What I read last week: the Stephen King edition

I spent seventeen hours in beautiful Austin, Texas, last week. Of those hours, approximately two of them were spent being lost and eight of them were spent being a jackass at this fine event. While my co-panelists had many thoughtful things to say about HBO as an industry bellwether or cultural transmitter, the first thing out of my mouth at the roundtable was, "Well, someone has to speak up for Real Sex."

Despite this inauspicious opening, some people still talked to me. One of them said of my being a reporter, "But how wonderful! You must have such discipline to keep writing regularly."

Startlingly, I did not blurt out the first reply that crossed my mind: I wouldn't call it discipline so much as I would call it a healthy sense of self-preservation. Nobody with half a brain will mess with an editor. At least, nobody with half a brain will mess with an editor more than once.

Yet I had occasion to think about writerly discipline on the way home. Because I had absently tossed my reading material in my checked bag, I ended up drifting through the Austin airport looking for something, anything, to handle the five hours I'd be spending in the air. Happily, I found a Stephen King book I hadn't read before: Four Past Midnight.

Here is the thing I will tell you up front: when you are sitting in an airplane, maybe you should not be reading The Langoliers.

Anyway, Four Past Midnight is a collection of novellas that are fun to read but frankly transparent -- I could see the bones beneath the stories, so reading them was like getting two experiences at once. On one level, I could follow along with the characters as they marched toward their inevitable fates. On another, I could mutter, "And here is where we get drawn into the characters' hearts, and here is when the tension ratchets up, and here is where we're left to bob in a pool of ominous dread, and here is the inevitable ending ..."

This is not a bad thing. My familiarity with an author is often part of his or her appeal. When I want light, comforting reading, I return to guys like King, or Terry Pratchett, or Neil Gaiman, or John Varley, or Christopher Moore. I know what they do, and the pleasure of the new is in seeing how they pull it off this time. Plus it's instructive.

Since I had enjoyed the dual reading I gave Four Past Midnight, I figured it was time to suck it up and read the book King wrote about how he does what he does: On Writing.

"Suck it up" is the right term: I have a reflexive dislike of the writing books that move beyond the mechanics and into the swampy terrain where personality propels the words' machinery into motion. I have a skeptic's suspicion of any pat distillation of what it takes to be a writer, ergo I am mistrustful of anything that professes to tell you how you too can become the writer you always dreamed you could be.

On Writing is the book I would pass along to anyone who ever rolled their eyes at Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. It appealed to me from the moment King began talking about what it was like to study poetry in 1969:

(T)here was a view among the student writers I knew at the time that good writing came spontaneously, in an uprush of feeling that had to be caught at once; when you were building that all-important stairway to heaven, you couldn't just stand around with your hammer in your hand. [...] Would-be poets were living in a dewy Tolkien-tinged world, catching poems out of the ether. It was pretty much unanimous: serious art came from ... out there! Writers were blessed stenographers taking divine dictation.

And of this ethos, King states:

I didn't cop to much of this attitude.

With that, he guaranteed I'd be carrying the slim little volume around, furtively gulping the chapters between writing assignments at work. As has been previously established, I am not what you'd call a civic booster in the city of Writers because I am always waiting for the mob with the pitchforks and torches to escort me out of town. There has never been the moment when I pulled le mot juste out of a rock and some batty old wizard decreed that I would be a writer. I am merely someone who writes.

And so, in this book, is King. He tells us how he shaped his writing and it shaped him, but he never floats up into lofty edicts about what Writers do. And when he gets to the mechanics -- what he calls "The Toolbox" -- it's purely from the perspective of what's worked for him and why it worked. And he says very smart things, like, "The business of meaning is a very big deal."

When King invokes other writers' practices, he usually does so from an experienced reader's perspective. Remember the reader? Few other writing books I've had to read do, which sets me to foaming at the mouth. But the best service King does for the reader is here:

We all remember one or more high school losers, after all; if I describe mine, it freezes out yours, and I lose a little bit of the bond of understanding I want to forge between us. Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.

Lord knows, there are plenty of descriptions King has tossed out that have stuck in my imagination for years -- once you read a passage detailing Carrie White's nose as hosting "a nest of blackheads," it's with you for life.

But I digress. On Writing also works because it makes no bones about how much work it is to write -- and how critical it is that you want to do that work. I suspect this is what few people like to hear. For one, it's a bummer to be told you're going to slave over a hot computer all day. For another, it dispels that flattering idea that the gods have kissed you with talent and you're one special S.O.B.

And that's how we end up back at writerly discipline. As King himself notes, "Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work."

Now if only he could write a book about that, eh?

Comments

[Uli]

Ah, yes, I love that book. I'm not a particular fan of King's - nor do I have any dislike of his work either, it's just not something I've read a lot of - but a fellow aspiring writer friend gave me On Writing years ago, and I periodically dip back into it, not to mention getting numerous requests to borrow it from other friends.

[Dellface]

For years I have harbored the dream that someday I could be a writer. I always loved "It", "The Stand" and "The Tommyknockers", so I picked up "On Writing" as soon as I saw it several years ago. I read it but never did anything about trying to apply the concepts he describes.

I should read it again (in some of my spare time) and see if I'm inspired to try again.

[Marian]

Money has no smell... Marian