Writing is a bit like code. (Or perhaps that's the other way around.) The real work is not typing, but organisation of the material, creating a structure of exposition - what you could crudely call 'design'.
As I understand it, King's approach is to sort of design as you go, ie, he finds the plot and discovers characters just by writing one damn word after another until they sort of fall out of the manuscript page. It works for him.
On the other end of the scale, you have something like Robert McKee's book[0], which is all about meticulously drawing out plot arcs on index cards and sticky notes. (In fact, it's basically an academic introduction to formalist narrative theory, cunningly disguised as a screenwriting manual.)
You will find many evangelists for each of those approaches, and of course any and all points in between. YMMV. The point is: the alternative approaches are in the main about the high level problems of organising an extended piece of writing. 'Style' would be more a matter of word choices, syntax, rhythm - the quality of the prose. On that, everyone agrees that clichés are usually A Bad Thing, and not much else.
Anyone who claims to have discovered an objective standard of 'good prose' is selling you snake-oil; there is no definition of the former that includes both Dickens and Hemingway, never mind the whole history of all the literature in all the languages of the world.
> Isn't the "analytical" way the exact oppisite, learning to write in a predefined style?
Nope. In my case "analytical" is the way I naturally write. King explicitly advocates throwing the kind of analysis that comes to me naturally overboard. He doesn't advocate exploration into how a writer best creates stories. He advocates a specific, narrowly defined method of creating stories, which involves intuition and instinct.
The important fact is this: I don't have any instincts in the sense that King means. Or so few that they are useless to guide my stories. This is true of lots of people, and I daresay that there are people who lack both "instincts" in the sense King means them and "analytical skills" in the sense I mean them, and find some other ways to create stories.
It's important to recognize that King means something very narrow and specific by "instincts" (in fairness, I'm not sure he actually uses that word, but he definitely talks a lot about intuition as a guide to story.) King is all about letting some inner emotional compass guide your story, and personally I hate the kind of stories he creates. I recognize the genius of his craft, but his stories are medieval emotionalist gibberish, and that is reflected by his process of creation: he lets the idiot darkness within tell him where to go next.
There is nothing wrong with this: by saying his stories are decidedly not to my taste is not to say they are "bad" in any objective sense. They move people and are meaningful to people; they are well-crafted and emotionally engaging. I find grapefruit repulsive as well, but would hardly condemn anyone for enjoying it.
But this does mean that King's method of creating a story is very restrictive. He is intuitive and exploratory with regard to creating stories, not with regard to the method of creating stories.
So my advocacy of self-exploration is on a different level than King's. He is telling writers: "Explore your story intuitively and emotionally." I am telling writers: "Explore your method of creating stories by any means you see fit."
Do you have any advise for highly analytical folks that get hung up on not knowing how people read things? My biggest frustration with writing is that I don't have an interpreter I can run over my work to test that it "works" and I have a voice of anxiety in the back of my head that someone is going to misinterpret what I write I horrible[1] ways. Less dramatically, when I sit down to write documentation, I don't really know how to verify that it is understandable and get hung up on trying to figure out how to do so.
> He's intuitive and exploratory to a degree that I--and many others--are just not.
> King [teaches] you how to write like them, and writers need to learn to write like themselves, which can only be discovered, not taught.
If King encourages you to follow your instincts, isn't this a direct advise to learn to write like yourself?
Isn't the "analytical" way the exact oppisite, learning to write in a predefined style?