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, the final paragraph of the part of the memoir entitled On Living: A Postscript. In its eighteen pages, King describes the accident that occurred on June 19th, 1999 in which he almost lost his life. You should read the entire chapter for two reasons: (1) To learn the details of the incident, how King was struck by a van as he took his daily walk. (2) Study how King approached recounting the saga leading up to the accident, his lengthy recuperation, and his decision to begin writing again. This became a key part of the process whereby he regained his health. Interestingly, what he chose to write was to complete On Writing.
Here is how he sums it all up.
Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Some of this book — perhaps too much — has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it — and perhaps the best of it — is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.
Drink and be filled up.
King’s summation of this autobiographical part of his memoir feels like the words of an individual who has stared at the face of death. Not metaphorically in some kind of literary way, but the actual gaping maw of what it would be like to be not-alive. In fact, King recounts how as he was loaded into the ambulance, he twice asked this question: Am I going to die?
The specter of death is unique among all the experiences of life. I have written on the subject: The Power of Death in Stories. Death is a threat. It looms in our future. The fact is each of us born with an expiration date. The fact we don’t know where, when, or how we will die imbues the reality of our own terminus point in time an existential authority over our destiny. Death is pretty gloomy stuff which is why we devote much of time avoiding the subject.
And yet … death has another power, a positive one, if you will. For nothing can put things into perspective quite like the prospect of our expiration.
Where King ends up, after having confronted death in a quite literal manner, is to embrace writing as a kind of magic. Indeed, it is the “water of life.” For those of us who feel drawn to create stories, whether fingers on keyboard or pen on paper, King drives home the point that we have a “permission slip” to embrace that instinct. More than embrace it, act upon it … if you’re brave enough to start.
Earlier in this chapter, King makes this observation: The scariest moment is always just before you start.
I have seen this quote many times floating around the internet, but I never knew its source until reading On Writing. Think about that: Stephen King, author of so many stories which traffic in fearful things … author of dozens upon dozens of books … an author who we associate with the ritual and routine of pounding out words each day …
Even he gets scared. What scares him the most is that moment “just before you start.”
The specter of death has a way of crushing that fear. It not only relativizes our angst about writing, that fact we are going to die means we’d best be getting on with living. To quote one of the most famous lines penned by King found on the very last page of “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”:
Get busy living … or get busy dying.
That is a sentiment worth sitting with each time we sit down to write. Reflect on the opportunity each of us has been offered to give voice to our unique creative take on this crazy, absurd, yet beautiful thing called Life.
The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
Come back next week for the final installment in the Sundays with Stephen King’s “On Writing” series.
Twitter: @StephenKing