Quote of the Day - Stephen King On Writing
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
After that, things can only get better.
I read Stephen King’s memoir On Writing last weekend. For a man with dozens of novels under his belt, he pulls no punches about what it takes to make it in the writing business. When he’s working on a book, he writes 2000 words a day, every day. No excuses and no breaks.
It had been a long time since I read a King book. The first one I read was The Dead Zone - after seeing the movie with Christopher Walken. I think I was about 10 at the time. Then read Christine, Carrie, It, Misery and The Tommyknockers. After a while there was a sameness about them that I couldn’t identify, but now I think I know what it was.
I loved the way he wrote characters and developed his stories. The problem was the climaxes. Mysterious evil force, monster, whatever - the thing he conjured up in my mind was always scarier than what he eventually described, and the stories resolved themselves too easily: deus ex machina.
I’ve heard that his work since 1993 is getting better, and On Writing (2000) is proof of that. Part memoir, part writing toolbox, it begins with a potted history of his early career, then breaks down everything he knows about writing into a series of recommendations. King believes that nothing can make a bad writer into a good one. But he does believe in practice: a competent writer can get better.
You have to read a lot, and you have to write a lot. There are no shortcuts.
If you wanted to write novellas, you could do worse than look to Different Seasons for models. The four short novels are masterpieces of control and character, and three have since been made into films: ‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption’, ‘Apt Pupil’ and ‘The Body’ (filmed as ‘Stand by Me’).
For King, story is everything, and plot is a dirty word. As long as the reader keeps turning the page, he’s doing what he sets out to do. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to revisit his fiction. If you have a recommendation, I’d love to hear it.
Tags: inspiration, Stephen King
May 29th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Certainly King is somewhat formulaic, but he’s good at what he does. Grisham is similarly good at the genre. That’s why they sell. A strength of King I’ve come to appreciate is his colloquial language that moves quickly. I agree with you, the thing imagined is great, the thing shown less so. In some cases it’s downright disappointing like in the terrific tale, IT where the final thing is a spider. That was a real bummer. When I read his book on writing I said to myself, this guy can really write. One short story about a thing that goes to airports was good. Most others not so good. Parts of Hearts in Atlantis were brilliant. Other parts were again the formula. Before or after Buick Eight, he announced he was stopping writing. I hoped he’d slow down and really show us what he can do at his very best, and stop cranking out. I think the same about Joyce Oates who does similar cranking of junk. A few years have passed since he said that, so I’ve stopped hoping. Still I respect him as a writer, and I am from Maine too, but I sure don’t rush out to buy his books.