Introduction
In literary circles and theory, there exists a definite order of hierarchy amongst the various genres and types of literature. There is a definite tendency to classify especially fiction, into what might be considered serious fiction such as epic tales, war fiction, theatrical dramas etc. and then the less serious, low-culture fiction such as horror and science fiction. Given the enormity of the culture surrounding such fiction, it mayhap seem peculiar why it has the bad reputation it does. In the preface to his book Monsters From The Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film, E. Michael Jones starts by mentioning a fact that demonstrates clearly the standard of horror has from the beginning been a decisively low one:
Until recently, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, unlike her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was not part of the pantheon of English literature. The cover of the Lion Books edition of Frankenstein, brought out in 1953, gives an accurate picture of the literary status of Frankenstein at the time. In the background stands the monster, looking like Marlon Brando on a bad day, staring at his bloodstained hands. In the foreground, an unconscious Blanche Dubois figure exposes a tantalizing bit of cleavage (Jones, ix).
But if it is true that horror deserves to be at the bottom of the literary list, then why are these genres as popular as they are? Everywhere we look, horror has a huge role. The cinemas are filled with horror movies that made a definite come-back in the nineties with Wes Craven’s teenage horror flick Scream and even the big Hollywood stars seem to be more than eager to participate in the further creation of horror movies that they would not have considered doing before. What is it about the ooze, the blood, the gore and the slime that attracts the reader/viewer so?
Perhaps the fact is that the world is full of horror wherever we look. The news are filled with photos and scenes of bloody attacks and violent crimes and sometimes this can be overwhelming to accept. There is a definite reflection of the fears of the global community in literature, the film industry and television productions. On every channel so-called “reality” programs are being run and the latest plastic surgery trend amongst those, where graphic descriptions and images of gory “repairs” on the human body are fully exposed for the eager viewers, are nothing short of a slasher movie imitations. Nobody wants to admit to watching such “trash” but we all take a peek at least every now and again.
In Clare Hanson’s article Stephen King: Powers of Horror, she explains via Freud, Lacan and Julia Kristeva, how horror fiction, which she claims is mostly consumed by men, seems to be “[. . . ] designed to work for the masculine subject as an exorcism: it offers a way of repassing through abjection and distancing oneself once again from the powers of the mother” (Hanson, 153). Being unsure about the validity of Hanson’s claim that horror is mostly consumed by the masculine population, I wonder whether her claim of the exorcistic powers of horror could be expanded to a larger scale where the popularity of horror in a general sense could essentially be explained by its capacity to allow its readers/viewers to “exorcise” their every day fears and concerns in a safe way. This view can then be interpreted as a kind of escape from the horrors of reality into the fictional horrors that may frighten, dismay, shock and repulse us, but when the book is read or the movie is over, no real life harm has been done and we can happily return to our every day lives. Furthermore, this also seems to have an eerie resemblance to Aristotle’s theory on catharsis, or the purifying effect the works of tragic authors can have on the audience. It is not know whether he literarily meant that tragedy as such rids us of our emotions or refines them, but if successful, it does affect the audience to some extent.
In this essay the intention is to look closely at one of the most prolific horror writers of today, Stephen King, with an emphasis on his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft where he addresses the issue of writing in a most personal and private way, offering a guiding hand to the next generation of writers and sharing from his vast experience. One of most important element of this book is exactly how King has dealt with the interviewer’s and reader’s most popular question of why he chose to write mostly horror (or rather the underlying question of when he is going to start to write some “real” books). He dives into his early childhood and later adult experience in an attempt to answer this question once and for all, explaining what elements influenced him most and why.
Biographical Facts
As has been mentioned above, the life experience of Stephen King as in most other authors’ cases, has greatly influenced his writing and therefore I will commence by mentioning some basic biographical facts that may give a clearer view of from what kind of background this prolific author has arisen.
King was born in 1947 on September 21, in Portland Maine to a lower middle class family. He has one brother two years his senior and they were raised by a hard-working mother, after the family father went to the store to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned home. He left the small family in debt and from then on Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King moved with her sons from one place to the next, seeking work where it could be found. She was as King mentions himself “one of America’s early liberated women, but not by choice” (King, 3). She was without a doubt a great, female influence on King (though by all means not the only one) and in her own way steered him into the direction of writing as will be mentioned further own.
King graduated from Lisbon Falls high school in 1966 and took his B.S. in English, a minor in speech, and a side interest in drama at the University of Maine at Orono in 1970. It was during his university years that he met his wife, writer Tabitha Spruce, another influential female force in his life, who has been an indispensable aid to him during his literary career and personal life crisis. King himself spares not the praise and importance of having a supportive spouse:
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 rented trailer on Klatt Road in Hermon was a wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would have 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. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows (King, 77).
The couple lived with their children under dire financial circumstances in a trailer home in Hermon, Maine, a place that King so affectionately called “the asshole of the world” (King, 75) in his famous Playboy interview XXX. At that point in life King taught English at Hampden Academy (Hampden, Maine), washed sheets at New Franklin Laundry during summer vacations and tried to write his fiction when there was spare time to be found. His breakthrough came when he sold his novel Carrie to Doubleday in hardback, and NAL in paperback for four hundred thousand dollars in 1973. There was no turning back for King. He was an instant success and again his wife is at least partially responsible since she was the one who insisted on his finishing the story after discovering it crumpled in the wastebasket:
She’d spied them while emptying my waste-basket, 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.’ (King, 81)
After Carrie King has produced an almost annual succession of fictional hits and yearly his fan groups become larger. His fame is such that the mere word horror has become synonymous with the name Stephen King, each as inseparable from the other as peas from a pod. He definitely belongs to the group of artists that experience such immense popularity that their work has been analysed and interpreted to oblivion long before their writing career are finished. The list of books that have been written about him is staggering and includes student guides and companions to his work, teacher’s manuals, biographical information and in depth analysis of certain novels and collections of short stories. On top of this, a number of movies, TV shows and audiotapes based on his fiction have been produced not to overlook the original screenplays and teleplays he has written himself.
One important part of King’s life that deserves further discussion is the fact that for years he had a serious substance abuse problem that affected not only his personal life and physical health, but also had its claws firmly imbedded in his work as a writer. He describes this problem in detail in his book On Writing, devoting long passages to it, and therefore this issue will also be examined more closely in these pages later on.
From the Roots of Childhood
In June of 1999, Stephen King took one of his routine walks along the shoulder of a familiar country road in Maine. He was hit by a van and seriously injured as a result. Near death than life, no less than six operations were required to restore his health and mend his completely broken body. After months of painful rehabilitation, the author was finally able to sit up and from then on started writing again. The result was his book On Writing, an unusual mix of autobiography and a writing guide for the aspiring writer.
As King describes it himself in the first pages of his book, his childhood is “a fogged-out landscape from which occasional memories appear like isolated trees . . . the kind that look as if they might like to grab and eat you” (King, 3). This imagery certainly sets the mood for an interesting reading. He goes on to explain that this book is not an autobiography but rather “a kind of curriculum vitae” (King, 4), his own attempt to show how he was formed as a writer.
One of his earliest memories is that of a certain babysitter he names Eula-Beulah, a very large teenage-girl, who laughed a lot, treated four year old Steve rather roughly and had a very peculiar sense of humour to say the least:
Eula-Beulah was prone to farts – the kind that are both loud and smelly. Sometimes when she was so afflicted, she would throw me on the couch, drop her wool-skirted butt on my face, and let loose. ‘Pow!’ she’d cry in high glee. It was like being buried in marshgas fireworks. I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing. Because, while what was happening was sort of horrible, it was also sort of funny (King, 8).
Mayhap, Eula-Beulah in her own fascinating ways thus became a great influence on young King, as his descriptions of her ring suspiciously close to some of his more infamous female characters, especially the heavy-set Annie Wilkes, who inflicts various tortures on her prisoner, writer Paul Sheldon, in King’s novel Misery which was published in 1987. Those who have seen the movie based on the film might very well picture a younger Kathy Bates[1] in the role Eula-Beulah and be quite satisfied with the result.
As Clare Hanson points out in her article Stephen King: Powers of Horror, the monstrous feminine is very much a living thing in King’s fiction. She also uses his novel Misery as an example of this in which she sees writer Paul Sheldon and nurse Annie Wilkes as oppositions between the masculine and the feminine, a relation in which Annie is the monstrous feminine, the ultimate, domineering mother figure. She is described very feminine in a physical sense (large breasts for example) but at the same time her large body is “big but not generous” (Hanson, 150). Annie is furthermore the ultimate, castrator as Hanson phrases it:
She operates as the castrating female in the most horrifying sense in the text, when she amputates Paul’s foot, wielding an axe and a blow-torch. The castration image is underscored: we are told Paul is sure, in this scene, that Annie will castrate him, and later Annie coyly confesses that she had thought of cutting off Paul’s ‘man-gland’ (Hanson, 150).
Whether Annie Wilkes in all her dimensions is deliberately or even consciously based on King’s notorious babysitter, is hard to say, but there seems to be an eerie sense of similarity between the two females, that certainly struck me the first time I read King’s descriptions of Eula-Beulah. At least he gives her this much credit:
In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred pound baby-sitter fart on your face and yell Pow! , the Village Voice holds few terrors (King, 8).
But Eula-Beulah is not the only female person that has thus deeply affected Stephen King. Another very important figure in his life that most likely had a strong influence over how he was formed as a writer has to be his mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. As said before, she was a person of strong character and determined will. King’s descriptions of her are honest and seem to be completely lacking in any kind of euphoric or heroic exaggerations. He even mentions that he suspects that at some point she might have “farmed his brother and he out to one of her sisters for awhile because she was economically or emotionally unable to cope with them for awhile” (King, 3).
Due to illness, six year old King was pulled out of school for a year and he spent it mostly in bed or otherwise housebound. To pass the time he read comic books and at some point decided to write his own story. As he says himself “imitation preceded creation” (King, 16) and he copied Combat Casey comics and added here and there is own descriptions. At last he showed one of these copies to his mother and her reaction to this probably was a crucial turning-point in his development as a future writer. After asking him whether he wrote it himself and seeming disappointed in his confession that it was mostly copied, she replied: ‘Write one of your own, Stevie,’ she said. ‘Those Combat Casey funnybooks are just junk – he’s always knocking someone’s teeth out. I bet you could do better. Write one of your own.’ (King, 17) These important words opened a whole new world to King; a world of possibilities that had never occurred to him at that young age. The result was a story about four magic animals that rode around in a car and helped small kids. He handed the copy to his mother who immediately put aside what she was doing and read the whole story at once. She then proceeded to tell him that it was “good enough to be in a book”, a statement that truly inspired King to continue or as he says himself: “Nothing anyone has said to me ever since has made me feel any happier” (King, 18). Furthermore she started paying him a quarter apiece for his stories and that was the “first buck he made in this business” (King, 19). Despite that, she later in life advised her son to get a teacher’s credential “so he would have something to fall back on” (King, 68).
Without such support from his parent, who knows what route King might have taken. It seems that the credit he gives to his wife that was mentioned here above when he was struggling as an aspiring writer, may also be given to his mother, who obviously had an important say in guiding her son towards the path of independent and creative writing.
Mrs. King seems to have been a fairly straightforward person and her blunt and honest answers to young King’s childish questions, are in his mind worthy of a small chapter of their own in his book. He remembers asking her at the age of five or six if she had ever seen anyone die. The reply was that she had seen one and heard another die. Intrigued as to how one could actually hear somebody die, he insisted on a further explanation. His mother told him a story of how a fourteen-year-old girl had drowned off Prout’s Neck in the 1920’s because nobody was able to reach her due to strong undertows in the water:
In the end they could only stand around, tourists and townies, the teenager who became my mother among them, waiting for a rescue boat that never came and listening to that girl scream until her strength gave out and she went under. Her body washed up in New Hampshire, my mother said. I asked how old the girl was. Mom said she was fourteen, then read me a comic book and packed me off to bed (King, 10).
In the case of the person she saw die, it was a sailor who jumped off the roof of the Graymore Hotel in Portland, Maine and landed in the street:
‘He splattered,’ my mother said in her most matter-of-fact tone. She paused, then added, ‘The stuff that came out of him was green. I have never forgotten it.’
That makes two of us, Mom (King, 10).
That final statement about him never having been able to forget this interesting piece of his mother’s history, does indicate that he was indeed deeply affected by it. Both the physical horror of the two separate narrations and the human tragedy behind them seem to be parallel to King’s own adult writing. It is true that horror is an ever present force in his writing but what is perhaps most unique to King’s writing is exactly that a lot of that horror is sprouted from human tragedy or emotions rather than real life monster and tedious descriptions of ooze and gore. King feels for people and that capacity to understand, interpret and put into words in a believable way human emotions makes him a very convincing writer, even if what is actually taking place in the narration might seem impossible.
King seems to realize that his mother’s “matter-of-fact tone” is borderline cold-hearted and in that way he does not draw up any rosy image of her. Quite frankly she seems to have scared him quite badly with her gruesome narrations. But it is exactly with this kind of descriptions that he shows the reader how he had even at an early age, an understanding of human desperation and a note of sympathy that rings a strong chord in his writing. Especially when it regards childhood fears but those who have read King to any extent, know that prepubescent kids (10-12 years old) are his expertise. This is the age in which logic and increased intellectual skills are becoming more prominent, but gullibility and naivety still linger on, making certain relapses into childish fears quite common. Most of us lose this as we grow older but a few of the more imaginative individuals (such as King himself) seem to hold on to this quality even as the years pass on, or at the very least, hold strongly on to the memories of those fears.
A good example of King’s fascination and understanding of childhood fears is his story The Library Policeman from his collection of short stories Four Past Midnight published in 1991. In his notes on the story King recalls his son Owen’s fear of the Library Police, an imaginary authority that supposedly comes to one’s house if the library books are overdue and how a discussion of these fears became the base for the above-mentioned story:
What I realized, however, was something I knew already: the fears of childhood have some hideous persistence. Writing is an act of self-hypnosis, and in that state a kind of total emotional recall often takes place and terrors which should have been long dead start to walk and talk again (King, FPM, 386).
He furthermore recalls how he himself as a child was fascinated with the library but at the same time frightened by its dark stacks and corners and intimidating blue-haired, elderly lady-librarians. This personal fear that he recalls, made it easy for him to sympathize with his son and then transport that understanding into a story. His mother’s own lack of understanding of what might be frightening to a child is reflected in the posters Sam, the main character of The Library Policeman views with horror in the library:
Sam looked to his left, and the faint smile on his lips first faltered and then died. Here was a poster which showed a large, dark car speeding away from what he supposed was a school building. A little boy was looking out of the passenger window. His hands were plastered against the glass and his mouth was open in a scream. In the background, a man – only a vague, ominous shape – was hunched over the wheel, driving hell for leather. The words beneath this picture read:
NEVER TAKE RIDES FROM STRANGERS!
(King, FPM, 401)
Substance Abuse and Writing
As mentioned above, Stephen King had for years a very serious problem with alcohol that later escalated into drug use as well. He gives this rather unpleasant and perhaps, embarrassing chapter of his life, a good deal of focus in On Writing and speaks honestly and openly about this issue in his life, how it affected his work and family life, and not to forget, how he dealt with it.
As King so eloquently puts it himself: “Alcoholics build defenses like the Dutch build dikes” (King, 104). This statement more or less sums up the early years of his married life as he assured himself that he “just liked to drink” (King, 104). Another method of denial he also refers to his the “the world famous Hemingway Defense” (King, 104), which he describes as such:
[. . . ] as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on, I can handle it. A real man always can (King, 104).
It is interesting to wonder whether this reference to Hemingway is a mere coincidence or not, since King has often been claimed to be under strong influences from that particular writer, especially when it comes to being a very male-ishly thinking writer, even lacking in conviction when writing female characters. Even Clare Hanson states in her above-mentioned essay that King’s work follows “an exemplarily ‘masculine’ trajectory” (Docherty, 135). In any case, the effect Hemingway had on King as a writer and obviously also an alcoholic in denial, parallels nicely in these descriptions.
Perhaps the most important point in adding King’s substance abuse into this essay (and probably the same reason why he saw it necessary to mention it himself at all in his book), is the fact that his problem affected his writing and the writing affected his problem so to speak. He acknowledges that even though he spent years in total denial about having a drinking problem, his inner self, that part of his mind and soul that writes the stories, had been aware of the problem as early as 1975, which is the year that he wrote the novel The Shining. In that story, writer Jack Torrance takes on the job of supervising a remote hotel in the mountains over the dead of winter when there are no other employees or hotel guests present, thinking that the change of scenery and isolation will help him with his writing. Instead, Jack becomes severely blocked, being almost unable to write a single sentence properly and slowly dives into madness by the haunting and presence of evil in the hotel. Many might see this as a reflection of King’s own sub-conscious fear of failing as a writer, especially in context with his increasing substance abuse, which surely is a kind of state of madness. The novel has even been interpreted by some as the tragic ruin of a family that shares its hallucinations and that not only the father but rest of the family also goes insane by the end.
King himself claims that the inner part of him, which writes, began to “scream for help in the only way it knew how, through his fiction and through his monsters” (King, 106). He hand-picks two other novels that clearly echo his own state of mind at the time of writing:
I wrote Misery (the title quite aptly described my state of mind), in which a writer is held prisoner and tortured by a psychotic nurse. In the spring 1986 I wrote The Tommyknockers, often working until midnight with my heart running at a hundred and thirty beats a minute, and cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stem the coke-induced bleeding” King, 107).
Nurse Annie Wilkes in Misery may then be seen as a metaphor for King’s own real-life self-destruction and torture he inflicted upon himself through the substance abuse, while he himself (or in that particular case, writer Paul Sheldon) lay helpless, unable to do anything except watch the horror unfold. But writer Sheldon does eventually triumph over the evil nurse as King did over his addiction problems with the help of his family and closest friends later on in life, so perhaps the novel, despite being written in a state of misery as mentioned above, reflected some evidence of hope never having left King completely, even at his worst moments.
In regards to The Tommyknockers King himself openly confesses that it is a metaphor for drugs and alcohol. An alien crew, hibernating in a spacecraft buried in the ground, weasels into the minds of people, giving them superficial intelligence and powers, takes a heavy toll instead, the person’s own soul. It was “the best metaphor for alcohol and drugs my tired, overstressed mind could come up with” (King, 107).
Not long after his writing The Tommyknockers, King’s wife, Tabitha, formed an intervention group of family and friends, giving King the ultimatum of getting professional help or getting out of the house since she and their children had no desire to witness his slow suicide. It is here that nurse Annie Wilkes came back into King’s mind and helped him make the ultimate decision:
[. . .] what finally decided me was Annie Wilkes, the psycho nurse in Misery. Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer[2]. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to work anymore if I quit drinking and drugging, but I decided (again, so far as I was able to decide anything in my distraught and depressed state of mind) that I would trade writing for staying married and watching the kids grow up. If it came to that (King, 109).
The Toolbox
The latter part of King’s book On Writing is exactly what the title suggests, his own personal instructions for the aspiring writers on writing. It is in no way similar to the traditional textbooks that most often are available to student writers. His instructions are written on a very personal note, they arrive from his own vast experience with writing fiction and are therefore written in a very informal way. Because of these above-mentioned facts, it is an unusual reading but extremely practical and I daresay, useful, because the informal style in which it is written, is appealing and personal and the straightforward tone makes his instructions easy to digest and follow.
The first chapter in this part of the book is called The Toolbox. King starts by telling the story of how his uncle Oren insisted on bringing his entire huge toolbox to fix one screen door, despite that it turned out that he only needed to use one small, screwdriver. This puzzled young King but his uncle’s prompt answer was:
‘I didn’t know what else I might find to do once I got out there, 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’ (King, 125). This advise King has transferred over on to writing and advises the inexperienced writer that in order to make the most of their writing skills, they construct their own toolboxes and build up the muscles to carry them around. That way, they will not get discouraged when looking at a hard job, but simply retrieve the appropriate tool and make use of it.
The first thing a writer should do is to organise the basic tools in his toolbox and those tools go on top. The “commonest of all” (King, 125) is of course vocabulary. Interestingly enough, King sees vocabulary as a cause of small concern, seeing that we all have it and that it is the way we use it and not how large it is, that matters the most. He takes examples of writers with enormous vocabularies, such as H.P. Lovecraft and advises strongly against any conscious effort to improve vocabulary, claiming that this should happen gradually and automatically with increased reading. To prove his point he also takes examples of very successful writers that did not spend to much energy on large vocabulary and complicated sentences. Amongst these are in his view for example John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, his favourite being Hemingway’s: “He came to the river. The river was there.” (King, 127) from his novel Big Two-Hearted River.
King’s reasoning for this view on vocabulary is actually quite interesting. In his view, deliberate decoration of sentences with long and complicated words, instead of using the first and most direct word that comes into mind, is a disaster. He explains this by claiming that the basic rule of vocabulary is to “use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colourful” (King, 130). He claims that:
The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God’s name would you want to make things worse by choosing a word which is only the cousin to the one you really wanted to use? (King, 130)
The next tool in the box should be grammar. In Writing With a Purpose (ed. Joseph F. Trimmer), there is an extensive, twenty page section on the how to write grammatical sentences, and it covers anything from how to eliminate sentence fragments from giving a detailed list of the most notorious irregular verbs in English. As King acknowledges that since On Writing is not a textbook on writing in the traditional sense, he does not dwell extensively on grammar, but solely mentions what he calls is own personal “pet peeves” (King, 136) on the matter. His first rule of grammar is to avoid the passive tense. He even ventures to speculate on why so many writers are attracted to the passive tense, saying that timid writers like it 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 lawyer’s torts majestic, I guess it does (King, 137).
The second “pet peeve” from King’s world of grammar has to do with the use of adverbs. In the above-mentioned book Writing With a Purpose, adverbs are simply defined as modifiers for verbs, adjectives and other adverbs and then exorcises are given in the identification of adverbs from a text. King on the other hand, goes a step further and states: “The adverb is not your friend” (King, 138). He puts it into the same category as the passive voice, as a tool for the timid writer. He feels strongly about this and explains that overuse of adverbs indicates a writer’s fear of not being able to express very clearly his point, finding it necessary to enhance what realy should not need any enhancement. As an example he uses the sentence: “He closed the door firmly”, by no means a really bad sentence, but he questions whether the adverb firmly is really necessary. King admits that some might find this dislike of adverbs a tad “anal retentive” (King, 139) and confesses that of course they have their own use at times. But he absolutely refuses to accept them in dialogue attribution, claiming and showing with examples, how the adverb-filled expressions are infinitely weaker then those without.
Now King dives into the next layer of the toolbox and unfolds the paragraph. He describes them as “maps of intent” (King, 145), claiming that they are almost as important for the way the look as for what they say. His advise on its use in fictional writing is simple and straightforward: to let nature take its course and not think too much about where the paragraph begins or ends. Revising later is of course important but paragraphs in fiction are apt to be most effective if they have that natural flow to them. If compared to the detailed instructions of paragraph structure in Writing With a Purpose, in which topical paragraphs are required to have unity of matter, be complete, exhibit an appropriate order of sentences and display coherence, King’s advise might seem simplistic. But it must not be forgotten that his is not a textbook on writing and he is also solely referring to fictional writing and not academic writing, which might have other requirements.
The ultimate advise on the toolbox, is King’s conviction that in fiction writing, the most important notion is to tell a good story and make the reader feel welcome. In regards to that, he finds that grammatical incorrectness such as fragments, are perfectly legitimate at times, as they can “work beautifully to streamline a narration” (King, 151). This is advise that one will probably not find in any textbooks on writing, but comes from the experience of writers such as King, whose career of successful writing is probably not a coincidence.
On Writing
After concentrating on the toolbox as a fundamental base for writing, King dives further into the more common practises of the writing process and this is perhaps the most exciting part of the book for the aspiring writer to read. He commences by stating that the most important rule of all is to read a lot and write a lot. He explains how despite being a slow reader himself, he manages to get through about seventy or eighty pieces of fiction a year. He reads for the pleasure of it, not for educational purposes as such, but as he explains, there is always a learning process at hand. In Writing With a Purpose the same advise is really being given by examples, since that book is filled with excellent examples of writing, both professional and student samples, for educational purposes. Interestingly enough, King feels that the bad books have ultimately much more to teach than the good ones. He remembers how it felt to read a bad piece of fiction and feel for the first time that he could to better himself. Similarly he recalls how it felt reading a masterpiece such as Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and being filled with despair over his own insufficiency as a writer. But he acknowledges that ultimately, all reading can have educational purposes:
So we read to experience the mediocre and the outright rotten; such experience helps us to recognize those things when they begin to creep into our own work, and to steer clear of them. We also read in order to measure ourselves against the good and the great, to get a sense of all that can be done. And we read in order to experience different styles (King, 166).
The second issue King tackles is just how much writing is enough? He begins by describing his own personal work methods, and how he writes every day when he is working on a piece and then comes to a full stop in between. He has through the years developed his own work strategy, which is to write about 2000 words a day. That comes to about 180,000 in three months, a good length for a novel. Despite recognising that as he grows older he works slower, King rarely allows himself to rest until he has his 2000 words. The fact that King so straight-forwardly admits to setting a certain word number limit for himself per day, is not only interesting and helpful for the inexperienced writer, it also clearly demonstrates what King himself repeats several times in the book; that writing is hard work. Surely talent comes into play as well, but it is a mistake to think that all the great writers find creation an easy task. It is a slow and tedious job based on a lot of practise and a lot of plain, hard work.
Traditional textbooks on writing rarely suggest a certain word number a day but Writing With a Purpose does share with King the importance of a serene environment. It clearly states that no matter if one’s preference is a secluded corner in the library or something else, it is vital to “develop habits that enhance your concentration rather than interfere with it” (Trimmer, 4). King is of the same opinion, stating that although it is not necessary to have an elaborate situation to work in, a framework of privacy, tranquillity and the determination to close that door and work, are necessary to get the work done. He insists that writing is not some spiritual event in which the writer sits and waits for the muse to come, but just another job that you have to work at. Like he says:
Your job is to make sure that the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ‘til noon or seven ‘til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start to showing up, chomping his cigar and making his magic (King, 180).
Perhaps one of the most nightmarish questions that haunt all aspiring writers is: what can I write about? The cliché answer to this is that you should write what you know. King does not fully agree with this, understandably enough, because how could writers of for example horror and science fiction follow that advise and get any writing done, since there material is often completely unrealistic and unknown to the world as we know it? King’s answer as to what a writer should write about is fairly straightforward: “Anything you damn well want. Anything at all . . . as long as you tell the truth” (King, 181). So what does this statement mean? He explains that regarding genre, it is best to write what you would like to read yourself. But ultimately he suggests writing what one wants and then embedding it with one’s own understanding and experience with life. A successful example of this is John Grisham. His novels have sold in immense number of copies and King claims the reason is that although the tales he writes are totally make-believe they are based on a reality he knows to be the truth from his own experience. Grisham is after all, a lawyer by profession himself and although he most likely never worked for the mafia as so many of his characters, he knows what it is like to be a young lawyer and that truth radiates through his novels.
Creating a Story
In the final part of King’s advise on writing, he goes in some detail into the art of creating a story. In his view, a good novel or a story, consist of three basic elements: narration which moves the story from A to B, description which creates a sensory reality to the reader and dialogue which brings life to the characters through speech. Interestingly, he leaves the matter of plot out of this equation. In Writing With a Purpose, plot is described as “coherent, unified, and meaningful sequence of events that forms the beginning, middle and end of a work of literature” (Trimmer, 313). It consists of three basic elements, those being exposition, conflict and climax. King disregards this completely and gives two quite sensible reasons for his disbelief in plot:
I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible (King, 188).
It may seem odd to think that plot is completely worthless, but that is not really what King is saying here. He certainly confesses to plotting a number of times while creating his fiction, but he does not see plot as a necessary element in the process of creating a good story. Whether this be true or not, his view does offer a mild relief for the aspiring writer. Since King’s writing usually has a decent enough storyline, it can be inspiring for those who think they can only dream to become successful writers, to know that even the ‘master of horror’ himself does not have every detail of the story laid out in front of him before he starts writing. His attitude towards plot as well indicates a certain confidence in his own ability to bring the story to a successful end, even if he has not worked the entire plot out in advance.
King’s compensates lack of plotting by relying on intuition. He says the reason he has been able to do that is because his books tent to rely more on situation rather than story. His method seems to be rather simple: he first thinks of a situation. The characters emerge, flat at first, and then he begins to narrate. He even explicitly says that he never demands from his characters that they do things his way, but rather prefers for them to take their own course. He even gives a few examples of how the characters have taken over and completely surprised King himself.
His initial plan for writer Paul Sheldon in novel Misery was to have him eaten by Annie Wilkes’s pig and his novel bound in his own skin. But as King acknowledges himself, Paul turned out to be more resilient than he anticipated and fought bravely and successfully to save his own life. Nurse Annie Wilkes also surprised her creator and was in the end not only a source of fear but also of sympathy:
And none of the story’s details and incidents proceeded from plot; they were organic, each arising naturally from the initial situation, each an uncovered part of the fossil. And I’m writing all this with a smile. As sick as I was with alcohol as I was much of the time, I had so much fun with that one (King, 195).
Coming back to description, King says that it begins by visualizing what you want the reader to experience and then putting it into words in a way that will “cause your reader to prickle with recognition” (King, 202). But he also warns against over-description of exterior details, of for example characters’ appearances, feeling that if the author goes to far in his descriptions he will ruin the opportunity for the reader to use his own imagination. He feels that a few, well chosen descriptive words that will stand for everything else, are sufficient. In many ways, this is very true. It can often be tiresome to read novels such as Emily Brönte’s Jane Eyre, in which extreme emphasis are on descriptions of personal appearances, or Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series, which are filled with seemingly endless and tedious nature descriptions. When it comes to dialogue, King insists that it can be a great help while trying to enforce the classic rule of writing which says that it is better to show than to tell. Through dialogue, the author can demonstrate many interesting facts about his characters, from what background they come, their general attitude or educational standard. He mentions that obviously, some authors are more talented at creating convincing dialogue than others, and takes H.P. Lovecraft as an example from the latter category. King offers an explanation for this and wonders whether Lovecraft’s shy and reclusive nature had an effect on his dialogue skills, since in order to be able to identify good dialogue, one needs to practise by talking and especially listening to others.
An important element in dialogue is according to King, to maintain honesty. He confesses to receiving more than weekly complaints from readers about profanity and other politically incorrect phrases he has incorporated into dialogue. But as he explains, to maintain realism in the dialogue, it is essential to keep to the truth. If a character accidentally crushes his thumb while hammering a nail into a wall, a very realistic response is unfortunately to use exclamations of profanity. If the writer does not stay true to that fact, is dialogue will most likely not be very convincing to the reader. This is truly more important than it might seem. In order for the reader to have interest in a story, he has to be able to get absorbed in it and for that to take place he has to believe in the characters and their authenticity. If they sound unrealistic or phoney, the reader will be constantly reminded of the fact that he is reading a fictional story that is not real. With that attitude, he probably will not even have enough interest to finish the story. But it is also a fact that King himself has often been criticized for going too far in trying to catch the readers’ interest by almost shoving the horror in their faces.
Symbolism and Theme
Regarding literary tools such as symbolism, theme, stream of consciousness, onomatopoeia and others, King’s attitude is relatively relaxed. He feels that whatever the writer feels he can successfully use to improve his fiction, he should take full advantage of. As King acknowledges, he has often been accused of being symbolically simplistic in his work and he mentions The Green Mile in this context, saying that his choice of giving his main character, sitting innocent on death row, the initials of a famous real life man that was innocent on death row also. But he claims that as he writes, he rarely decides consciously to use symbolism; most often he discovers it later when revising and then he sometimes draws it out more clearly. In fact, for King, second drafts were made for symbolism and theme.
A good example of this is King’s recollection of writing novel Carrie. It is quite obvious to the literary critic that this novel blatantly uses blood symbols in various ways. Carrie’s paranormal abilities are brought out by her first menstrual period and she is later drenched in pig’s blood at the school prom. According to King he did not realise this blood symbolism at the crucial points in the story until he read the first draft himself. The blood symbolism is also strongly connected to the horrors of the female body, as Clare Hanson points out in her essay:
Carrie is brought up to fear and distrust the generative sexual powers of the female body: it is impressed on her not only that sex is sinful, but that sex has its origins in the sinfulness of the mother, in her lust and desire. Her mother tells her of her own pleasure in the sexual act in a kind of retrospective frenzy of repudiation, and then moves into ritualistic chant, the main theme of which is again the sinfulness of Eve, who ‘loosed the raven on the world’ and who was visited by ‘the Curse of Blood’ (Hanson, 143).
In this context it is interesting that Carrie’s paranormal abilities, that in fact make her a kind of telekinetic monster, are brought on by her first menstruation, when her body is changing from that of a child into a grown woman, emphasising the connection between blood and the monstrous feminine.
King has often mentioned that he firmly believes that a story is a pre-existing thing and that the writer’s real job is similar to that of an archaeologist, to search for it and carefully bring it out like a dinosaur’s ancient skeleton. With this view in mind, he says that symbolism can be treated in the same way. For the aspiring writers, symbolism can seem like a nightmare to grasp and use as a literary tool, and King suggests a relaxed attitude towards it. Believe that it pre-exists just as the story, and then when revising, draw it out if it serves a purpose.
But what does King mean by symbolism serving a point or not? As he mentions, symbolism is not a necessity for a story to work, and it can at times damage the work, if it serves only the point of creating what he calls “a sense of artificial profundity”. But if it seems to belong in the story, King feels that symbolism can serve as a focus point for both the reader and the author.
In Writing With a Purpose, in introduction to theme is suggested by examining how authors express themselves through literary devices such as symbols. A symbol is “a person, act, or thing that has both literal significance and metaphorical meaning” (Trimmer, 316). For King, theme is not so important as such, but he does claim, it is there all though he personally does not have too many thematic concerns. He feels that mostly his deepest interests come out as thematic in his books. Examples of this are why God lets terrible occurrences happen, the thin line between reality and fantasy, and why violence seems to have such an attraction for fundamentally good people. He repeats that for him, theme is not a major issue, it is more something that comes up again and again in his writing because that particular issue has sparked his interest in his own personal life.
Final Words
When looking back at the original thought put forward in the introduction of this chapter, about the status of horror, science fiction and supernatural fiction amongst the various literary genres, it seems obvious that the abovementioned are the least respected. As E.J. Clery says in the introduction to her book The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1760-1800, the mere title of her book seems paradoxical in the light of the history such literature has amongst literature in general. As she mentions herself, fantasy does not even seem to have a place in the hierarchy of literary genres, but since it is more marginal than elevated. As she says: “Its popular success has more often been described as a spread or even contagion than as a rise” (Clery, 1).
Keeping this dubious status of the genre in mind, it seems amazing that an author such as Stephen King, has managed to become as successful as he is. He has soled millions of copies of his works and the popularity seems never-ending. Despite those numbers, many a King fan finds him/herself defending their choice of reading to others that do not accept the genres that King’s fame is based on, as serious literature. It is often deemed as something frivolous, childish and of having no more value than just a moments entertainment at the best. Some King readers have even confessed to being borderline harassed as teenagers by their English teachers for their ‘shockingly bad’ choice of reading. One would think appreciation of any teenager reading at all by his/her own free will, should be in order rather than reprimands.
But what is it that causes this great prejudice against writers of the fantastic? Why are they so harshly judged? Does the fact that King is a worldwide success phenomenon simply proof some kind of degenerate spiral of fiction readers then? I think not. The fact is that most who judge the hardest the genres of horror and the fantastic, have read the least of it, and therefore are hardly in a position to sit and deem this or that as bad fiction. It is similar to a devoted opera fan openly expressing a disgust in heavy metal music without ever having given that particular genre of music any chance at all. If there is anything worse than musical snob, it is literary snob. The fact is that it is simply wrong for any serious literary critic to deem a piece of fiction before reading it thoroughly and preferably without prejudice. To claim that one genre is acceptable and another is not is a blatant display of literary ignorance. I am not referring to personal tastes here, because in that we all have our preferences. I simply claiming that genre in itself has nothing to do with the quality of the individual piece of fiction. There are some science fiction and horror that frankly belong in the garbage bin, but the same can be said about so many romance novels, thrillers, detective stories, epic stories and dramas. Each piece of literature has to be allowed to stand for itself and on its own merits when critiqued, just as the human being should be judged by his or her individual quality and not by ethnicity or race.
While reading King’s On Writing, it became more and more obvious that that book is in fact a necessary reading for the less appreciative of fantasy fiction. King explains the elements that lie behind his choice of genre or theme, that being that simply his own life’s experience has moulded him as a writer and that what he writes is an honest response to that. He furthermore clearly demonstrates in this book that he is a professional in his field and that it is no mere coincidence that he is successful. He surely has his defects as a writer, often being accused of over-explaining and over-writing his books, but he has worked hard to get where he is and openly confesses everything about the painful process he went through to polish himself in the field of writing. The advise he gives on the writing process is profoundly personal, easy to understand and as a result, very practical. His book is wonderfully different from the textbooks on writing because instead of simply defining different literary tools and methods, it actually tells you how to use them in a way that hits the mark. But it may very well be that the image King, the king of horror himself, portrays of all the rejection slips from various publishers he kept on his wall above his typewriter, is perhaps the best encouragement any aspiring writer that reads his book could get.
Bibliography
Barnes, Jonathan ed. The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle. New York.
Cambridge University Press. 1995. Pages 277-278.
Beahm, George, ed. The Stephen King Companion. London. Futura Publications.
1991.
Clery, E.J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800. New York. Cambridge
University Press. 1995.
Docherty, Brian, ed. American Horror Fiction: From Brckden Brown to Stephen
King. London. The Macmillan Press Ltd. 1990.
Jones, Michael, ed. Monsters From the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film.
Dallas. Spence Publishing Company. 2000.
King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. London. New English Library.
2001.
Schweitzer, Darrel, ed. Discovering Modern Horror Fiction. Washington. Starmont
House. 1985.
Trimmer, Joseph F., ed. Writing With a Purpose. Boston/New York. Houghton
Mifflin Company. 2001.
[1] Actress Kathy Bates performed the role of Annie Wilkes in the movie Misery (director Rob Reiner, 1990) which was based on King’s novel, with such conviction that even the most hardened film viewers found it hard not to be frightened of her.
[2] A direct reference to the fate of writer Paul Sheldon, whom Annie forces to re-write a novel, her way.
In literary circles and theory, there exists a definite order of hierarchy amongst the various genres and types of literature. There is a definite tendency to classify especially fiction, into what might be considered serious fiction such as epic tales, war fiction, theatrical dramas etc. and then the less serious, low-culture fiction such as horror and science fiction. Given the enormity of the culture surrounding such fiction, it mayhap seem peculiar why it has the bad reputation it does. In the preface to his book Monsters From The Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film, E. Michael Jones starts by mentioning a fact that demonstrates clearly the standard of horror has from the beginning been a decisively low one:
Until recently, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, unlike her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was not part of the pantheon of English literature. The cover of the Lion Books edition of Frankenstein, brought out in 1953, gives an accurate picture of the literary status of Frankenstein at the time. In the background stands the monster, looking like Marlon Brando on a bad day, staring at his bloodstained hands. In the foreground, an unconscious Blanche Dubois figure exposes a tantalizing bit of cleavage (Jones, ix).
But if it is true that horror deserves to be at the bottom of the literary list, then why are these genres as popular as they are? Everywhere we look, horror has a huge role. The cinemas are filled with horror movies that made a definite come-back in the nineties with Wes Craven’s teenage horror flick Scream and even the big Hollywood stars seem to be more than eager to participate in the further creation of horror movies that they would not have considered doing before. What is it about the ooze, the blood, the gore and the slime that attracts the reader/viewer so?
Perhaps the fact is that the world is full of horror wherever we look. The news are filled with photos and scenes of bloody attacks and violent crimes and sometimes this can be overwhelming to accept. There is a definite reflection of the fears of the global community in literature, the film industry and television productions. On every channel so-called “reality” programs are being run and the latest plastic surgery trend amongst those, where graphic descriptions and images of gory “repairs” on the human body are fully exposed for the eager viewers, are nothing short of a slasher movie imitations. Nobody wants to admit to watching such “trash” but we all take a peek at least every now and again.
In Clare Hanson’s article Stephen King: Powers of Horror, she explains via Freud, Lacan and Julia Kristeva, how horror fiction, which she claims is mostly consumed by men, seems to be “[. . . ] designed to work for the masculine subject as an exorcism: it offers a way of repassing through abjection and distancing oneself once again from the powers of the mother” (Hanson, 153). Being unsure about the validity of Hanson’s claim that horror is mostly consumed by the masculine population, I wonder whether her claim of the exorcistic powers of horror could be expanded to a larger scale where the popularity of horror in a general sense could essentially be explained by its capacity to allow its readers/viewers to “exorcise” their every day fears and concerns in a safe way. This view can then be interpreted as a kind of escape from the horrors of reality into the fictional horrors that may frighten, dismay, shock and repulse us, but when the book is read or the movie is over, no real life harm has been done and we can happily return to our every day lives. Furthermore, this also seems to have an eerie resemblance to Aristotle’s theory on catharsis, or the purifying effect the works of tragic authors can have on the audience. It is not know whether he literarily meant that tragedy as such rids us of our emotions or refines them, but if successful, it does affect the audience to some extent.
In this essay the intention is to look closely at one of the most prolific horror writers of today, Stephen King, with an emphasis on his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft where he addresses the issue of writing in a most personal and private way, offering a guiding hand to the next generation of writers and sharing from his vast experience. One of most important element of this book is exactly how King has dealt with the interviewer’s and reader’s most popular question of why he chose to write mostly horror (or rather the underlying question of when he is going to start to write some “real” books). He dives into his early childhood and later adult experience in an attempt to answer this question once and for all, explaining what elements influenced him most and why.
Biographical Facts
As has been mentioned above, the life experience of Stephen King as in most other authors’ cases, has greatly influenced his writing and therefore I will commence by mentioning some basic biographical facts that may give a clearer view of from what kind of background this prolific author has arisen.
King was born in 1947 on September 21, in Portland Maine to a lower middle class family. He has one brother two years his senior and they were raised by a hard-working mother, after the family father went to the store to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned home. He left the small family in debt and from then on Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King moved with her sons from one place to the next, seeking work where it could be found. She was as King mentions himself “one of America’s early liberated women, but not by choice” (King, 3). She was without a doubt a great, female influence on King (though by all means not the only one) and in her own way steered him into the direction of writing as will be mentioned further own.
King graduated from Lisbon Falls high school in 1966 and took his B.S. in English, a minor in speech, and a side interest in drama at the University of Maine at Orono in 1970. It was during his university years that he met his wife, writer Tabitha Spruce, another influential female force in his life, who has been an indispensable aid to him during his literary career and personal life crisis. King himself spares not the praise and importance of having a supportive spouse:
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 rented trailer on Klatt Road in Hermon was a wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would have 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. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows (King, 77).
The couple lived with their children under dire financial circumstances in a trailer home in Hermon, Maine, a place that King so affectionately called “the asshole of the world” (King, 75) in his famous Playboy interview XXX. At that point in life King taught English at Hampden Academy (Hampden, Maine), washed sheets at New Franklin Laundry during summer vacations and tried to write his fiction when there was spare time to be found. His breakthrough came when he sold his novel Carrie to Doubleday in hardback, and NAL in paperback for four hundred thousand dollars in 1973. There was no turning back for King. He was an instant success and again his wife is at least partially responsible since she was the one who insisted on his finishing the story after discovering it crumpled in the wastebasket:
She’d spied them while emptying my waste-basket, 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.’ (King, 81)
After Carrie King has produced an almost annual succession of fictional hits and yearly his fan groups become larger. His fame is such that the mere word horror has become synonymous with the name Stephen King, each as inseparable from the other as peas from a pod. He definitely belongs to the group of artists that experience such immense popularity that their work has been analysed and interpreted to oblivion long before their writing career are finished. The list of books that have been written about him is staggering and includes student guides and companions to his work, teacher’s manuals, biographical information and in depth analysis of certain novels and collections of short stories. On top of this, a number of movies, TV shows and audiotapes based on his fiction have been produced not to overlook the original screenplays and teleplays he has written himself.
One important part of King’s life that deserves further discussion is the fact that for years he had a serious substance abuse problem that affected not only his personal life and physical health, but also had its claws firmly imbedded in his work as a writer. He describes this problem in detail in his book On Writing, devoting long passages to it, and therefore this issue will also be examined more closely in these pages later on.
From the Roots of Childhood
In June of 1999, Stephen King took one of his routine walks along the shoulder of a familiar country road in Maine. He was hit by a van and seriously injured as a result. Near death than life, no less than six operations were required to restore his health and mend his completely broken body. After months of painful rehabilitation, the author was finally able to sit up and from then on started writing again. The result was his book On Writing, an unusual mix of autobiography and a writing guide for the aspiring writer.
As King describes it himself in the first pages of his book, his childhood is “a fogged-out landscape from which occasional memories appear like isolated trees . . . the kind that look as if they might like to grab and eat you” (King, 3). This imagery certainly sets the mood for an interesting reading. He goes on to explain that this book is not an autobiography but rather “a kind of curriculum vitae” (King, 4), his own attempt to show how he was formed as a writer.
One of his earliest memories is that of a certain babysitter he names Eula-Beulah, a very large teenage-girl, who laughed a lot, treated four year old Steve rather roughly and had a very peculiar sense of humour to say the least:
Eula-Beulah was prone to farts – the kind that are both loud and smelly. Sometimes when she was so afflicted, she would throw me on the couch, drop her wool-skirted butt on my face, and let loose. ‘Pow!’ she’d cry in high glee. It was like being buried in marshgas fireworks. I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing. Because, while what was happening was sort of horrible, it was also sort of funny (King, 8).
Mayhap, Eula-Beulah in her own fascinating ways thus became a great influence on young King, as his descriptions of her ring suspiciously close to some of his more infamous female characters, especially the heavy-set Annie Wilkes, who inflicts various tortures on her prisoner, writer Paul Sheldon, in King’s novel Misery which was published in 1987. Those who have seen the movie based on the film might very well picture a younger Kathy Bates[1] in the role Eula-Beulah and be quite satisfied with the result.
As Clare Hanson points out in her article Stephen King: Powers of Horror, the monstrous feminine is very much a living thing in King’s fiction. She also uses his novel Misery as an example of this in which she sees writer Paul Sheldon and nurse Annie Wilkes as oppositions between the masculine and the feminine, a relation in which Annie is the monstrous feminine, the ultimate, domineering mother figure. She is described very feminine in a physical sense (large breasts for example) but at the same time her large body is “big but not generous” (Hanson, 150). Annie is furthermore the ultimate, castrator as Hanson phrases it:
She operates as the castrating female in the most horrifying sense in the text, when she amputates Paul’s foot, wielding an axe and a blow-torch. The castration image is underscored: we are told Paul is sure, in this scene, that Annie will castrate him, and later Annie coyly confesses that she had thought of cutting off Paul’s ‘man-gland’ (Hanson, 150).
Whether Annie Wilkes in all her dimensions is deliberately or even consciously based on King’s notorious babysitter, is hard to say, but there seems to be an eerie sense of similarity between the two females, that certainly struck me the first time I read King’s descriptions of Eula-Beulah. At least he gives her this much credit:
In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred pound baby-sitter fart on your face and yell Pow! , the Village Voice holds few terrors (King, 8).
But Eula-Beulah is not the only female person that has thus deeply affected Stephen King. Another very important figure in his life that most likely had a strong influence over how he was formed as a writer has to be his mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. As said before, she was a person of strong character and determined will. King’s descriptions of her are honest and seem to be completely lacking in any kind of euphoric or heroic exaggerations. He even mentions that he suspects that at some point she might have “farmed his brother and he out to one of her sisters for awhile because she was economically or emotionally unable to cope with them for awhile” (King, 3).
Due to illness, six year old King was pulled out of school for a year and he spent it mostly in bed or otherwise housebound. To pass the time he read comic books and at some point decided to write his own story. As he says himself “imitation preceded creation” (King, 16) and he copied Combat Casey comics and added here and there is own descriptions. At last he showed one of these copies to his mother and her reaction to this probably was a crucial turning-point in his development as a future writer. After asking him whether he wrote it himself and seeming disappointed in his confession that it was mostly copied, she replied: ‘Write one of your own, Stevie,’ she said. ‘Those Combat Casey funnybooks are just junk – he’s always knocking someone’s teeth out. I bet you could do better. Write one of your own.’ (King, 17) These important words opened a whole new world to King; a world of possibilities that had never occurred to him at that young age. The result was a story about four magic animals that rode around in a car and helped small kids. He handed the copy to his mother who immediately put aside what she was doing and read the whole story at once. She then proceeded to tell him that it was “good enough to be in a book”, a statement that truly inspired King to continue or as he says himself: “Nothing anyone has said to me ever since has made me feel any happier” (King, 18). Furthermore she started paying him a quarter apiece for his stories and that was the “first buck he made in this business” (King, 19). Despite that, she later in life advised her son to get a teacher’s credential “so he would have something to fall back on” (King, 68).
Without such support from his parent, who knows what route King might have taken. It seems that the credit he gives to his wife that was mentioned here above when he was struggling as an aspiring writer, may also be given to his mother, who obviously had an important say in guiding her son towards the path of independent and creative writing.
Mrs. King seems to have been a fairly straightforward person and her blunt and honest answers to young King’s childish questions, are in his mind worthy of a small chapter of their own in his book. He remembers asking her at the age of five or six if she had ever seen anyone die. The reply was that she had seen one and heard another die. Intrigued as to how one could actually hear somebody die, he insisted on a further explanation. His mother told him a story of how a fourteen-year-old girl had drowned off Prout’s Neck in the 1920’s because nobody was able to reach her due to strong undertows in the water:
In the end they could only stand around, tourists and townies, the teenager who became my mother among them, waiting for a rescue boat that never came and listening to that girl scream until her strength gave out and she went under. Her body washed up in New Hampshire, my mother said. I asked how old the girl was. Mom said she was fourteen, then read me a comic book and packed me off to bed (King, 10).
In the case of the person she saw die, it was a sailor who jumped off the roof of the Graymore Hotel in Portland, Maine and landed in the street:
‘He splattered,’ my mother said in her most matter-of-fact tone. She paused, then added, ‘The stuff that came out of him was green. I have never forgotten it.’
That makes two of us, Mom (King, 10).
That final statement about him never having been able to forget this interesting piece of his mother’s history, does indicate that he was indeed deeply affected by it. Both the physical horror of the two separate narrations and the human tragedy behind them seem to be parallel to King’s own adult writing. It is true that horror is an ever present force in his writing but what is perhaps most unique to King’s writing is exactly that a lot of that horror is sprouted from human tragedy or emotions rather than real life monster and tedious descriptions of ooze and gore. King feels for people and that capacity to understand, interpret and put into words in a believable way human emotions makes him a very convincing writer, even if what is actually taking place in the narration might seem impossible.
King seems to realize that his mother’s “matter-of-fact tone” is borderline cold-hearted and in that way he does not draw up any rosy image of her. Quite frankly she seems to have scared him quite badly with her gruesome narrations. But it is exactly with this kind of descriptions that he shows the reader how he had even at an early age, an understanding of human desperation and a note of sympathy that rings a strong chord in his writing. Especially when it regards childhood fears but those who have read King to any extent, know that prepubescent kids (10-12 years old) are his expertise. This is the age in which logic and increased intellectual skills are becoming more prominent, but gullibility and naivety still linger on, making certain relapses into childish fears quite common. Most of us lose this as we grow older but a few of the more imaginative individuals (such as King himself) seem to hold on to this quality even as the years pass on, or at the very least, hold strongly on to the memories of those fears.
A good example of King’s fascination and understanding of childhood fears is his story The Library Policeman from his collection of short stories Four Past Midnight published in 1991. In his notes on the story King recalls his son Owen’s fear of the Library Police, an imaginary authority that supposedly comes to one’s house if the library books are overdue and how a discussion of these fears became the base for the above-mentioned story:
What I realized, however, was something I knew already: the fears of childhood have some hideous persistence. Writing is an act of self-hypnosis, and in that state a kind of total emotional recall often takes place and terrors which should have been long dead start to walk and talk again (King, FPM, 386).
He furthermore recalls how he himself as a child was fascinated with the library but at the same time frightened by its dark stacks and corners and intimidating blue-haired, elderly lady-librarians. This personal fear that he recalls, made it easy for him to sympathize with his son and then transport that understanding into a story. His mother’s own lack of understanding of what might be frightening to a child is reflected in the posters Sam, the main character of The Library Policeman views with horror in the library:
Sam looked to his left, and the faint smile on his lips first faltered and then died. Here was a poster which showed a large, dark car speeding away from what he supposed was a school building. A little boy was looking out of the passenger window. His hands were plastered against the glass and his mouth was open in a scream. In the background, a man – only a vague, ominous shape – was hunched over the wheel, driving hell for leather. The words beneath this picture read:
NEVER TAKE RIDES FROM STRANGERS!
(King, FPM, 401)
Substance Abuse and Writing
As mentioned above, Stephen King had for years a very serious problem with alcohol that later escalated into drug use as well. He gives this rather unpleasant and perhaps, embarrassing chapter of his life, a good deal of focus in On Writing and speaks honestly and openly about this issue in his life, how it affected his work and family life, and not to forget, how he dealt with it.
As King so eloquently puts it himself: “Alcoholics build defenses like the Dutch build dikes” (King, 104). This statement more or less sums up the early years of his married life as he assured himself that he “just liked to drink” (King, 104). Another method of denial he also refers to his the “the world famous Hemingway Defense” (King, 104), which he describes as such:
[. . . ] as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on, I can handle it. A real man always can (King, 104).
It is interesting to wonder whether this reference to Hemingway is a mere coincidence or not, since King has often been claimed to be under strong influences from that particular writer, especially when it comes to being a very male-ishly thinking writer, even lacking in conviction when writing female characters. Even Clare Hanson states in her above-mentioned essay that King’s work follows “an exemplarily ‘masculine’ trajectory” (Docherty, 135). In any case, the effect Hemingway had on King as a writer and obviously also an alcoholic in denial, parallels nicely in these descriptions.
Perhaps the most important point in adding King’s substance abuse into this essay (and probably the same reason why he saw it necessary to mention it himself at all in his book), is the fact that his problem affected his writing and the writing affected his problem so to speak. He acknowledges that even though he spent years in total denial about having a drinking problem, his inner self, that part of his mind and soul that writes the stories, had been aware of the problem as early as 1975, which is the year that he wrote the novel The Shining. In that story, writer Jack Torrance takes on the job of supervising a remote hotel in the mountains over the dead of winter when there are no other employees or hotel guests present, thinking that the change of scenery and isolation will help him with his writing. Instead, Jack becomes severely blocked, being almost unable to write a single sentence properly and slowly dives into madness by the haunting and presence of evil in the hotel. Many might see this as a reflection of King’s own sub-conscious fear of failing as a writer, especially in context with his increasing substance abuse, which surely is a kind of state of madness. The novel has even been interpreted by some as the tragic ruin of a family that shares its hallucinations and that not only the father but rest of the family also goes insane by the end.
King himself claims that the inner part of him, which writes, began to “scream for help in the only way it knew how, through his fiction and through his monsters” (King, 106). He hand-picks two other novels that clearly echo his own state of mind at the time of writing:
I wrote Misery (the title quite aptly described my state of mind), in which a writer is held prisoner and tortured by a psychotic nurse. In the spring 1986 I wrote The Tommyknockers, often working until midnight with my heart running at a hundred and thirty beats a minute, and cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stem the coke-induced bleeding” King, 107).
Nurse Annie Wilkes in Misery may then be seen as a metaphor for King’s own real-life self-destruction and torture he inflicted upon himself through the substance abuse, while he himself (or in that particular case, writer Paul Sheldon) lay helpless, unable to do anything except watch the horror unfold. But writer Sheldon does eventually triumph over the evil nurse as King did over his addiction problems with the help of his family and closest friends later on in life, so perhaps the novel, despite being written in a state of misery as mentioned above, reflected some evidence of hope never having left King completely, even at his worst moments.
In regards to The Tommyknockers King himself openly confesses that it is a metaphor for drugs and alcohol. An alien crew, hibernating in a spacecraft buried in the ground, weasels into the minds of people, giving them superficial intelligence and powers, takes a heavy toll instead, the person’s own soul. It was “the best metaphor for alcohol and drugs my tired, overstressed mind could come up with” (King, 107).
Not long after his writing The Tommyknockers, King’s wife, Tabitha, formed an intervention group of family and friends, giving King the ultimatum of getting professional help or getting out of the house since she and their children had no desire to witness his slow suicide. It is here that nurse Annie Wilkes came back into King’s mind and helped him make the ultimate decision:
[. . .] what finally decided me was Annie Wilkes, the psycho nurse in Misery. Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer[2]. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to work anymore if I quit drinking and drugging, but I decided (again, so far as I was able to decide anything in my distraught and depressed state of mind) that I would trade writing for staying married and watching the kids grow up. If it came to that (King, 109).
The Toolbox
The latter part of King’s book On Writing is exactly what the title suggests, his own personal instructions for the aspiring writers on writing. It is in no way similar to the traditional textbooks that most often are available to student writers. His instructions are written on a very personal note, they arrive from his own vast experience with writing fiction and are therefore written in a very informal way. Because of these above-mentioned facts, it is an unusual reading but extremely practical and I daresay, useful, because the informal style in which it is written, is appealing and personal and the straightforward tone makes his instructions easy to digest and follow.
The first chapter in this part of the book is called The Toolbox. King starts by telling the story of how his uncle Oren insisted on bringing his entire huge toolbox to fix one screen door, despite that it turned out that he only needed to use one small, screwdriver. This puzzled young King but his uncle’s prompt answer was:
‘I didn’t know what else I might find to do once I got out there, 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’ (King, 125). This advise King has transferred over on to writing and advises the inexperienced writer that in order to make the most of their writing skills, they construct their own toolboxes and build up the muscles to carry them around. That way, they will not get discouraged when looking at a hard job, but simply retrieve the appropriate tool and make use of it.
The first thing a writer should do is to organise the basic tools in his toolbox and those tools go on top. The “commonest of all” (King, 125) is of course vocabulary. Interestingly enough, King sees vocabulary as a cause of small concern, seeing that we all have it and that it is the way we use it and not how large it is, that matters the most. He takes examples of writers with enormous vocabularies, such as H.P. Lovecraft and advises strongly against any conscious effort to improve vocabulary, claiming that this should happen gradually and automatically with increased reading. To prove his point he also takes examples of very successful writers that did not spend to much energy on large vocabulary and complicated sentences. Amongst these are in his view for example John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, his favourite being Hemingway’s: “He came to the river. The river was there.” (King, 127) from his novel Big Two-Hearted River.
King’s reasoning for this view on vocabulary is actually quite interesting. In his view, deliberate decoration of sentences with long and complicated words, instead of using the first and most direct word that comes into mind, is a disaster. He explains this by claiming that the basic rule of vocabulary is to “use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colourful” (King, 130). He claims that:
The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God’s name would you want to make things worse by choosing a word which is only the cousin to the one you really wanted to use? (King, 130)
The next tool in the box should be grammar. In Writing With a Purpose (ed. Joseph F. Trimmer), there is an extensive, twenty page section on the how to write grammatical sentences, and it covers anything from how to eliminate sentence fragments from giving a detailed list of the most notorious irregular verbs in English. As King acknowledges that since On Writing is not a textbook on writing in the traditional sense, he does not dwell extensively on grammar, but solely mentions what he calls is own personal “pet peeves” (King, 136) on the matter. His first rule of grammar is to avoid the passive tense. He even ventures to speculate on why so many writers are attracted to the passive tense, saying that timid writers like it 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 lawyer’s torts majestic, I guess it does (King, 137).
The second “pet peeve” from King’s world of grammar has to do with the use of adverbs. In the above-mentioned book Writing With a Purpose, adverbs are simply defined as modifiers for verbs, adjectives and other adverbs and then exorcises are given in the identification of adverbs from a text. King on the other hand, goes a step further and states: “The adverb is not your friend” (King, 138). He puts it into the same category as the passive voice, as a tool for the timid writer. He feels strongly about this and explains that overuse of adverbs indicates a writer’s fear of not being able to express very clearly his point, finding it necessary to enhance what realy should not need any enhancement. As an example he uses the sentence: “He closed the door firmly”, by no means a really bad sentence, but he questions whether the adverb firmly is really necessary. King admits that some might find this dislike of adverbs a tad “anal retentive” (King, 139) and confesses that of course they have their own use at times. But he absolutely refuses to accept them in dialogue attribution, claiming and showing with examples, how the adverb-filled expressions are infinitely weaker then those without.
Now King dives into the next layer of the toolbox and unfolds the paragraph. He describes them as “maps of intent” (King, 145), claiming that they are almost as important for the way the look as for what they say. His advise on its use in fictional writing is simple and straightforward: to let nature take its course and not think too much about where the paragraph begins or ends. Revising later is of course important but paragraphs in fiction are apt to be most effective if they have that natural flow to them. If compared to the detailed instructions of paragraph structure in Writing With a Purpose, in which topical paragraphs are required to have unity of matter, be complete, exhibit an appropriate order of sentences and display coherence, King’s advise might seem simplistic. But it must not be forgotten that his is not a textbook on writing and he is also solely referring to fictional writing and not academic writing, which might have other requirements.
The ultimate advise on the toolbox, is King’s conviction that in fiction writing, the most important notion is to tell a good story and make the reader feel welcome. In regards to that, he finds that grammatical incorrectness such as fragments, are perfectly legitimate at times, as they can “work beautifully to streamline a narration” (King, 151). This is advise that one will probably not find in any textbooks on writing, but comes from the experience of writers such as King, whose career of successful writing is probably not a coincidence.
On Writing
After concentrating on the toolbox as a fundamental base for writing, King dives further into the more common practises of the writing process and this is perhaps the most exciting part of the book for the aspiring writer to read. He commences by stating that the most important rule of all is to read a lot and write a lot. He explains how despite being a slow reader himself, he manages to get through about seventy or eighty pieces of fiction a year. He reads for the pleasure of it, not for educational purposes as such, but as he explains, there is always a learning process at hand. In Writing With a Purpose the same advise is really being given by examples, since that book is filled with excellent examples of writing, both professional and student samples, for educational purposes. Interestingly enough, King feels that the bad books have ultimately much more to teach than the good ones. He remembers how it felt to read a bad piece of fiction and feel for the first time that he could to better himself. Similarly he recalls how it felt reading a masterpiece such as Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and being filled with despair over his own insufficiency as a writer. But he acknowledges that ultimately, all reading can have educational purposes:
So we read to experience the mediocre and the outright rotten; such experience helps us to recognize those things when they begin to creep into our own work, and to steer clear of them. We also read in order to measure ourselves against the good and the great, to get a sense of all that can be done. And we read in order to experience different styles (King, 166).
The second issue King tackles is just how much writing is enough? He begins by describing his own personal work methods, and how he writes every day when he is working on a piece and then comes to a full stop in between. He has through the years developed his own work strategy, which is to write about 2000 words a day. That comes to about 180,000 in three months, a good length for a novel. Despite recognising that as he grows older he works slower, King rarely allows himself to rest until he has his 2000 words. The fact that King so straight-forwardly admits to setting a certain word number limit for himself per day, is not only interesting and helpful for the inexperienced writer, it also clearly demonstrates what King himself repeats several times in the book; that writing is hard work. Surely talent comes into play as well, but it is a mistake to think that all the great writers find creation an easy task. It is a slow and tedious job based on a lot of practise and a lot of plain, hard work.
Traditional textbooks on writing rarely suggest a certain word number a day but Writing With a Purpose does share with King the importance of a serene environment. It clearly states that no matter if one’s preference is a secluded corner in the library or something else, it is vital to “develop habits that enhance your concentration rather than interfere with it” (Trimmer, 4). King is of the same opinion, stating that although it is not necessary to have an elaborate situation to work in, a framework of privacy, tranquillity and the determination to close that door and work, are necessary to get the work done. He insists that writing is not some spiritual event in which the writer sits and waits for the muse to come, but just another job that you have to work at. Like he says:
Your job is to make sure that the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ‘til noon or seven ‘til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start to showing up, chomping his cigar and making his magic (King, 180).
Perhaps one of the most nightmarish questions that haunt all aspiring writers is: what can I write about? The cliché answer to this is that you should write what you know. King does not fully agree with this, understandably enough, because how could writers of for example horror and science fiction follow that advise and get any writing done, since there material is often completely unrealistic and unknown to the world as we know it? King’s answer as to what a writer should write about is fairly straightforward: “Anything you damn well want. Anything at all . . . as long as you tell the truth” (King, 181). So what does this statement mean? He explains that regarding genre, it is best to write what you would like to read yourself. But ultimately he suggests writing what one wants and then embedding it with one’s own understanding and experience with life. A successful example of this is John Grisham. His novels have sold in immense number of copies and King claims the reason is that although the tales he writes are totally make-believe they are based on a reality he knows to be the truth from his own experience. Grisham is after all, a lawyer by profession himself and although he most likely never worked for the mafia as so many of his characters, he knows what it is like to be a young lawyer and that truth radiates through his novels.
Creating a Story
In the final part of King’s advise on writing, he goes in some detail into the art of creating a story. In his view, a good novel or a story, consist of three basic elements: narration which moves the story from A to B, description which creates a sensory reality to the reader and dialogue which brings life to the characters through speech. Interestingly, he leaves the matter of plot out of this equation. In Writing With a Purpose, plot is described as “coherent, unified, and meaningful sequence of events that forms the beginning, middle and end of a work of literature” (Trimmer, 313). It consists of three basic elements, those being exposition, conflict and climax. King disregards this completely and gives two quite sensible reasons for his disbelief in plot:
I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible (King, 188).
It may seem odd to think that plot is completely worthless, but that is not really what King is saying here. He certainly confesses to plotting a number of times while creating his fiction, but he does not see plot as a necessary element in the process of creating a good story. Whether this be true or not, his view does offer a mild relief for the aspiring writer. Since King’s writing usually has a decent enough storyline, it can be inspiring for those who think they can only dream to become successful writers, to know that even the ‘master of horror’ himself does not have every detail of the story laid out in front of him before he starts writing. His attitude towards plot as well indicates a certain confidence in his own ability to bring the story to a successful end, even if he has not worked the entire plot out in advance.
King’s compensates lack of plotting by relying on intuition. He says the reason he has been able to do that is because his books tent to rely more on situation rather than story. His method seems to be rather simple: he first thinks of a situation. The characters emerge, flat at first, and then he begins to narrate. He even explicitly says that he never demands from his characters that they do things his way, but rather prefers for them to take their own course. He even gives a few examples of how the characters have taken over and completely surprised King himself.
His initial plan for writer Paul Sheldon in novel Misery was to have him eaten by Annie Wilkes’s pig and his novel bound in his own skin. But as King acknowledges himself, Paul turned out to be more resilient than he anticipated and fought bravely and successfully to save his own life. Nurse Annie Wilkes also surprised her creator and was in the end not only a source of fear but also of sympathy:
And none of the story’s details and incidents proceeded from plot; they were organic, each arising naturally from the initial situation, each an uncovered part of the fossil. And I’m writing all this with a smile. As sick as I was with alcohol as I was much of the time, I had so much fun with that one (King, 195).
Coming back to description, King says that it begins by visualizing what you want the reader to experience and then putting it into words in a way that will “cause your reader to prickle with recognition” (King, 202). But he also warns against over-description of exterior details, of for example characters’ appearances, feeling that if the author goes to far in his descriptions he will ruin the opportunity for the reader to use his own imagination. He feels that a few, well chosen descriptive words that will stand for everything else, are sufficient. In many ways, this is very true. It can often be tiresome to read novels such as Emily Brönte’s Jane Eyre, in which extreme emphasis are on descriptions of personal appearances, or Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series, which are filled with seemingly endless and tedious nature descriptions. When it comes to dialogue, King insists that it can be a great help while trying to enforce the classic rule of writing which says that it is better to show than to tell. Through dialogue, the author can demonstrate many interesting facts about his characters, from what background they come, their general attitude or educational standard. He mentions that obviously, some authors are more talented at creating convincing dialogue than others, and takes H.P. Lovecraft as an example from the latter category. King offers an explanation for this and wonders whether Lovecraft’s shy and reclusive nature had an effect on his dialogue skills, since in order to be able to identify good dialogue, one needs to practise by talking and especially listening to others.
An important element in dialogue is according to King, to maintain honesty. He confesses to receiving more than weekly complaints from readers about profanity and other politically incorrect phrases he has incorporated into dialogue. But as he explains, to maintain realism in the dialogue, it is essential to keep to the truth. If a character accidentally crushes his thumb while hammering a nail into a wall, a very realistic response is unfortunately to use exclamations of profanity. If the writer does not stay true to that fact, is dialogue will most likely not be very convincing to the reader. This is truly more important than it might seem. In order for the reader to have interest in a story, he has to be able to get absorbed in it and for that to take place he has to believe in the characters and their authenticity. If they sound unrealistic or phoney, the reader will be constantly reminded of the fact that he is reading a fictional story that is not real. With that attitude, he probably will not even have enough interest to finish the story. But it is also a fact that King himself has often been criticized for going too far in trying to catch the readers’ interest by almost shoving the horror in their faces.
Symbolism and Theme
Regarding literary tools such as symbolism, theme, stream of consciousness, onomatopoeia and others, King’s attitude is relatively relaxed. He feels that whatever the writer feels he can successfully use to improve his fiction, he should take full advantage of. As King acknowledges, he has often been accused of being symbolically simplistic in his work and he mentions The Green Mile in this context, saying that his choice of giving his main character, sitting innocent on death row, the initials of a famous real life man that was innocent on death row also. But he claims that as he writes, he rarely decides consciously to use symbolism; most often he discovers it later when revising and then he sometimes draws it out more clearly. In fact, for King, second drafts were made for symbolism and theme.
A good example of this is King’s recollection of writing novel Carrie. It is quite obvious to the literary critic that this novel blatantly uses blood symbols in various ways. Carrie’s paranormal abilities are brought out by her first menstrual period and she is later drenched in pig’s blood at the school prom. According to King he did not realise this blood symbolism at the crucial points in the story until he read the first draft himself. The blood symbolism is also strongly connected to the horrors of the female body, as Clare Hanson points out in her essay:
Carrie is brought up to fear and distrust the generative sexual powers of the female body: it is impressed on her not only that sex is sinful, but that sex has its origins in the sinfulness of the mother, in her lust and desire. Her mother tells her of her own pleasure in the sexual act in a kind of retrospective frenzy of repudiation, and then moves into ritualistic chant, the main theme of which is again the sinfulness of Eve, who ‘loosed the raven on the world’ and who was visited by ‘the Curse of Blood’ (Hanson, 143).
In this context it is interesting that Carrie’s paranormal abilities, that in fact make her a kind of telekinetic monster, are brought on by her first menstruation, when her body is changing from that of a child into a grown woman, emphasising the connection between blood and the monstrous feminine.
King has often mentioned that he firmly believes that a story is a pre-existing thing and that the writer’s real job is similar to that of an archaeologist, to search for it and carefully bring it out like a dinosaur’s ancient skeleton. With this view in mind, he says that symbolism can be treated in the same way. For the aspiring writers, symbolism can seem like a nightmare to grasp and use as a literary tool, and King suggests a relaxed attitude towards it. Believe that it pre-exists just as the story, and then when revising, draw it out if it serves a purpose.
But what does King mean by symbolism serving a point or not? As he mentions, symbolism is not a necessity for a story to work, and it can at times damage the work, if it serves only the point of creating what he calls “a sense of artificial profundity”. But if it seems to belong in the story, King feels that symbolism can serve as a focus point for both the reader and the author.
In Writing With a Purpose, in introduction to theme is suggested by examining how authors express themselves through literary devices such as symbols. A symbol is “a person, act, or thing that has both literal significance and metaphorical meaning” (Trimmer, 316). For King, theme is not so important as such, but he does claim, it is there all though he personally does not have too many thematic concerns. He feels that mostly his deepest interests come out as thematic in his books. Examples of this are why God lets terrible occurrences happen, the thin line between reality and fantasy, and why violence seems to have such an attraction for fundamentally good people. He repeats that for him, theme is not a major issue, it is more something that comes up again and again in his writing because that particular issue has sparked his interest in his own personal life.
Final Words
When looking back at the original thought put forward in the introduction of this chapter, about the status of horror, science fiction and supernatural fiction amongst the various literary genres, it seems obvious that the abovementioned are the least respected. As E.J. Clery says in the introduction to her book The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1760-1800, the mere title of her book seems paradoxical in the light of the history such literature has amongst literature in general. As she mentions herself, fantasy does not even seem to have a place in the hierarchy of literary genres, but since it is more marginal than elevated. As she says: “Its popular success has more often been described as a spread or even contagion than as a rise” (Clery, 1).
Keeping this dubious status of the genre in mind, it seems amazing that an author such as Stephen King, has managed to become as successful as he is. He has soled millions of copies of his works and the popularity seems never-ending. Despite those numbers, many a King fan finds him/herself defending their choice of reading to others that do not accept the genres that King’s fame is based on, as serious literature. It is often deemed as something frivolous, childish and of having no more value than just a moments entertainment at the best. Some King readers have even confessed to being borderline harassed as teenagers by their English teachers for their ‘shockingly bad’ choice of reading. One would think appreciation of any teenager reading at all by his/her own free will, should be in order rather than reprimands.
But what is it that causes this great prejudice against writers of the fantastic? Why are they so harshly judged? Does the fact that King is a worldwide success phenomenon simply proof some kind of degenerate spiral of fiction readers then? I think not. The fact is that most who judge the hardest the genres of horror and the fantastic, have read the least of it, and therefore are hardly in a position to sit and deem this or that as bad fiction. It is similar to a devoted opera fan openly expressing a disgust in heavy metal music without ever having given that particular genre of music any chance at all. If there is anything worse than musical snob, it is literary snob. The fact is that it is simply wrong for any serious literary critic to deem a piece of fiction before reading it thoroughly and preferably without prejudice. To claim that one genre is acceptable and another is not is a blatant display of literary ignorance. I am not referring to personal tastes here, because in that we all have our preferences. I simply claiming that genre in itself has nothing to do with the quality of the individual piece of fiction. There are some science fiction and horror that frankly belong in the garbage bin, but the same can be said about so many romance novels, thrillers, detective stories, epic stories and dramas. Each piece of literature has to be allowed to stand for itself and on its own merits when critiqued, just as the human being should be judged by his or her individual quality and not by ethnicity or race.
While reading King’s On Writing, it became more and more obvious that that book is in fact a necessary reading for the less appreciative of fantasy fiction. King explains the elements that lie behind his choice of genre or theme, that being that simply his own life’s experience has moulded him as a writer and that what he writes is an honest response to that. He furthermore clearly demonstrates in this book that he is a professional in his field and that it is no mere coincidence that he is successful. He surely has his defects as a writer, often being accused of over-explaining and over-writing his books, but he has worked hard to get where he is and openly confesses everything about the painful process he went through to polish himself in the field of writing. The advise he gives on the writing process is profoundly personal, easy to understand and as a result, very practical. His book is wonderfully different from the textbooks on writing because instead of simply defining different literary tools and methods, it actually tells you how to use them in a way that hits the mark. But it may very well be that the image King, the king of horror himself, portrays of all the rejection slips from various publishers he kept on his wall above his typewriter, is perhaps the best encouragement any aspiring writer that reads his book could get.
Bibliography
Barnes, Jonathan ed. The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle. New York.
Cambridge University Press. 1995. Pages 277-278.
Beahm, George, ed. The Stephen King Companion. London. Futura Publications.
1991.
Clery, E.J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800. New York. Cambridge
University Press. 1995.
Docherty, Brian, ed. American Horror Fiction: From Brckden Brown to Stephen
King. London. The Macmillan Press Ltd. 1990.
Jones, Michael, ed. Monsters From the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film.
Dallas. Spence Publishing Company. 2000.
King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. London. New English Library.
2001.
Schweitzer, Darrel, ed. Discovering Modern Horror Fiction. Washington. Starmont
House. 1985.
Trimmer, Joseph F., ed. Writing With a Purpose. Boston/New York. Houghton
Mifflin Company. 2001.
[1] Actress Kathy Bates performed the role of Annie Wilkes in the movie Misery (director Rob Reiner, 1990) which was based on King’s novel, with such conviction that even the most hardened film viewers found it hard not to be frightened of her.
[2] A direct reference to the fate of writer Paul Sheldon, whom Annie forces to re-write a novel, her way.
posted by Jóna Rúna @ 8:35 e.h.
0 Comments:
Skrifa ummæli
<< Home