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 a wonderful chapter titled “Toolbox” (pp. 111–137). King frames the chapter with an anecdote about his Uncle Oren, a carpenter, and a toolbox he had inherited from King’s grandfather Fazza. The toolbox in question is heavy, as King notes weighing “between eighty and hundred and twenty pounds.”
King writes about how as a lad, he accompanied Uncle Oren to fix a broken screen on the backside of the house. He finishes the anecdote with this:
When the screen was secure, Uncle Oren gave me the screwdriver and told me to put it back in the toolbox and “latch her up.” I did, but I was puzzled. I asked him why he’d lugged Fazza’s toolbox all the way around the house, if all he needed was that one screwdriver. He could’ve carried a screwdriver in the back pocket of his khakis.
“Yeah, but Stevie,” he said, bending to grasp the handles, “I didn’t know what else I might find to do once I got out here, did I? It’s best to have your tools with you. If you don’t, you’re apt to find something you didn’t expect and get discouraged.”
This leads King into using a toolbox as a metaphor for writing. Here is an excerpt from pp. 122–124 in which King writes about one of his two “pet peeves” in the matters of “grammar and usage.”
Verbs come in two types, active and passive. With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something. With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence. The subject is just letting it happen. You should avoid the passive tense. I'm not the only one who says so; you can find the same advice in The Elements of Style.
Messrs. Strunk and White don't speculate as to why so many writers are attracted to passive verbs, but I am willing to; I think timid writers like them for the same reason timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. There is no troublesome action to contend with; the subject just has to close its eyes and think of England, to paraphrase Queen Victoria. I think unsure writers also feel the passive voice somehow lends their work authority, perhaps even a quality of majesty. If you find instruction manuals and lawyers towards majestic, I guess it does.
The timid fellow writes The meeting will be held at seven o'clock because that somehow says to him, "Put it this way and people will believe you really know." Purge this quisling thought! Don't be a Muggle! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put that meeting in charge! Write The meeting’s at seven. There, by God! Don't you feel better?
I won't say there's no place for the passive tense. Suppose, for instance, a fellow dies in the kitchen but ends up somewhere else. The body was carried from the kitchen and placed on the parlor sofa is a fair way to put this, although “was carried" and "was placed" still irks the shit out of me. I accept them but I don't embrace them. What I would embrace is Freddy and Myra carried the body out of the kitchen and laid it on the parlor sofa. Why does the body have to be the subject of the sentence, anyway? It's dead, for Christ sake! Fuhgeddaboudit!
Two pages of the passive voice — just about any business document ever written, in other words, not to mention reams of bad fiction — make me want to scream. It's weak, it's circuitous, and it's frequently torturous, as well. How about this: My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was begun. Oh, man — who farted, right? A simpler way to express this — sweeter and more forceful, as well — might be this: My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss. I will never forget it. I'm not in love with this because it uses with twice in four words, but at least we're out of that awful passive voice.
You might also notice how much simpler the thought is to understand when it's broken up into two thoughts. This makes matters easier for the reader, and the reader must always be your main concern; without Constant Reader, you are just a voice quacking in the void. And it's no walk in the park being the guy on the receiving end. “[Will Strunk] felt the reader was in serious trouble most of the time," E. B. White writes in his introduction to The Elements of Style, “a man floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone trying to write English to drain the swamp quickly and get his man up on dry ground, or at least throw him a rope." And remember: The writer threw the rope, not The rope was thrown by the writer. Please oh please.
Years ago upon my first reading of On Writing, I took away many lessons. Avoid the passive voice was a biggie. I scratched that into my prefrontal lobe. When I stumbled onto screenwriting and read hundreds of scripts to immerse myself in the craft, King’s advice rang truer than a cathedral bell.
We write screenplays in the present tense. This highlights how what the reader experiences happens in the here and now. The event unfolds in the moment. Right now. We do well to use verbs which convey that sense of immediacy to the reader.
Moreover, what we refer to as “scene description,” wherein we describe the setting and action in a given scene, is called “action” in popular screenwriting software programs. Action. Description. This serves as a reminder that screenwriters (and writers in general) ought not only avoid the passive voice, but embrace using the most active verbs possible.
Speaking of pet peeves, here are two of mine: Writers who default to using the verbs looks and walks. I harangue my students about this: There are at least 25,000 verbs in the English language. Certainly, you can do better than constantly using the pedestrian verbs “looks” and “walks.”
In fact, I made this point so fervently one time on my blog, someone put together two helpful lists: 90 words for “looks” and 115 words for “walks.”
As a reader, which verb would engage your imagination more: looks or ogles, gapes, stares, gawks, squints, spies, inspects, surveys, peeks, peers?
Which verb would convey more action: walks or staggers, paces, speeds, lurches, leaps, skips, bounds, sprints, stumbles?
Therefore, by all means, avoid the passive voice. While you’re at it, embrace active verbs.
Come back next week and many weeks thereafter for more in the Sundays with Stephen King’s “On Writing” series.
Twitter: @StephenKing