On Writing

 

1978 was the year I discovered the funniest book I’d ever read, and also the scariest. The father of my friend Chris Rosburg really enjoyed smoking and reading, so he decided to open a store called Books & Briars. It was a bookstore with a tobacco counter, or a tobacconist with a whole lot of books. I dropped in regularly to chat with Chris. I’d help him by pointing out that A Child’s Garden of Grass did not belong in the gardening section, and he’d share the latest sick jokes. (“What has fifty-eight legs and flies? John Gacy’s crawl space.”) From the stacks I discovered the extremely funny book, and the extremely scary one. I am not claiming either one is its category’s superlative, only that at the time I read them, I laughed harder, or shuddered more, than I have with any books before or since. Things change, and I doubt either book would impress me as much today. When I was twelve, I read The Catcher In the Rye, and Atlas Shrugged. I thought they were two of the best novels ever written. I reread both when I was sixteen, and boy, had my opinion changed!

 

The funniest book was The Water-Method Man. I don’t remember much more about it than the title being a reference to an old treatment for venereal disease. It’s author, John Irving, had written three more books by that point, his newest, The World According to Garp, would make him famous. Because I enjoyed The Water-Method Man I bought and read the others, and a few years later The Hotel New Hampshire, then quit him for years. I had decided that he was writing the same book over and over, and I no longer needed to see how he’d rework it.

 

The scariest book was The Shining. I am not an avid reader of horror. I’ve certainly read the odd Lovecraft or Bloch, but I don’t itch for the newest Dean Koontz. The Shining was an impulse buy – it looked like it might be good – and I didn’t expect it to really scare me. There was something about it that really did. It’s a haunted house story, nothing new about that. But the idea that we were seeing the ghosts through the eyes of a five-year-old, and that he had paranormal abilities, so when he encountered them what seemed dim and whispery to normal folk were for him blazing images, the volume turned up to eleven, made it very intense. When the kid starts blasting out an extrasensory cry for help, and it’s so powerful that Hallorann, two thousand miles away in Florida, drives off the road, I was riveted.

 

Like Irving, I hunted up King’s other books. He’d published two by then, Carrie and Salem’s Lot. More were coming, and I kept buying. He held me as a reader a lot longer than John Irving did. Still, there came a point where I grew tired of King. It happens, even with the best of them. King was never the best, but parts of him are very good. In his book On Writing he lumps himself with three other writers who were at the time he wrote among the biggest sellers in the market. Two of them are now dead: Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy. John Grisham is still around, and still busy, as is King. Of the four King is far and away the best writer. He says in On Writing that what makes writers successful is their ability to tell the truth. I agree only to a limited extent. What makes all of those four extraordinarily successful is that at some level they all channel their inner twelve-year-old boy.

It's a thing I first observed with King, and the insight came while reading The Body, a novella famously adapted as the movie Stand By Me. The characters in the story are twelve-year-old boys. (If they are eleven, or fourteen, or anything other than twelve, you may let me know care of the I Don’t Give a Shit Foundation.) During their quest to go see a dead body, they take a break while one of them tells the others a story. The story is about a fat kid who is picked upon. There are a lot of those in King’s stories; enough that I wonder if Little Stevie was once a kid with a weight problem. This particular victim turns the tables at a fair. He enters a pie-eating contest, gorges on blueberry pies while the crowd taunts him for being a fat pig, and then gets his revenge by vomiting. Projectile vomiting! Blueberry vomiting! Which causes chain-reaction vomiting so copious it threatens to flood the fairgrounds and drown the town. The other kids love that story! It is the sort of story a twelve-year-old boy would love. Me, I don’t love it. But readers did. The same sort of audience that saw a campfire surrounded by bean-eating cowboys and made Blazing Saddles a hit made books with scenes like those bestsellers.

 

Stephen King is the Steven Spielberg of writers! Spielberg has tried with mixed results to make “grown up” movies, but his greatest successes have come with movies that a young boy would love. (One of his biggest hits, Jurassic Park, is a movie about dinosaurs written by Stephen King’s peer, Michael Crichton.) Spielberg’s most recent movie, Meet the Fabelmans, is a semi-autographical story about a young boy who shows technical brilliance while making movies whose heart and soul are childish: about crashing trains; kids with their own friend from outer space; or cliched war stories. Steven Spielberg combines that juvenile sensibility with impressive technical accomplishment. Stephen King also combines a juvenile sensibility with amazing technique.

 

It's one thing to understand where he is coming from, and recognize that while he will never write The Great Gatsby or Grapes of Wrath, he has written, and will write, very satisfying books which sell many more copies than either of those sold when they were first published. It is another to figure out how to channel it. I doubt anyone can tell us, even the man himself. What he can tell us is about his technique. That’s what he does in On Writing.

 

I just wish he offered more. Most of King’s advice is bog standard. Turn to any book about writing by a writer and they will tell you to: Plant your ass in a chair every day; Eliminate excess words; Consult a good style manual; Read a lot. King tells it as well as anyone, but there is much he might have said. Perhaps like a good magician, he did not want to reveal the actual mechanics of his tricks. What sorts of things do I wish he revealed? Here follow a few.

 

The short and the long of it.  My brother had a friend, Harris from Paris, who lived in Tokyo. Like many itinerants, Harris discovered the gig economy before it was called that. One of the ways he made money was writing copy for product inserts. “Suppose you are writing copy for a leather case made to hold a Nikon camera, what is your headline?” My brother suggested: “The Nikon Camera Case.”

“Try again,” said Harris. “Not enough words.”

“The … Nikon Camera Case, Made of Rich Brown Leather?”

“No good! The text itself should be two or three thousand words, and the headline at least two or three hundred.”

“That’s absurd!”

“They pay fifty cents a word for the copy, and a buck a word for the headline.”

 

The reason nineteenth century novels were so massive was often because they began as serials, the authors being paid by the word. The Japanese manufacturers felt their customers expected more than a blurb, and paid for excess. Nineteenth century readers, too, wanted their money’s worth. Tastes change. They changed rapidly in the 20^th century. But even before Ernest Hemingway revolutionized writing, others pointed the way. Mark Twain was a pathfinder when he picked up his tomahawk and scalped James Fenimore Cooper. “Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.” Twain then tells us that there are “Nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two. In ‘Deerslayer’ Cooper violated eighteen of them.” He lists them; here is number fourteen: “Eschew surplusage.” I.e.: Keep it short.

 

Beginnings writers seldom have a problem with writing too short. Telling them to eschew surplusage is safe advice, as most don’t eschew, they chew, gobbling surplusage like a herd of starving cows. What hardly anyone goes on to talk about is when something needs to be long.

 

Consider this sentence: The panther ran through the jungle. Even a committee comprising William Strunk, Jr., Elwyn Brooks White, Ernest Miller Hemingway, and the panther herself, can find nothing wrong with that sentence. Now consider this one: The maharajah’s caravan moved through jungle, a caravan of a size not seen since the days of the maharajah’s great-grandfather: fifty elephants, each with a howdah made of teak carved by artisans in the distant past, with scenes of military triumphs, of timeless love affairs, or in honor of the gods; each elephant led by a mahout, and flanked by six soldiers, clad in silk uniforms with shining scimitars tucked in their cummerbunds, and peacock feathers jutting from their turbans; trailing the elephants a retinue afoot, three thousand five hundred strong; behind them the ox-drawn wagons, bearing provisions for the morrow’s festivities; all parading through the jungle, inexorably, inexorably, that is, until the caravan came to an abrupt halt. The maharani had dropped her iPhone.

 

Sure, the sentence is a shaggy dog story setting up its punchline, but even without the joke at the end, it needs to be long. Caravans do not “run through the jungle.”

Going back to short sentences, there is more to it than most let on. “The panther ran through the jungle.” Why? Perhaps she is hunting. Among a panther’s prey are warthogs, gazelles, and impalas. The writer chose to feature the panther, but the sentence could have featured its prey. I offered three choices, which might you favor? The warthog? Warthogs can run. They are quite fast, capable of running at thirty miles an hour. But “the warthog ran through the jungle” sounds absurd. You almost have to be writing humor, to choose the warthog. “The gazelle ran through the jungle” works. Gazelles run; it sounds fine. The impala, though, is exotic. There’s an animal worth chasing! Writing the right short sentence can be more difficult than writing a long one!

 

The Ins and Outs of Ins and Outs. Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code sold 80 million copies. Coincidentally, that’s how many chapters are in the book. The hero, Robert Langdon, can’t go two pages, tops, before a shot rings out, a car spins out of control, lightning strikes, he falls through a trap door, or a librarian tells him the library is closing, sometimes all of them at once. Not every chapter needs a cliffhanger, but if you are writing thrillers, as King does, you want readers turning pages to see what happens next. There are many ways to handle this, but a useful tip is to think of how transitions are done in movies.

As the climax approaches in Silence of the Lambs, Clarice is going to interview a witness, when she gets the good news from her boss, Jack Crawford: they have located Buffalo Bill. They are surrounding his house as Jack speaks to her on the phone. We see teams of armed agents moving into position. Meanwhile, in his basement, the serial killer is arguing with his victim, who has trapped his dog in the pit. His doorbell rings upstairs. The agents have the house surrounded by now, and the team on the porch is ringing the bell. The killer goes upstairs to see who is at the door. The agents burst through the door, and sweep through the rooms of the house. It’s empty! They are at the wrong house. Meanwhile, the killer opens his door, and there is unsuspecting Clarice, mentally disarmed because she “knows” Crawford’s team is hundreds of miles away, arresting the killer.

 

I was reminded of that scene recently while reading a thriller by Mick Herron. (If you haven’t discovered Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series, do yourself a favor and check them out.) Herron uses the “wrong doorbell” trick, albeit in reverse. We know the killers are at a door, and the doorbell rings at a house where our unsuspecting heroes are waiting for a pizza delivery. End of chapter. This time it’s the killers at the wrong house. For the moment. The doorbell will ring again!

 

Some rules on breaking the rules. If you have read Peanuts, you’ve seen Snoopy sitting on top of his dog house, pounding away at a typewriter, beginning a story, always with the same words: “It was a dark and stormy night.” Where’d he get them?

Sir Edward George Earl Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1^st Baron Lytton, was a British politician and writer. Hugely popular in the early and middle nineteenth century, at least one of his books, The Last Days of Pompeii, was still being read in the twentieth. In 1830 he published a novel, Clark Clifford, whose first seven words were; “It was a dark and stormy night …” Thanks to Snoopy as much as anyone, Bulwer-Lytton, and those words in particular, are synonymous with bad writing. There is an annual Bulwer-Lytton contest where people try to write the worst opening.

 

Let’s reinforce it. Elmore Leonard, one of the most prolific and successful authors of our times, offered ten rules for writing. The very first rule is: Never open a book with the weather. Never. No dark and stormy nights, not even bright and sunny afternoons. Sorry, Sherlock, I guess London fog can dry up and blow away, or at least creep off to the middle of the book on little cat feet.

 

What then to make of this?

The rain came, and should have washed down the streets.   Falling, it should have captured the particles of dust, the fog of auto exhaust, the reek from stray fires smoldering in piles of garbage, tackled them all, and dragged them to earth.   It should have washed the grime and peeling paint down the walls of the buildings.   It should have swept all the discarded newspapers and crushed cigarette butts and rotting banana peels from the sidewalks, swept everything into the gutter, so the city was clean and fresh, renewed.   Instead, the rain came too fast.   The streets filled with water faster than the antiquated sewers could cope.   They backed up like a plugged toilet, so that pedestrians could expect wet tissue paper and dog turds plastered to their calves.   In Manila, even the rain didn’t work right.

That’s the opening paragraph of my novel The Battered Butterfly. Not only am I opening a novel with the weather, but while I don’t use the actual words “dark and stormy night,” it’s apparent the night is dark and stormy. I think it works, though you as reader are always free to disagree.

Why do I think so? Well, for one, it isn’t really about the weather, it’s about Manila. When I decided I wanted to write about the Philippines, in particular the Ermita neighborhood of Manila, writing a hard-boiled, picaresque crime novel felt right. The place had everything; sex, violence, corruption. It was the embodiment of noir. For his fifth labor, Hercules has to clean out the stables of King Augeus, stables housing three thousand head of cattle, stables which haven’t been washed for thirty years. Hercules reroutes a pair of rivers, which does the trick. Here I open up the heavens, and the deluge fails. No one is cleaning this place.

Beyond that, there is a bit of foreshadowing, the storm anticipating the storm of violence about to be unleashed. Also, we are about to meet the hero, Lefty Markowitz. Lefty is not the narrator of the novel, but the last sentence in the paragraph, “In Manila, even the rain didn’t work right,” echoes his voice. It establishes the tone of the book, cynical and ironic.

Did I think of all that when I wrote it? No, it just felt right at the time. Only later did I try to analyse it. You are your own reader, and should ask yourself when reading what you’ve written if it sounds like something you would enjoy reading if someone else had written it.

Those are some topics I wish King covered. He didn’t, but few of them do. Lots of writers have written about writing. It’s funny that books by writers about writing sell as well as they do. Writing is a craft. So are pottery and cabinetmaking, but no one reads books on those for fun and profit. Most people know that they will never become the next Patti Warashina, or George Heppelwhite, but they think there is a chance they could be the next Dan Brown, John Grisham, or Stephen King. When a Stephen King sets out to write about the craft, he knows that most readers are seeking a little bit of advice, and a lot of entertainment.

What sort of entertainment? Most books on writing by famous writers turn out to be memoirs. Lawrence Block has written at least five books on writing, his output helped by his having done a column for Writers Digest for many years. All of his books have plenty of biographical detail, despite Block never having done much of anything except write. King at least held a few day jobs, but Block dropped out of college to write full time, and never looked back. William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade, a “must read’ for aspiring screenwriters, is another memoir disguised as a How To. Having worked in film he has some impressive gossip. Even Charlie Kaufman’s movie Adaptation is sort of a “how to write a screenplay,” though that’s about like saying the Moby Dick is about “how to go fishing.”

King gives us an autobiography which takes us through the sale of the paperback rights to Carrie. Raised by a single mom, a kid who loved E.C. comics and movies like I Was a Teenage Werewolf, by the time he was grown he and his family were living in a trailer, while he taught school, and sent stories to men’s magazines. Then—Bang!—four hundred thousand dollars (of which he got half), and bye, bye trailer.

That’s the point when he began stockpiling impressive celebrity gossip. So many of his books have been filmed he could elbow Kevin Bacon aside with Five Degrees of Stephen King. Instead, it’s the point where he turns to the craft of writing, nominally “How I Do It.” Then to fill out the book he gives an account of his accident and its aftermath. It reads like a Stephen King story. He was creamed while walking along the shoulder of the road by a guy who wanted: “’Some of those Marzes bars they have up in the store’ … It occurs to me I have nearly been killed by a character right out of one of my own novels.”

To the above he adds a section showing his edits to a story, useful to writers, and a preview of a work then in progress. And a list of books he’d read in the past few years. Subsequent additions added more lists of books, and for the 20^th anniversary addition, a pair of articles by his sons. Even the book list is interesting. He is evidently not a fast reader. (He says as much.) He lists about one hundred books which he calls the best of the previous four years. Two subsequent lists each add around eighty more, each read over the course of a decade. Most are fiction, and what I found most interesting were the ones I’d expect him to have read when he was younger. Perhaps he did. Or, perhaps not. It’s almost impossible to imagine him not getting around to To Kill A Mockingbird until the late nineties. The Adventures of Augie March and War and Peace are heavier works usually read, if at all, by people closer to their college days. Then again, I first read both within the last ten years, so why not King?

Overall, it’s a good book. Reading it won’t turn you into a bestselling author. If that turns lies ahead, you are the one who must do the steering. But it will entertain you, and if you plan to do any writing, his advice will help.