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January 6, 2018 review

I'm kicking off my fifth year on ŷ������ with a re-read of the best book about writing that I've read to date. I've considered that On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft--Stephen King's contribution to the crowded field of How To Write a Novel, published in 2000--might hold this slot due to King being one of my favorite living authors. Ball players can tune out a coach who never made it in the pros quicker than a guy who did and was a superstar to boot, and I'm certainly more likely to heed the advice of a guru who didn't attain his divinity by mysterious means. The author of The Shining certainly had my attention.

King begins his instruction by doing something I wish my teachers did on the first day of class; he tells us about himself. Raised by a single mother in Maine in the 1950s and '60s, King recounts his childhood, his earliest discoveries in fiction, his first forays into writing and publishing, his breakthrough debut novel Carrie some ten years later in 1974 and his near collapse from alcohol and drugs. The writing advice kicks in, covering vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style and much more. This was the book King was chipping away at in June 1999 when he was struck by a negligent driver while on an afternoon walk, and this life changing experience is recounted as well.

Even when King isn't dispensing writing advice--and when he does, it's helpful to anyone from students writing a paper to writers with dreams of being the next King of Horror--simply reading his prose is a motivation and a delight. Holder of a Bachelor's of Arts in English from the University of Maine at Orono, King's manner or style has always reminded me of a character in a King novel, an English instructor perhaps, but more likely a guy who works at the hardware or auto parts store in town and who loves: 1) talking to people, and 2) helping people by sharing his expertise. King's forte is storytelling, with a minor in popular culture.

-- Imitation preceded creation; I would copy Combat Casey comics word for word in my Blue Horse tablet, sometimes adding my own descriptions where they seemed appropriate. "They were camped in a big dratty farmhouse room," I might write; it was another year or two before I discovered that drat and draft were different words. During the same period I remember believing that details were dentals and that a bitch was an extremely tall woman. A son of a bitch was apt to be a basketball player. When you're six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank.

-- I was born in 1947 and we didn't get our first television until 1958. The first thing I remember watching on it was Robot Monster, a film in which a guy dressed in an ape-suit with a goldfish bowl on his head--Ro-Man, he was called--ran around trying to kill the last survivors of a nuclear war. I felt this was art of quite a high nature. But TV came relatively late to the King household, and I'm glad. I am, when you stop to think about it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit. This might not be important.

-- "What I don't understand, Stevie," she said, "is why you'd write junk like this in the first place. You're talented. Why do you want to waste your abilities?" She had rolled up a copy of V.I.B. #1 and was brandishing it at me the way a person might brandish a rolled-up newspaper at a dog that has piddled on the rug. She waited for me to answer--to her credit, the question was not entirely rhetorical--but I had no answer to give. I was ashamed. I have spent a good many years since--too many, I think--being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it.

-- I wasn't having much success with my own writing, either. Horror, science fiction, and crime stories in the men's magazines were being replaced by increasingly graphic tales of sex. That was part of the trouble, but not all of it. The bigger deal was that, for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching. I liked my coworkers and loved the kids--even the Beavis and Butt-Head types in Living with English could be interesting--but by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain. If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then.

-- I had written three other novels before Carrie--Rage, The Long Walk, and The Running Man were later published. But none of them taught me the things I learned from Carrie White. The most important is that the writer's original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader's. Running a close second was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

-- Put vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don't make any conscious effort to improve it. One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed. Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind if it is appropriate and colorful.

-- Two pages of the passive voice--just about any business document ever written, in other words, not to mention reams of bad fiction--make me want to scream. It's weak, it's circuitous, and it's frequently torturous, as well. How about this: My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna began. Oh, man--who farted, right? A simpler way to express this idea--sweeter and more forceful, as well--might be this: My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss. I'll never forget it. I'm not in love with this because it uses with twice in four words, but at least we're out of that awful passive voice.

-- The best form of dialogue attribution is said, as in he said, she said, Bill said, Monica said. If you want to see this put stringently into practice, I urge you to read or reread a novel by Larry McMurtry, the Shane of dialogue attribution. That looks damned snide on the page, but I'm speaking with complete sincerity. McMurtry has allowed few adverbial dandelions to grow on his lawn. He believes in he-said/she-said even in moments of emotional crisis (and in Larry McMurtry novels there are a lot of those.) Go and do thou likewise.

-- I am approaching the heart of this book with two theses, both simple. The first is that good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments. The second is that while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.

-- Smith wasn't looking at the road on the afternoon our lives came together because his rottweiler had jumped from the very rear of his van into the back-seat area, where there was an Igloo cooler with some meat stored inside. The rottweiler's name is Bullet (Smith has another rottweiler at home; that one is named Pistol). Bullet started to nose at the lid of the cooler. Smith turned around and tried to push Bullet away. He was still looking at Bullet and pushing his head away from the cooler when he came over the top of the knoll; still looking and pushing when he struck me. Smith told friends later that he thought he'd hit "a small deer" until he noticed my bloody spectacles lying on the front seat of his van. They were knocked from my face when I tried to get out of Smith's way. The frames were bent and twisted, but the lenses were unbroken. They are the lenses I'm wearing now, as I write this.

I could keep going and going with excerpts, which with only a few of the digressions that turned It into a 444,414 word kiddie high chair and Under the Dome into a 334,074 word boat anchor, are just by their free flowing honesty inspirational to anyone who seeks to communicate thought to print. Instead, I think I'll dust off my half-finished manuscript and channel the spirit of Carrie White to get to writing.

January 8, 2014 review

It's not every day you can buy two great books for the price of one, but with On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, readers are treated to both an engaging autobiography of one of the 20th century's most prolific novelists, and his illuminative thoughts on the craft of writing.

Stephen King had been publishing for more than 25 years when this memoir arrived in 2000, and while he's probably been asked "Where do you get your ideas?" or "How do I become a novelist?" enough times over to want to either strangle someone or answer that a book, I love how balanced and unassuming his approach was in going about the latter.

Rather than document the genesis of every novel he ever wrote as if they were masterpieces (most are far from it, including Cujo, which King admits he can't remember writing through the cocaine and beer), or offer novelists a definitive instruction manual on how to become a bestselling author like him, King dabs his pen in each of those inkwells with welcome doses of humility and insight.

King writes about his youth -- watching his grandfather tote a giant tool box outside for the seemingly mundane task of repairing a screen door, or writing Carrie in the laundry room of the trailer he shared with his wife -- as well as his near death in 1999, when the author is struck by a distracted driver.

My greatest takeaway from the sections of the book which deal with craft is King's revelation that for him, writing feels less like dreaming up stories and more like paleontology, pulling a fossil out of the ground. A story is buried somewhere. King touches on the tools a writer can use to dig it up.

Whether you're a writer, or a fan of King's, or both, this memoir is like opening up a safety deposit box you've been given the key to and finding rich stuff (to borrow an expression from The Goonies) inside.