over describe things often. King advised that there was such a thing as over describing and under describing and each was equally detrimental to one's writing. There is a level to which you should describe a setting and people up to and after that you have to let your readers' imagination take over. Even if you as a writer remember all of the minor details of a place, the multiple smells, sounds, sights and maybe even tastes, you must evaluate which details are significant enough to your story to include. For instance if I was to talk about my sorority in my memoir (as I am) I would not need to go over every single relationship that I've made through it, or every detail in a single experience that I'm describing. If I were to keep reiterating the numerous details surrounding the bonfire that my memoir starts out describing, the smell of burning wood, hot chocolate and cold fall ear and the sounds of coyotes howling in the distance and silent tears of understanding from the girls listening to each other as the candle passed around, the reader would probably get bored and give up on reading. Likewise if I simply said there was a bonfire and didn't explain any details to why it is significant to the story the reader would wonder why I put it there. This portion on description in King's book really made me think about stories and what is necessary and what is not necessary to include in the telling of them.