[Blarg]

<u>On Writing</u>, by Stephen King

I finished Stephen King's On Writing last night. I enjoyed the emphasis on putting the story center stage. The book's emphases were very indicative of King as a writer, and, like his fiction, On Writing is more about enjoying oneself with interesting people for a time than coming away changed or challenged, with much of note to take with you.

For instance, King hates plotting, he says. He likes to discover the work by writing it. This would go a long way toward explaining why he can do things like let his stories drift haplessly for very long stretches, filling them out with endless detail about cornball, often quite thin characters who aren't doing anything in particular. When he at length snaps to, he can finally march his story along, if anyone is still interested. This kind of writing is on full display in messes like The Stand, which rambles on over a thousand pages, much of which is essentially unfilled with anything particularly lively.

This may be how King likes to write, and it is often recommended as the way writing should be done -- it should be essentially "found." To King's credit, he elsewhere puts aside the culturally much-vaunted role of genius in writing and ascribes writing stuff worth reading primarily to hard work. But in denigrating the need to work on structure and plot even in the sort of workaday fiction he writes, he falls into the same trap he decries. Writing without plotting requires much more of lucky genius and visits from a muse than fully envisioning where you are going and why and how to get there from the start. King may be able to eventually tidy things up into a workable whole that feels somewhat unified and has gone in a direction worth pursuing without plotting, but how many of us are among the best-selling authors in the world, or have dozens of novels behind us that have trained us and honed our skills for decades? In effectively saying, "just do it blind," King is unconsciously promoting the spooky exceptionalism he insists good writing isn't really about.*

His other comments on writing seem to pertain more to his style of writing or approach to it than to writing in general. It is this that seems the main failure of this book: it is in some ways more about how to write like Stephen King than how to write and write well. An example is his sub-par discussion of symbolism. As someone who "writes as he goes," King discusses finding your symbolism after you've done your writing. While there is something to be said for the idea that you don't really know everything about your work on a deep level until it is finished and you can step away and get some perspective, King points out the value of finding what seem to be little more than pleasing trivial coincidences and reworking them by hook or by crook elsewhere into a work to provide foreshadowing or a few echoes. The mis-focus on such minor happenstances and stress on making much of them, while ignoring the enormous symbolic ramifications of the entire structure of a work, points out King's shortcomings. To be fair, King's type of fiction neither uses nor needs much symbolism, and most fiction isn't the type made to resonate on a symbolic level. But this is another indicator that in On Writing, King, despite his best intentions, is sometimes out of his depth, or rather, at the perfect depth for the type of fiction he does.

King comes across as usually very honest in the book, but he also seems to have gotten used to indulging himself, which takes a bit of his edge off. He coins new words regularly and drops them into his sentences without comment. This seems more than a little precious, and can get annoying. That he seems quite comfortable with that argues against him being as on the level as he tries to portray.

Potential readers of the book should also be warned that the greatest part of the book is auto-biography. This can get a bit slow and trying. A more pertinent criticism is that it is not as revealing as it could be of the writer rather than the man. Both are interesting, but in a book called On Writing, one would expect even any autobiographical emphasis to fall differently than it did.

The only books given much discussion at all were his very first one, Carrie, and Misery. Both were used more as foils for autobiographical sketches than fodder for serious discussion about writing. At the end of the book, one has learned a lot more about King as a person, and it was for the most part reasonably enjoyable. But as a writer, he retains his mystery. And on writing itself, while his emphasis on the importance of story was interesting and welcome, I wish there had been more.

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*Note: For those dealing with considerations like word or page limits, like short story and scriptwriters, or who simply don't want to write 1200 page books where nothing much happens for extended stretches, a "write it till you find it" type of approach to writing is also particularly inappropriate.