Tag: stephen king

The truth inside the lie

In 2003, Stephen King received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Many in the world of “lit’rachure” were not amused, and a few went all foamy-mouthed bugshit crazy (a pause to imagine many froth-flecked moths batting frantically against a lit window, bump bump flutter flutter bump).

And then Stephen King made his acceptance speech..

The story and the people in it may be make believe but I need to ask myself over and over if I’ve told the truth about the way real people would behave in a similar situation…. We understand that fiction is a lie to begin with. To ignore the truth inside the lie is to sin against the craft, in general, and one’s own work in particular.
 
— Stephen King, accepting the National Book Foundation Medal

I have read everything King has written. He’s one of my favorite writers because in his work I always find joy (and you know I’m big on joy) and hope and truth. I find real people living real lives, and when the monsters come they heighten rather than diminish that reality. The everyday people in King’s work are laid low or made great, found wanting or given a chance for redemption when the monsters come.

And they take me with them. Their bewilderment and fears and unexpected joys in the midst of their own personal armageddons are mine too. I understand their metaphors and their rhythms of speech. They are quintessentially American people, and their stories are plain and visceral and rooted in the deepest layer of the country’s collective psyche in way that, for my money, the “great American authors” do not routinely achieve. Those people are not my writers. They do not speak for me or about me or to me as a reader. Stephen King does.

And when I re-read his speech yesterday, I found him also speaking to me as a writer:

There is a time in the lives of most writers when they are vulnerable, when the vivid dreams and ambitions of childhood seem to pale in the harsh sunlight of what we call the real world. In short, there’s a time when things can go either way.
 
— Stephen King, accepting the National Book Foundation Medal

I had that time fairly recently. I fire-walked my own hopes and fears and other people’s expectations, and now I am in a place where the air is cleaner and the world is bigger for me. I found my truth inside the lie. It sounds like Stephen King found his a long time ago, and good for him.

I’d love to meet him. Not to make forever friends — just for a beer and a burger and a conversation between two writers who are fascinated by the things people will do if given half a chance. I wish that someone who knows him would give him a copy of Dangerous Space and point him to the title story, because I think he’d like the rock ‘n’ roll of it, the everydayness in which Duncan and Mars find their whole world made new by music… I would like something I wrote to put a smile on Stephen King’s face, the way he has so often put a smile on mine.

Horror stories

I have been a Stephen King fan since I was a teenager. I think, at his best, he is one of the all-time masters of story and character. He understands how the smallest moment or seemingly unimportant choice can utterly change a life. He can tell a hell of a story. And no one does a particular kind of American voice better. Stephen King books can scare the shit out of me every time, to the point that I get spooked reading them by myself at night.

Other horror books I love: Ghost Story and Shadowland by Peter Straub, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, Stoker’s Dracula, most all of Poe…

And every once in a while I’ll watch a horror movie. I like Alien, Aliens, Jaws, The Haunting (the 1963 Robert Wise film, not the cringe-inducing Jan de Bont 1999 remake).

All in all, a very short list from a very large field. I stopped appreciating horror when the splatterpunks came along in the 80’s. I’ve read the Books of Blood and the rest of the splattercanon, and you know what? Just don’t like it.

Today I watched 30 Days of Night. Well, I watched about 70% and fast-forwarded through the rest. It wasn’t offensive. It was a smart premise. And the violence was as much suggested as shown — it certainly earns the R rating, but it’s not the linger-lovingly-on-the-violence-in-slow-motion approach that made me turn off Robocop (and please, can someone please help Verhoeven with his issues? It’s getting so I won’t watch a movie with his name on it…).

But in other ways it was too routine to elevate it above the formulaic. A bunch of demographically-varied people get picked off one by one, some because they are stupid and some because they are noble. The nice touch was the ending….

SPOILER ALERT
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… in which the hero realizes that he has to become a monster in order to be able to fight them (they are really strong), so he injects himself with the tainted blood of a victim in order to induce a transformation. He saves his ex-girlfriend and the obligatory orphaned child (yep, same old instant-family routine), and then dies in her arms as the sun finally comes up. No last-minute reprieve.

I wouldn’t watch this movie again, but because it bored me, not because it offended me. And I can certainly be offended. I won’t ever watch the Saw movies or Hostel or Funny Games any of the other torture-porn/let’s-get-sadistic-on-someone’s-ass films that seem to be the new splatterpunk.

If it’s true that horror films help us cathartize (is that a word?) deep cultural fears, allow us to bleed energy out of some personal demons, then maybe it makes some kind of sense that so many of these movies are about random, sadistic violence. The kind of thing any of us are helpless to prevent or to control, that we can only try to survive. Maybe that’s how we’re all feeling about our world and our lives right now. There’s a line I heard that to me is a perfect example, from the new movie The Strangers, in which the heroine asks one of the random masked-into-facelessness strangers, “Why are you doing this to us?” and the stranger says, “Because you were home.” It doesn’t get any more pointed than that.

But I fucking hate those movies. In the worst moments (mine or theirs), I leave them feeling both compartmentalized and complicit in something nasty. I feel flattened. Reduced. I hate the whole story ethic that trivializes human violence by making it “just because” and then making that the center of a story. To me, that’s a rotton core. To me, it’s the same nihilism as the root of splatterpunk — let’s just think of worse and worse things to describe, to witness, to be on some level engaged with, and the first one to blink and turn away is a wuss.

That particular kind of human violence is too frightening and too real to treat that way. I don’t want to see it turned into entertainment, any more than I want to see rape turned into entertainment. But clearly a lot of people do want to see it. And I’m curious why. Anyone who has theories to share (actual theories as opposed to judgment of the audience), I’d really like to hear them. As a storyteller, it’s something I’d like to understand even if I don’t ever want to do it.

I am interested in writing a horror novel someday — but it’ll be more King than Saw. I’d like to explore the kind of scare that seems to be out of vogue right now (typical Eskridge timing) — the fear of the unknown and unknowable, the unexplained, the monsters that scare us because they come from deep within us, or because we are tempted to let them that far in. I hope there will still be a place for that when I get around to it.

What horror films or books have you liked? Can you tell me why? I’m interested in refining my own notions about these things.

What Stephen King says…

…goes double for me.
 

I look for stories that care about my feelings as well as my intellect, and when I find one that is all-out emotionally assaultive… I grab that baby and hold on tight. Do I want something that appeals to my critical nose? Maybe later (and, I admit it, maybe never). What I want to start with is something that comes at me full-bore, like a big hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky. I want the ancient pleasure that probably goes back to the cave: to be blown clean out of myself for a while, as violently as a fighter pilot who pushes the EJECT button in his F-111. I certainly don’t want some fraidy-cat’s writing school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream-of-consciousness bullshit about what Bob Dylan once called “the true meaning of a peach.”
 
— Stephen King, from the Introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2007

Short stories

Kelley:

Recently I have been reading a short story book by Jeffrey Deaver called “Twisted Stories.” Reading the book, and comparing it to similar books I have read by Stephen King and Dean Koontz, leads me to one question I have about short stories.

I like to think I am good at reading character, in people in general. So my question is can a good writer, reverse that type of process, and give a reader a good solid character in a short story?

It’s especially obvious in Deaver’s book that characters take a back seat to get a good shock by the ending. Surely you can manage a short story while still giving your character some depth if movies can do it, it’s a very similar format in pacing and length. Thoughts?

I absolutely believe that three-dimensional, emotionally true characters are possible in short fiction. I would have to put a fork through my forehead if I didn’t (grin), since those are the kinds of stories I try to write.

I agree with you about Deaver and many, many other writers of short fiction, particularly in crime/thriller genres. I’ve read very few short stories in those genres that paid much attention to character. In those stories, the point is the twist at the end, the shock (the big reveal, they call it in screenwriting). Some science fiction is like that too, although much more SF these days tries to focus the “cool idea” through the lens of character. Some people are more successful than others.

And some writers just don’t do short stories very well.

And some writers believe short stories are not to be taken as seriously as longer ones, which makes me exceedingly grumpy. There’s a school of thought that says novels are “better” than short stories because they are longer, more complex, require more carefully blended layers. Et cetera. I think it is certainly true that novels are more work than short stories; they take longer to conceive and longer to write. What pisses me off is the assumption that doing more work automatically makes a work more worthy, and therefore short fiction is automatically lightweight not just in word count, but in intrinsic value. Stories certainly can be lightweight, sure — you’re reading some right now. But they can also be luscious and dense and have as much layering, pound for pound, as a novel; and to create compelling character in 5,000 or 15,000 or 25,000 words is neither an easy nor a less worthy thing to do.

Not sure I agree with you about Stephen King. I think he’s a master of character. There’s no one who does a particular American voice and manner like he does, and with such obvious love for his characters, even the real shitheels. I love his work. If you’re not finding enough character in the shorter stories to interest you, then I highly recommend any of his novella collections (writing as either Stephen King or Richard Bachman): Different Seasons (amazing stuff, including Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and The Body), Four Past Midnight, and The Bachman Books, which are actually short novels but rip along so fast they feel like novellas.

I’d love to hear anyone’s recommendations for short fiction with great characters. Let’s talk.

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And if anyone wants to start a different conversation, just use this link (or the Talk to me here link on the sidebar). It may take me a little time, but I will respond — I love these conversations.

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Edited to add: Jocelyn just turned me on to the short review “where short story collections step into the spotlight.” A brief wander through the site already tells me that there are plenty of collections out there dealing with character-based fiction…. so let’s all go find something good to read.

Also check out their blog.

Small reasons

Kelley said: “Other points of view are more flexible. One of the things I love about Stephen King’s work is his facility in wandering in and out of everyone’s heads, primary and secondary characters, and combining their real-time thoughts with memory, behavior, observation and feeling to paint a complex picture in a few simple strokes. He’s fantastic at creating character.”

Sticking my thoughts into this: I think also what King does so well is motivation. I guess that’s really covered in “creating character” but it’s a distinction that I like to make because so many writers don’t nail what makes people or any other thing such as a dog or a car do what they do as well as he does.

Sly

I totally agree. People hardly ever do things in a psychological vacuum. But often, the reasons are so…. small. So everyday. An accumulation of little wants, small frustrations, bad choices that seem unimportant at the time. Or just the desire to stand for a minute longer with one’s face in the sun, or stop for ice cream. King has a gift for making those things interesting and recognizable, and for picking the ones that matter most in the character’s overall behavior in the story. What his people do, and why, almost always matters later on in the story.

King has such a generosity toward his characters, even the ones we aren’t really meant to like. He’s always willing to inhabit them, to see them from the inside out. I think that’s what makes it possible for the reader to see them too.

What’s literature?

Been a while, but I’m back for a glass of something and some good conversation…

What’s literature? Tough one. For many, I think they can’t get past the boundary that a book has to have been taught in English class — high school or college — in order to be considered literature. Presumably, something has to be read to be considered literature, or maybe it had to have been read at one time. I’m thinking of a quote from the movie “Bullets Over Broadway”, where the pretentious playwright mentor of the hero proudly intones that all of his plays are specifically written to go unproduced. I’m also reminded of my freshman year of college, where my Intro to Literary Method teacher spent a class period talking about the concept of “dramatic literature”, or plays written to be read rather than performed. Then later the same day, my American Musical Theater prof talked about how the concept of “dramatic literature” is a crock — plays have to be performed to be fully realized.

So what does this have to do with literature? I think my point is that writing, in order to be relevant to anyone other than the writer, has to be read. But to be literary, it has to relate to the world. Now, a lot of writing takes place in the world without actually relating to it. Hell, some of Stephen King’s writing is like that. And I’m not talking about just dropping common references — a lot of writing does that as a short cut to engage readers. There’s a feeling to literature that I’m having trouble articulating (obviously). I think a lot of writing is intended to (and succeeds in) activating emotional reactions from its audience, but in a very superficial way, like movies made from video games instead of scripts, or quickie books written based on TV characters. In order to be literary, I think writing (or art in general) has to access emotions in a genuine way. I almost wrote a “lasting” way, but it doesn’t have to last to make an impression.

I guess I think Stephen King’s best work is literary, but no writer is always literary. I think a lot of people think that authors are either always literary or always not. But was Charles Dickens really writing at the top of his game all the time? Was John Steinbeck? Was Jane Austen? The answer should be obvious.

Well, that’s my two cents on literature. Here’s another related question, though, which is implied in some of my comments above: does a work have to be written to be literature? Can a film or a play qualify as literature?

Later, y’all.

Adam Diamond

I’m with your American Musical Theatre professor on this one. Strictures of form are essential. Goethe said, “In the limitations the master shows his mastery.” I do think that “literature” is a specific term that refers to prose or poetry, so I don’t think plays or films are literature, but the best ones embody the same qualities as the best books –” a good story, well told, about characters who are true even if they aren’t real.

Art is not theory, it’s connection. It’s not about thinking, it’s about doing. It’s an interaction between people, across a spectrum of immediacy that ranges from live on stage to words or images whose creators are no more than mulch and memory. When it comes to fiction, I’m not interested in realigning the post-modern literary paradigm through radical re-interpretation of established form. Blech. I want a good story, well told, with some sort of resonance and meaning that I can connect with. I want it to be particular, the way our tastes and experiences and notions of ourselves are particular. That’s part of my definition of good writing. But do we really need three hundred pages of ten-dollar words and tortured metaphors to get there? I don’t think so.

I recently judged a writing competition with two other writers. One referred to himself as a noir mystery writer, the other as a literary writer. We had an interesting disagreement about what should constitute a winning entry, and eventually found ourselves on opposite sides of the border. The entry that these writers preferred was controlled and structured and obeyed all the rules of reasonable prose, and it was boring. Nothing happened. All telling, no showing. An adjective or two for every noun, an adverb for every verb. A theme constructed in crystalline sentences and unconvincing dialogue. I would rather pound my head against a brick wall than read a whole book of that stuff. But they liked it because it was “good writing.”

We disagreed not so much about what good prose is, but what it does. I agree with you, Adam, at heart it’s about emotional truth (which is how I’m paraphrasing your comments, let me know if that’s not right). I’m not sure it’s possible to successfully express precise emotional truth in bad prose, but I am sure that it’s possible to write beautiful prose without heart, without a human center.

So much of what is pointed out as “literary” prose seems to me to be almost a purely intellectual exercise in vocabulary and structure and style. All these things are necessary, but they are tools, not substance. A novel shouldn’t be “about” voice or theme. Yeesh. It should be language in service of story. It should create people the reader can connect with in some way, and things should happen to these people that matter to them, and to us.

And of course there are many literary novels that do exactly this. I think my biggest grump comes with the idea that genre, by definition, cannot be literary in this way. Genre can be crap sure, and it can also be literature –” but try getting the literary establishment to think so. It was interesting at the judging meeting. Everyone was comparing writing experience, seeing who could pee highest up the wall. The New York Times Notable Book thing is a clear contender in this regard, and the LW’s eyebrows went up a notch when I mentioned it. Then he looked at the book. “Oh,” he said. “Science fiction.”