This Year, I’m Thankful for Stephen King

During my years of martial arts obsession, I learned an old Chinese proverb about kung fu. The student’s understanding evolves in three stages.

Before I knew kung fu, a punch was just a punch, and a kick was just a kick.

As I learned kung fu, a punch was no longer just a punch, and a kick was no longer just a kick.

Now that I know kung fu, a punch is just a punch, and a kick is just a kick.

Over the past year, I have spent my spare moments learning the craft of writing long fiction. Put me in kung fu category #2 where fiction writing is concerned.

Long fiction is hard. Bloody hard. I think that I began my fiction pursuit due to my affinity for sculpting prose. I love words. I used to recite my fledgling vocabulary from the crib, repeating single words while experimenting with different inflections. My love of prose grew naturally from this infant stem. Alas, prose merely begins the discussion. The craft of long fiction includes mastery of so many facets: overall structure, point of view, narrative voice, character development, the tension of character conflict, scene crafting, etc.

Beyond the facets of mere category, I became aware of the wars of purity and method. The Plotters/Planners, armed with pre-planning and detailed outlines, stand arrayed against the Organics/”Pantsers”, who harness the unfolding energies of instinctual story weaving. Dogma and the dogmatic reappear, even in the world of fiction. Should I have been surprised? Religion indeed spawns dogma. But then, fiction did give birth to religion. I chuckled at being tripwired by the tautology. Again. Fiction spawns dogma, now as ever. Make-believe must be gotten right.

Nevertheless, time slowed as those stiff headwinds came pouring from the open doorway of new knowledge. They coiled themselves into a tidy little vortex. My story fell prey to a newly cluttered mind, which pulled in all directions well enough to make progress in none. Paranoia seeped through the crevices of my splintered vision. When you take the necessary steps to get educated about fiction, you realize just how easily you can get it wrong. Yes, you can indeed invest an enormous amount of time on your fiction and still write shit.

Shit comes in many aromas, ranging from the deeply unreadable to the cheaply cliche. Sitting at the keyboard and scenting inevitable traces of bile, I did the natural thing. I began to edit as I wrote. And to re-edit. So it went, until at last the groan of disintegrating gears and the hiss of overheating coils drowned out the last vestiges of the actual story.  A terribly common tale, I’ve come to learn.

Enter Stephen King. Many people naturally associate Stephen King with ‘horror stories’.  (No, I’m not planning to write a horror novel; my intentions orbit around a disturbing little tale of faith, revelation, and the nature of our minds.) Despite this popular but flat categorization, King has written a broad range of fiction, including dramas like Stand by Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Green Mile.  I must confess to never having read a single book by  King, until I picked up his excellent memoir, On Writing.

His advice helps to quiet those headwinds and to refocus the writer’s mind on doing what needs doing. It may take sheer speed to outrun self-doubt. Or it may take noseplugs to get through what Anne Lamott calls the “shitty first draft”. The bottom line remains simple. Skill and craft always arise the same way: practice. Miles on the odometer. Time and attempts and failure. You  have to write, as simple as that sounds. You have to let the story be the boss. You have to get it down, and editing in situ can retard that effort.

I have enjoyed the past year’s dive into the craft of long fiction. Writing now fascinates me in richer colors. The mind splintering and confusion have sown good seed. But this Thanksgiving, I would have to say that I’m particularly thankful for Stephen King, whose advice was one half of getting me off the dime.

Mr. Olivetti was the other half.

To be continued…