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, excerpts from pp. 180, 185, and 189.
Let us know talk a little bit about dialogue, the audio portion of our programme. It's dialogue that gives your cast their voices, and is crucial in defining their characters — only what people do tells us more about what they're like, and talk is sneaky: what people say often conveys their character to others in ways of which they — the speakers — are completely unaware.
— —
As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty. And if you are honest about the words coming out of your characters mouths, you'll find that you've let yourself in for a fair amount of criticism. Not a week goes by that I don't receive at least one pissed-off letter (most weeks there are more) accusing me of being foul-mouthed, bigoted, homophobic, murderous, frivolous, or downright psychopathic. In the majority of cases what my correspondents are hot under the collar about relates to something in the dialogue: “Let's get the fuck out of Dodge” or “We don't cotton much to niggers around here" or "What do you think you're doing, you fucking faggot?"
— —
Some people don't want to hear the truth, of course, but that's not your problem. What would be is wanting to be a writer without wanting to shoot straight. Talk, whether ugly or beautiful, is an index of character; it can also be a breath of cool, refreshing air in a room some people would prefer to keep shut up. In the end, the important question has nothing to do with whether the talk in your story is sacred or profane; the only question is how it rings on the page and in the ear. If you expect it to ring true, then you must talk yourself. Even more important, you must shut up and listen to others talk.
In this section of the book, King spends some time writing about the use of profanity in dialogue. He writes, “My mother, God rest her, didn’t approve of profanity or any such talk; she called it ‘the language of the ignorant.’ This did not, however, keep her from yelling ‘Oh shit!’ if she burned the roast or nailed her thumb a good one while hammering a picture-book in the wall.”
My guess is King included a discussion about profanity in the context of the importance of writers being honest in writing dialogue because it’s a test. What kind of character is this? One who is prone to profanity? One who is loathe to swear? One, like King’s mother, who when trauma strikes cannot help but blurt out a healthy “Oh, shit!”
It’s an excellent question to ask of a character — Do you use profanity or not — and speaks to a key point: In order to be honest when writing a character’s dialogue, the writer must know the character. Deeply. Intimately. To the core of their being.
One of the writing mantras I came up with for my students is about writing dialogue: What a character says and how they say it derives from who they are and where they live. The character is a specific individual. Thus, their dialogue should also be specific to them.
In the best of all worlds, when you dig down into a character and really know them … that’s when they being to talk to you.
And that’s the most honest dialogue.
Come back next week and many weeks thereafter for more in the Sundays with Stephen King’s “On Writing” series.
Twitter: @StephenKing