Writing With the King: His, Mine & Ours

NOTE: This is the long-awaited wrapup for my unintentionally-lengthy look at Stephen King's writing book-cum-memoir "On Writing: A memoir of the Craft".   At the end of which you will find a free short story written at the prompting and in the style of Stephen King.

His, Mine and Ours 

I've spent this entire series alternating between arguing with King and praising his writing.  And honestly, I'm not sure I entirely agree with him on what writing is, where it comes from or whether or not it's something anyone can do.  I'm also split on my feelings as to whether or not there's a ceiling to our potential as writers beyond which it's impossible to improve.  King obviously feels that there is, but I'm not so sure.  I think it is possible to learn to do this and what "natural" writers are born with is an innate love for it.  Whether or not that love is the catalyst needed to go from adequate to great is a philosophical question beyond the purview of this blog or this book.

Which begs the question: "Why are you so enthusiastic about a writing book that you don't entirely agree with, written by a writer whose books you're not especially a fan of?"

Arguing with King in absentia is part of the charm of his book.  If I entirely agreed with King I probably would not have given his memoir a second reading.  I have piles of books about writing in my home library that may or may not ever get a second look, most of them written by writers I whole-heartedly love and agree with.

The three books I most often loan-out are the three with which I maintain an active dialogue.  Telling Lies for Fun & Profit and Bird By Bird spend more time being loaned out than they do on my shelf and I can wholeheartedly endorse both of them for writers seeking guidance... but that doesn't mean I rubberstamp the opinions of Mr. Block of Ms. Lamott any more than I can with Mr. King.  Though I admit to arguing much more with King, but it's a friendly sort of one-sided tussle for my part.

On Writing challenged a lot of the closely-held assumptions I'd made about writing, among them the idea that I didn't need and didn't have time for writing prompts.

When King first published this book of writing advice and memories, it included a challenge to his readers.  He posed a writing problem and asked us to send him our results.

Now, when a major author asks to see something you've written, if you have any literary aspirations at all you don't hesitate.  You send them your writing sample.  Most writers refuse - on advice of counsel - to read unpublished and unagented works as an act of self-protection against future lawsuits of the "You stole my idea..." variety.  Lawsuits still happen, as JK Rowling can tell you, but I'm sure they're much less frequent because of this policy.

Because he'd never accepted writing samples from un-agented writers before, I think this was a bit of an eye-opener for Mr. King.  According to a post on his website shortly after the book came out, the request resulted in an avalanche of stories from the writers and fans eager to garner that kind of attention.  I'm as sure that many of them had dreams of landing a book deal as I am that none of them did... at least not from Mr, King's recomendation based on these writing samples.

In subsequent printings of the book, this request was removed and a notice on his website notes that submissions are closed.

All the same, it's a good 'story problem'  and one of the few I've seen that actually inspired me to sit down and put hands on keys.  I'm notoriously averse to someone giving me something to write about beyond the most general guidelines.  "Write about math" is a good prompt for me.  "Write a story about characters in this specific situation, hitting the following specific points..." is significantly less likely to get a response from my creative faculty.

Have I mentioned yet how much I hated writing for school?

Suffice to say that I like to write my own ideas and if I didn't I probably would still be a journalist.  I have enough ideas and writing prompts of my own to last me a lifetime and any time spent writing someone else's ideas feels like fingernails on the chalkboard.  No matter who the idea came from, I feel caged by these things and the urge to wander off their map is overwhelming.

For some reason King's story didn't do that to me.  For one thing, I don't usually write horror, so I was stepping into unknown territory and knowing that Stephen King had drawn the map in my quavering mitts was oddly comforting.  For another, it wasn't a ghost story it was a story of love gone awry and the chain of events leading to confrontation.

Of course I wandered off the path anyway, but I did so knowing what direction the path lay when I wanted to get back to it.  Dick & Jane are in a bad marriage.  Spousal abuse compounded by all the bad add-ons a horror writer of King's caliber can dream up.  But the roles are reversed and Jane is the abuser and Dick the abused.  Events lead to separation and, eventually, Jane's arrest.  One day, Dick drops their child off at a friend's and comes home to find Jane waiting for him...  chaos ensues.

And for whatever reasons, my fingers flew across the keyboard.  On some level I was playing out my arguments with King's assumptions about storytelling and "The Craft".  But the story became a meditation on the benevolence of the Creator, on fatherhood, vengeance and the proprietary feelings we all feel toward our loved ones and what happens when that's taken to an unhealthy level.

It was a strange feeling to have my storytelling so guided by someone else.

My story was longer than the word count he later imposed (out of a sense of wise self-preservation, I'm sure) so I never sent it to him or tried to get it published (it wasn't my idea, after all) and throughout the writing of this series, I've been vacillating on whether or not to just post it here and be done with it.  I've decided to do so as a way to encourage you to do the same, if not here then in your own webspace.

Without further ado I invite you to read: "Mine" A macabre little story about Dick & Jane (Opens as a .PDF "GoogleDoc")


Read the previous posts in this series:
Writing With the King: An introduction and summary about why I care and why you should too.

Part I - Designated Dreamers: The truth of memory and the place of writers as society's shepards of the subconscious.

Part II - Bedside Tables: The importance of the mundane as a foil for the fantastic (or the horrifying).

Designated Dreamers - Writing with the King Part One

NOTE: Part one of a sort of live-blogging of the book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King.  Click Here here for the introduction/explanation.
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Hyperthymesia is the technical name for people who remember an absurd amount of detail about their personal history.  Frequently as I read memoirs and autobiographies I am struck by the degree of detail that the authors allegedly remember about their lives when I can barely recall what I had for dinner yesterday.  I can only assume in all charity that these folks are compulsive diarists, giving themselves a lot of source material to work with.

Stephen King is not afflicted with this condition.

Mary Carr (author of The Liar's Club) presents her childhood in an almost unbroken panorama.  Mine is a fogged-out landscape from which occaisional memories appear like isolated trees . . . the kind that look as if they might like to grab and eat you.
                    -Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

I'm going to dispense with the first half of the book in a single post because this is a writing blog, not a Stephen King fansite.  I'm honestly not really a big fan of King's books. Some of them I like, some I don't.  I do wish he would write more books with young/old protagonists like It and the oft-maligned Dreamcatcher.  His dreamier stuff is superb as well and I don't really gravitate often to the end of the shelf where things go bump in the night.  I came to him through his short stories and essays.  His short stories are his best stuff, I think and I've posted links before to his essays and op/eds on the state of writing and especially censorship. 

King's memoir is refreshing for its self-effacing humor, candidness and because he allows it to carry the vague uncertainty that most of us feel when discussing our childhood.  And he certainly pulls no punches, though most of them are aimed at himself.

Self-pugilism aside, one is left with little doubt that the kid was destined to write the books he has written.  Something about his childhood and early adulthood made it inevitable.  I tend to think that while anyone really can (and often does) write, there are those who are born to tell the stories other people want to hear and among those few, some are selected to turn them into sculpture, paintings, photographs, movies, plays and books.  Society's designated dreamers.

Stephen King is one of these people and into his hands was pressed the darker sort of dreaming that we do.  Nevertheless, his childhood has that curious carefree quality that even kids in desperate circumstances seem to have the innate ability to eke out of their lives.  Normalcy is in the eye of the beholder, after all.  He and his kid-genius brother Dave seemed to make it work and create a good deal of good memories among the stops on the gypsy road that took them from Wisconsin to Maine in a series of hops from one family member to the next with a single mother trying to make it work in an America that was almost purpose-built to discourage single parenting.

In all honesty, I re-read this book periodically and I usually skip pages 1-100.  (The writing section begins on page 102, but on page 100 he talks about his desk and the place writing and art have in life which I think should never be overlooked.)  Though I don't recall seeing it on the most recent read-through, I seem to recall King telling the reader what page to skip to if they came to read about the writing and didn't care about his childhood.  Maybe an edition edit or my imagination, I don't know.  But I think that  at least the first time you read it, you should read the bio.

Young Stevie King, nor matter how foggy though his memory may be, is presented with the clarity of one of King's best young characters.  A life lived amid disruptions and viewed in retrospect with a wise and writerly eye.  And I think that the adventures and hardships, hopes and dreams of young Stephen King and even the addictions that almost claimed his older incarnation give us a compelling insight into the man and the process by which a sizeable chunk of almost four decades of American popular fiction came into being.

I may not be King's biggest fan, but his approach to the craft, his words, his deft use of language, especially in his short fiction, are a study in American letters.  His influence is undeniable and no matter what you think of what he wrote, I have to admire the way that he wrote most of it.  And though his so-called 'literary standing' is often met with an eye roll by critics, I think his attention to the language will  ultimately save him from the dustbin of history.

Whatever you think about him it's hard to deny that King is a man with things to say and the chops to say them in memorable ways.  What more could you ask for from your designated dreamer?

An Odious Little Book

Last week was Banned Books Week and mine was not the only blog taken over by the topic of banned and challenged books. Christine at Stacked posted a book review of one of the most reviled books in history and mounted a compelling defense of keeping it in print and on the shelves.

Of course, I am talking about Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler.

The intellectual courage it took for her to review such a book is astounding. During banned books week, she took on a book that almost everyone agrees is the vile product of a twisted mind, the elucidation of a twisted ideology that literally broke the world and began the march toward the holocaust. I had to read Mein Kampf in college and the thing that struck me most about it is how boring the whole thing was.

Hardly one of Hitler's firebrand moments.

And that is the dangerous face of evil. Hannah Arendt, reporting for the New Yorker on the Trial of Adolph Eichmann, wrote of the realization that evil wasn't a radical force, or a transcendent philosophy, it was the banal and efficient daily application of a horrible ideology. An evil force of bookkeepers backed up by the might of the Wermacht.

I've already posted my defense of keeping both extremes of the political argument in print and readily-available for readers despite the fact that one side or the other makes my blood boil. For better or worse, his is the map of modern political dialogue (or screaming matches as the case may be) and to make it disappear would be to lie about who we are and how we communicate... and how we don't.

But what of Mein Kampf? Surely if any book deserves the "Banned" stamp, it is this one.

This is where it gets sticky. It's easy to rally around a book we love, but how do we argue for a book that we hate? At what point do we cut it off? I don't know. There are some ideas, some philosophies, some books out there in the world that even I think should be suppressed. But where do we draw that line as a society? As I see it, the biggest problem with banning a book like Mein Kampf is that it doesn't make it go away, it drives it underground. It adds a titillating context to reading it that changes the way your mind accepts or rejects its content.  

This is banned, censored, someone doesn't want me to read this... 

Back in my Borders days, we carried Mein Kampf on the shelf in the German history section. At least once every few months, a German citizen visiting our shores would come into my bookstore and for a copy of the book to take home with them. Because it was banned in Germany--it still is for all I know. They were so intensely curious about it, wanted to see it; most of them bought a copy. Between college students slogging through the thing for a class and the German visitors, it's a wonder we ever had it on the shelf.

As my grandparents’ generation dies and then my parents generation follows them, the realities of the world that went to war pass from living memory to the pages of books. There is an erosion when this happens, sharp edges get knocked off and we forget the details. There will one day be no one left to tell us the story with the horror in their voices of having lived through it; no more war crimes trials and extraditions of aging Nazis; no more unremarkable accountants standing before the assembled masses, horrifying us with the blandness of their evil. And there will be no more neighbors, grandparents, or art teachers, as I had growing up, who will show you the numbers tattooed on their arms and witness to you the reality of the camps with hushed voices and tears.

Without the written record, without the evidence on the shelves of every bookstore, we will slowly lose our horror. The names Elie Weisel and Simon Weisenthal and Anne Frank will become dusty and cobwebbed names on the flaking spines of books in an unregarded section of your local library.

6 million killed in the camps. The numbers are too great to grasp, too evil to contain. How long before the greatest atrocity in human history is regarded as an anomaly even by those that aren't among those who deny that it happened. Already it's viewed by too many as something that could only happen once, Hitler was evil, a malign spirit from a medieval morality play, the devil incarnate, somehow separate from the human race. If he wasn't human we don't have to accept that a human being did such a thing... or could do it again.

I'm not the first to say it and hopefully I won't be the last, but it's already begun, the myth of Hitler has overtaken the historical. Hitler has devolved into a caricature, a name thrown around in arguments to vilify your enemy’s position and with overuse any metaphor weakens.

The greatest lie we tell ourselves is “We will never forget” and the second greatest is “It could never happen again”. Which is why I believe that the speech that needs the most protection is so often the speech that scares us the most.

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Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel in progress is The Palimpsest.

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Brown Out?

It's funny. I don't think I know anyone who is actually reading the new Dan Brown book. I've been holed up with the sickness so I'm out (though I'll read it eventually) was anyone in line Tuesday morning, clambering to get their hands on it? The largest print run in publishing history, touted to be the book that can save or doom the publishing industry single-handedly... Is it good? bad? indifferent? Whether you're reading it or not, let me know what you think in comments. (If not, why not? &c.) In the meantime - if you've a hankering for some alt-historical thriller fun - you can create your own custom Dan Brown sequel using Slate.com's Handy Dan Brown Sequel Generator just pick a city and an ancient (or not-so-ancient) secret society and off you go!

Bird By Bird (A Backlist Book Review)

Never has a writing book been more recommended to me.

Never has a writing book been pressed into my hand with greater fervor than this one.

Every professional writer I know has this on the shelf or has at least read it and probably been among those who tried to get me to read it.

Every one of these since the first one has been met with the secret handshake, the knowing smile, the nod: I write shitty first drafts too and I don’t feel bad about it. I’ve read Bird by Bird. And if you want to be a writer, so should you.

Since it was first published in 1994, author and writing teacher Anne Lamott has given us permission to be writers and for writers to be human. We don’t have to feel isolated and alone, sitting at the table in the café or in the corner of our garret apartment, wrestling with our demons as pencils and typewriters and laptops fight our attempts to get it all down on the page before it escapes. Anne’s got our backs.

All of the best writer’s guides have been at least one part literary memoir and Bird By Bird is no different. With humor and grace, Anne takes us through her unorthodox childhood with her writer father and his writer friends. When she finally finds her voice as a result of his fight with brain cancer, we are there with her as ghosts at her side as she struggles as all of us have to find the words to encapsulate the strange humor of the dying and the absurdity of life. From that absurdity of life, Anne draws her inspiration and her humor. And in the process she teaches us so very much about both writing and life as a spiritual journey.

Anne’s iconic tips for writing range from the empty 1 inch picture frame that reminds us to write in small assignments to the aforementioned permission to sit down and write a shitty first draft even if it seems all the other writers in the world are taking dictation from God. Get it all down, make it pretty later. Odds are that the people whose final drafts seem dictated from Beyond had a shitty first draft too.

With frank language and the humor of the sensitive soul behind the words, Anne draws us into her life and her classroom. She dwells on the fears and outright neuroses that all writers deal with, makes it ok for us to feel that way, reminds us we’re not alone in that regard either. There are others out there doing the same.

This book serves a larger purpose as well. She reminds us that we are all mortal. Each and every one of us is dying a little each day, and though she understands why we do it, procrastination is a sin. Every day you put off writing is one less day that you will have to write. And so much of the damage we wrestle with is self-inflicted. Perhaps the best advice she gives she is passing on from her father. She reminds us that no matter how big the project, no matter how big your subject or how daunting the research ahead of you, no matter many birds crowd your narrative, you don’t have to write it all at once -- just take it bird by bird.

Great Big Meanies (A backlist book review)

I must confess: I'm guilty of book-rustling. Last week, someone left a book lying around the break room at work and I couldn't find anyone who would claim it. (I did try to ask permission before borrowing it, honest!)

I really do try not to judge a book by its cover, but Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies strikes me as a deliberate attempt to provoke an exquisitely-erudite riot. Surely I was doing a service to my fellow grammarians by removing it from the writing center for the weekend.

We wouldn't want the grammar snobs to riot, now would we? (Though I admit that the image of disapproving grammarians toting well-punctuated picket signs tickles me somewhat.)

All seriousness aside, newspaper copy editor June Casagrande has made grammar funny again. She has written what I can only describe as the anti-Eats Shoots and Leaves by lobbing the verbal hand grenade back across the lines.

It seems impossible that someone can teach you the difference between the subjunctive and indicative verb forms and effect the pantsing of the entire English language establishment in one go, but Ms Casagrande manages it. Not only does she manage it, but she makes it funny.

At risk of cliche I must say: This is not your father's grammar guide. In fact, if you want to test Fitzgerald's axiom about first-rate intelligence ("...the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function") then you should read this book back-to-back with the humorously-fussy Eats Shoots and Leaves. You would be surprised to know that it's possible without your head exploding, but only just. (I just did it and the headache lingers.) Somewhere between Lynn Truss's call to take up arms in the fight against the Decline and Fall of Western Punctuation and June Casagrande imploring us to get a grip lies the battlefield where most of us live.

Think of Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies as a survival guide for those of us caught in the combat zone. Casagrande has provided a strategy guide for those put-upon by the free-roaming grammar snobs in our midst.

"It's time, oh yes, it's time for the rest of us to stand up to these snobs--to call their bluff. If not for our own edification, if not to gain a better command of the language and all the doors it opens to us--at the very least we must learn a little about grammar and usage for the sheer thrill of taking down these grammar tyrants, one at a time, just to watch them fall."

Each chapter is targeted at a specific common error that is harped-upon by those who wish to polish their linguistic credentials on the foreheads of those less fortunate. Casagrande makes her hyperbolic stance work by using self-deprecating anecdotes and a liberal dose of dark humor. She makes short work of the Oxford Comma, the predicate nominative, semicolons, punctuation within quotes and a host of other issues that define the linguistic battlefield. In fact, by staking out the two ends of the grammar spectrum, this book and Eats, Shoots & Leaves work remarkably well together.

You might want to keep them apart of your bookshelf though, lest you have to break up a fight.

This is a highly-recommended addition to your reference library and a darn fun read. How often do you hear those two things in the same sentence?

Schemers

Proving that fate has a strange sense of humor... SeattlePI.com reports that an unpublished autobiography written by William H. McMasters has been found relating the events leading up to the day that he dropped the dime on Alfred Ponzi. You may recall Ponzi's bio from the endless B-roll related to the recent Bernie Madoff (aka "Ponzi Redux"). McMasters was Ponzi's publicist and (apparently) was ignorant of Ponzi's scam until he decided that the dividends his boss was promising investors were too good to be true and went to the authorities. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? The article in the New York Times fills in the details and draws all the parallels for you. Speaking of scams, I'm reading Frank Partnoy's The Match King and it is on my list of must-reads for anyone curious about the origins of the financial products at the root of our current crisis. I admit that I lack the financial expertise to fully and completely appraise this book on any level other than the storytelling and that can be summed-up as "Wow, that's a helluva story". This even-handed review by the folks with the chops to really evaluate Partnoy's book over at The Economist magazine will get you started, though.

Lying for a Living

NOTE: I took Easter Sunday off, so you get two posts today. Enjoy! 

Book Review A lot of writing books have made the trek from the store to my shelves and back out again, but there's only one that I reread on a regular basis. It is also the one I enthusiastically endorse to anyone who asks me for advice on writing.

I push it into people's hands with such free abandon, you would almost think I was trying to get rid of it. (It's frankly amazing that I still have the original copy I bought at a Milwaukee bookstore back in the day.)

For my money, the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit is the quintessential writing book. If you can only buy one, buy this one. It's been in print without update for some time, so some of the nuts and bolts issues Lawrence Block deals with in the book are a bit dated (he talks about typewriters even more than I do) but good advice never expires. I can't think of another place you'll find this quality of advice about the writer's life and the business of cranking out lies with sufficient consistency to make a living at it.

(On a sidenote: I don't look to books for the latest on publishing anyway. Since the most current information about dealing with editors, agents and maneuvering the current publishing labyrinth changes constantly, getting that advice on the web only makes sense. Most literary agents maintain websites and many of them have highly-informative blogs, which I recommend more than any of the many books I've read.)

I have a confession to make: Years ago when I first "discovered" this book, it was because I quite frankly wanted a book with that title on my shelf. Seriously, who wouldn't want to have people peruse their shelves and find a book with this title?

After I got past chortling over the clever title, I was pleasantly surprised by the essays contained in this odd little tome.

Lawrence Block is the depressingly-talented author of over 150 books. He sold his unagented first book at an early age and on the first try back when those things really happened. He quickly established himself at a time when short stories were still a going concern and his stories of this education in the booktrade and his years turning out unabashed slush for a paycheck are hilarious and the lessons to be learned thereby are hilarious memorable.

Block's essays are compiled from his years writing for Writer's Digest, so the tone - while lighthearted - is educational. It deals with more than just the usual "Where do you get your ideas?" topics, expanding to advise the aspiring writer on finding your voice, what to study in college, procrastinating, plagiarizing, avoiding chemical dependency, and how to answer the people who ask you "So... where do you get your ideas?"

In between he also manages to cover plotting, characterization, structure and characters that speak languages fluenty which you're only passingly familiar with. His college advice will make you wish he'd written you a letter before you chose your major. The final chapter - a writer's prayer based upon AA's Serenity Prayer - will make you wish you could get it printed on a poster and hang it above your desk or writing chair.

This book should be on everyone's shelf. If only for the title and that last chapter, I dare say that it needs to be on every writer's shelf.