Sundays with Stephen King’s “On Writing”
A series featuring reflections on writing from the famed author’s memoir.
A series featuring reflections on writing from the famed author’s memoir.
I had not read Stephen King’s memoir On Writing for several years when it occurred to me to do so again. While at it, why not share reflections from the renowned writer in a weekly Sunday series at Go Into The Story?
King is a prolific author. Fair to say that is an understatement. One need only glance at a roster of his written works to determine that. If any contemporary writer has earned the right to reflect on the craft, it would be King. However, that is not the motivation he had in writing his memoir. This excerpt from the ‘First Foreword’ of On Writing explains the genesis of the book, a fateful exchange with Amy Tan, fellow writer and member of an authors’ charity rock music group The Remainders.
One night while we were eating Chinese before a gig in Miami Beach, I asked Amy if there was any one question she was never asked during the Q-and-A that follows almost every writer’s talk — that question you never get to answer when you’re standing in front of a group of author-struck fans and pretending you don’t put your pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. Amy paused, thinking it over very carefully, and miss said: “No one ever asks about the language.”
I owe an immediate debt of gratitude to her for saying that. I had been playing with the idea of writing a little book about writing for a year or more at that time, but had held back because I didn’t trust my own motivations — why did I want to write about writing? What made me think I had anything worth saying?
The easy answer is that someone who has sold as many books of fiction as I have must have something worthwhile to say about writing it, but the easy answer isn’t always the truth. Colonel Sanders sold a hell of a lot of fried chicken, but I’m not sure anyone wants to know how he made it. If I was going to be presumptuous enough to tell people how to write, I felt there had to be a better reason than my popular success. Put another way, I didn’t want to write a book, even a short one like this, that would leave me feeling like a literary gasbag or a transcendental asshole. There are enough of those books — and those writers — on the market already, thanks.
But Amy was right: nobody ever asks about the language. They ask the DeLillos and the Updikes and the Styrons, but they don’t ask popular novelists. Yet many of us proles also care about the language, in our humble way, and care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper. What follows is an attempt to put down, briefly and simply, how I came to the craft, what I know about it now, and how it’s done. It’s about the day job; it’s about the language.
My intention is similar to the Sundays with Ray Bradbury series: Each week as I re-read King’s memoir, print notable excerpts at Go Into The Story to inspire our creativity and conversation about the craft.
Today: From the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of On Writing, an excerpt from pp. 74–76. Even if you haven’t read his memoir, you may know the legend of how Carrie almost did not happen.
While he was going to college my brother Dave worked summers as a janitor at Brunswick High, his old alma mater. For part of one summer I worked there, too. I can't remember which year, only that it was before I met Tabby but after I started to smoke. That would've made me nineteen or twenty, I suppose. I got paired with a guy named Harry, who wore green fatigues, a big keychain, and walked with a limp. One lunch hour Harry told me what it had been like to face a Japanese banzai charge on the island of Tarawa, all the Japanese officers waving swords made out of Maxwell House coffee cans, all the screaming enlisted men behind them stoned out of their gourds and smelling of burned poppies. Quite a raconteur was my pal Harry.
One day he and I were supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls’ shower. I looked around the locker room with the interest of a Muslim youth who for some reason finds himself deep within the women’s quarters. It was the same as the boy’s locker room, and yet completely different. There were no urinals, of course, and there were two extra metal boxes on the tile walls — unmarked, and the wrong size for paper towels. I asked what was in them. “ Pussy-plugs,” Harry said. “For them certain days of the month.”
I also noticed that the showers, unlike those in the boys’ locker room, had chrome U-rings with pink plastic curtains attached. You could actually shower in privacy. I mentoined this to Harry, and he shrugged. “I guess young girls are a bit more shy about being undressed.”
This memory came back to me one day while I was working at the laundry, and I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains, or privacy. And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn’t now what it is , and the other girls — grossed out, horrified, amused — start pelting her with sanitary napkins. Or with tampons, which Harry had called pussy-lugs. The girl begins to scream. All that blood! She thinks she’s dying, that the other girls are making fun of her even while she’s bleeding to death… she reacts… fights back… but how?
I read in an article in Life magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena — telekinesis being the ability to move objects just by thinking about them. There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first —
Pow! Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I had an idea. I didn’t leave my post at Washex #2, didn’t go running g around the laundry waving my arms and showing Eureka!,” however. I’d had many other ideas as good and some that were better. Still I thought I might have the basis for a good yarn … the story remained on the back burner for awhile, simmering away in that place that’s not quite the conscious but not quite the subconscious, either. I had started my teaching career before I sat down one night to give it a shot. I did three single-spaced pages of a first draft, then crumpled them up in disgust and threw them away.
I had four problems with what I’d written. First and least important was the fact that the story didn't move me emotionally. Second and slightly more important was the fact that I didn't much like the lead character. Carrie White seemed thick and passive, a ready-made victim. The other girls were chucking tampons and sanitary napkins at her, chanting “Plug it up! Plug it up!” and I just didn't care. Third and more important still was not feeling at home with either the surroundings or my all-girl cast of supporting characters. I had landed on Planet Female, and one sortie into the girls’ locker room at Brunswick High School years before wasn't much help in navigating there. For me writing has always been best when it's intimate, as sexy as skin on skin. With Carrie I felt as if I were wearing a rubber wet-suit I couldn't pull off. Fourth and most important of all was the realization that the story wouldn't pay off unless it was pretty long, probably even longer than “Sometimes They Come Back,” which had been at the absolute outer limit of what the men's magazine market could accept in terms of word-count. You had to save plenty of room for those pictures of cheerleaders who had somehow forgotten to put on their underpants — they were what guys really bought the magazine for. I couldn't see wasting two weeks, maybe even a month, creating a novella I didn't like and wouldn't be able to sell. So I threw it away.
The next night, when I came home from school, Tabby had the pages. She'd spied them while emptying my wastebasket, had shaken the cigarette ashes off the crumpled balls of paper, smoothed them out, and sat down to read them. She wanted me to go on with it, she said. She wanted to know the rest of the story. I told her I didn't know jack-shit about high school girls. She said she'd help me with that part. She had her chin tilted down and was smiling in that severely cute way of hers. “You’ve got something here,” she said. “I really think you do.”
What if Tabby hadn’t emptied her husband’s wastebasket? What if she hadn’t noticed the crumpled pieces of paper? What if she had bit her tongue and not said anything figuring that Stephen must know what he’s doing in tossing aside those pages. Carrie may never have come into existence. Perhaps King would have continued writing features for magazines and never gone on to write novels. Instead, Tabby said, “You’ve got something here.”
Earlier in the memoir (pp. 73–74), King wrote this about Tabby:
My wife made a crucial difference during those two years I spent teaching at Hampden… If she had suggested that the time I spent writing stories on the front porch of our rented house on Pond Street or in the laundry room of our rent a trailer on Klatt Road in Hermon was wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would've gone out of me. Tabby never voiced a single doubt, however. Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given… Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don't have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
I wrote a Go Into The Story article a few years ago: What are you afraid of? Here’s how it began:
I am afraid of typing FADE IN.
I am afraid I won’t be able to finish this script.
I am afraid I don’t have enough talent.
I am afraid the words won’t come.
I am afraid my characters won’t feel real.
I am afraid people won’t like my writing.
I am afraid people won’t like my story.
I am afraid I won’t get an agent.
I am afraid I am wasting my time.
I am afraid I don’t know enough about the craft.
I am afraid people will laugh at me.
I am afraid I won’t make any money writing.
I am afraid of not succeeding.
I’m not sure Stephen King ever doubted his own abilities as a writer, but there must have been times when the couple, struggling to make ends meet with two infant children, he wondered, “Is this worth it?”
Fortunately, someone had his back. Tabby.
Who can you rely on to offer encouragement? If you have someone in your corner — and I really hope you do! — take a moment to give thanks. Fix this image in your mind: I dedicate this book to…
The name of that person who has your back.
Come back next week and many weeks thereafter for more in the Sundays with Stephen King’s “On Writing” series.
Twitter: @StephenKing