Arts and Crafts

This week was another quick read, this time supplied by Stephen King, one of my long-time favorite authors.  The book I read this time, though, was not a scary novel; it was On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.  In it Stephen King gives an account of his life (including his horrific accident in 1999) and his work and then spends some time talking about how to become a better writer if you're already competent.  If you're a bad writer, he says, there's no hope for you.

That kind of blunt advice makes this book a bit different from others that are obviously designed to be used in a creative writing course.  King is highly skeptical of such courses, even though that's where he met his wife back when he went to University of Maine and was going through a period of writer's block, a malady he hasn't suffered from very often over the fifty-plus years he's been writing professionally.  In addition to the fifty novels he's published, he's written numerous short stories, screenplays, and other works--enough to prove that he writes almost continuously.

I have to say I agree with King's doubt about the usefulness of creative writing courses.  One of my creative writing professors once said that writing is self-taught, and I knew he was right, despite the fact that we were both there in a creative writing class trying to prove otherwise.  What creative writing classes are good for, King admits, is to provide a place to seriously discuss and engage in writing, and to provide good jobs for writers.

King's attitudes are a large part of what I find refreshing about his book; the other part is the truly useful advice he gives.  Some of it I've heard before; for instance, he says that to be a good writer, you have to write a lot and read a lot.  But other advice was new to me: don't worry about plot; put your characters in a situation and let them work their way out of it--plot will take care of itself.  That bit of advice was a revelation to me.  Hey, I can stop worrying about plot!  If anyone besides Stephen King had said that--say someone who writes "serious" novels that don't have a plot--I'd be skeptical.  But King, like most popular fiction writers, knows how to keep a story moving forward.  Writers like him are good at plot, so maybe it's not so mysterious after all.

Throughout On Writing, I get the sense that King is being honest and practical.  Here's how I do it, he says, and here's what I think writers need to succeed at the craft.  Interestingly enough, throughout the book he never refers to what he does as art (at least I can't think of a single instance).  It seems to me that he has a worker's sensibility about writing, especially writing popular fiction.  It's not high culture, but it is something valuable, something more than mere entertainment.  A good story is essential to our lives, and in order to work, it has to be accessible.  A story that hides its truth from readers is not doing its job.

Obviously, King and his stories have done their job for decades.  And he's not ready to quit yet.

If  you're interested in writing or reading, or if you're just interested in Stephen King, I recommend this book highly.

Now, on to the next.  This time I'm going back to history with a story about the 1906 earthquake, A Crack in the Edge of the World.  Another disaster awaits!