“If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.” It might be the greatest single piece of advice for a budding author — and it’s right on this book’s inside jacket flap. You’re advised to read the rest of the slim tome, though, because it’s the most practical and unpretentious writer’s manual around — as practical and unpretentious as its author, who, yes, just happens to be one of the world’s most famous novelists. What does he have to say? “Read a lot, write a lot,” don’t dress up the vocabulary unnecessarily, and never come “lightly to the blank page.” The 300-page book’s first third is as close to a memoir as King is likely to get, and the last section is a clear-eyed account of the 1999 car accident that almost killed him. But it’s the middle that will serve writers for generations.