Tag: stephen king

Reader’s Corner: King & Riordan

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When I was a kid, I used to read several books at a time. I blame this on my home school education,  tv was a limited amusement, and that we used to belong to the Pizza Hut reading program: read x number of books and you get a free single-serving pizza.

I would read books that were beneath my reading level so I could chow through them in a single day, satisfactorily log it, and then read another one. Normally, I was reading other books that were not considered pizza fodder, though I took great satisfaction in logging those too.

Then I grew up. Got a major case of The Depression, and stopped reading!

I know, what a bummer.

I’ve actually been reading again for a while but not like I used to. Not like I did as a kid.

I’ve been starting small, again reading books below my age. For example, my coworker gave me the Percy Jackson books for Christmas. You’ll have these read over the weekend, right? She asked me.

Uhhhhhhh, I said, very intelligently.

To be honest, I was feeling the pressure. My mom had also given me two books that she wanted me to read, one of which was sitting on my shelf for over a month, the other languishing in my kindle for even longer. I also had my own list of to-reads which I had yet to get to–Amazon asks me how many stars I want to rate a book I’ve purchased but yet to read, and the guilt sets in.

I did not have the Percy books read over the weekend, but I did go through them at a good pace despite working full time, writing, being dog tired, and reading other projects.

Yes, I am back to reading multiple books at a time!

The primary book that I read while reading Percy Jackson was Joyland by Steven King. I chose to read Joyland to expand my genre horizons beyond science fiction and fantasy.

I consumed Joyland in a day and a half. Stephen King is a pretty good writer, obviously. His On Writing was one of the first books I read about the craft, though my thoughts are mixed on it now as an adult. I really enjoyed Firestarter, but couldn’t get into some of his more “heavier” stuff. Basically, I don’t read a lot of Stephen King for several reasons, and I started IT though stopped when I discovered what happens at the end of the novel.

I’ve never read any of Rick Riordan’s work before and, even though they are different genres written for different audiences, I couldn’t help but compare the two to each other craftwise.

One of the things I immediately noticed about Joyland was that it was not structured into chapters. The other thing I noticed is that, even though I could remember what happened as I was reading, the drama was written so smoothly it was sliding melted butter over bread. It’s the juxtaposition of feeling where you remember what happened–but you also don’t. The same sort of feel when you try to remember exactly what filled your hours on a weekend, but you can’t. The day was there, and it wasn’t. There’s just the feeling you had–that it was great or good or satisfying or bad.

I’ve always had this feeling when I’m immersed in a well written book. It reminds me of the feeling I get when I’m trying to write: how am I going to fill these pages when hardly anything is happening, when the plot is a slow boil? And here is Stephen King doing just that, nearly effortlessly.

I’m not sure if I’m explaining it right. Maybe if I finally bring in my point about Percy Jackson:

With Percy Jackson, I have the opposite feeling. I remember what fills the page because it feels very much like a video game. Each obstacle is like a punctuation mark. Again, this is probably because this is aimed at a (much) younger audience than myself.

But it also got me thinking about different writing styles, and the audience. Of course, you’re going to be changing your form and style as necessary, but I couldn’t help but feeling that my most mature writing is more like Riordan’s than King’s.

And there really is nothing wrong with that! But, especially since I am not writing for a younger generation, I want my writing to read more like King’s. Not in his voice, just the way people read the words without noticing the plot structure or other writing devices because they are so well hidden in the actual story.

It’s something that I’ll be aiming for in the coming months.

Reading Corner: On Writing by Stephen King

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I finished reading On Writing by Stephen King for the second time of my life. The first time I read it I was an eager adolescent–a teenager I believe–who wanted to be a writer more than anything in the whole world.

I don’t know what happened after I finished reading it for the first time. I know that crushing depression and a bewildering experience with my professor in my college’s creative writing program made it difficult for me to write. I didn’t write for years after I graduated college due to one thing or another, and when I did start writing again, it was fanfiction. I have an account somewhere on the internet that documents over 100 works of fanfiction, some of them over fifty thousand words.

I don’t think Stephen King would have much use for fanfiction, but for me it helped rekindle not so much love but at least a feeling towards writing again.

And it had been such a long time since I had felt anything towards writing that I welcomed it, and hung on to it, and kept writing it even though I didn’t write the stuff that got a lot of notes and attention from the fandom corners in which I lurked.

Stephen King talks a lot about reading and writing daily. I’m ashamed to say that I still don’t write every day. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t read seventy to eighty books every year. I read still, but not a lot, and again not every day. Stephen King is very hard on television and I do tend to veg in front of netflix after a long day’s work. I find it difficult to wake up in the mornings and no matter how determined I am to Accomplish Things and Write Stuff in the mornings, it rarely happens.

I’ve been vaguely aware of this untenable state of affairs for a while now. Re-reading King’s words of wisdom was simply a fog horn telling me to stop diddling around on the internet and to actually Do Something.

In the latter pages of this book, Stephen King talks about the joy of writing, and how he never did it for the paycheck. I don’t have that joy. I haven’t had fun playing around with words for a long time. I want to survive on my writing, and I don’t want to go back to my job because working is like being in Azkaban.

So I think first and foremost I need to find that joy again as well.

I don’t know how I’ll do that, but I do know that I won’t find it by waiting for it to come to me. I know that I enjoy writing. Even when I don’t enjoy it until I start (much like cardiovascular activities), eventually I get in the zone and I feel love for the words I’m putting on the page, and I love the way I’ve put them together, and I love writing.

So I know it’s there. It just needs to be rekindled. It’s been untended for far too long–first because of brain and heart sickness, and then discouragement and the lack of ability to tell a story–to even think of a story.

Stephen King said that he had an Ideal Reader in mind, someone you wrote for. I don’t think I have one of those yet. My Mom and my Dad are good people but there is a lot of bad stuff between my mom that I don’t feel comfortable having her be my ideal Reader. Also, she doesn’t have the time and has her own circle of people towards whom she bears emotional responsibility.

Stephen King’s Ideal Reader is his wife but I have been single for eight years and I do not see that changing anytime soon.

I can’t let not having an Ideal Reader stop me. I know that writers don’t do well alone–that they do need a community of some sort.

So in addition to recommitting myself to rekindling that joy, I am also going to try to make a friend to be my Ideal Reader. And maybe I can be their Ideal Reader in return–anything could happen.

My isolation in terms of friendships is not good for my writing. Staying at home all the time minus trips to the movie theater, is not good for my writing. That needs to change as well. One thing that stuck in my head when reading this memoir is that Stephen King’s ideas for a novel came when he was out doing something–even something as mundane as work or driving up a highway. Even I’ve experienced this. My venture to Utah’s salt flats have shaped the background of two stories, even if I did end up putting them away for later.

Despite not having read hardly any of Stephen King’s works (I think I’ve only read Firestarter), I am grateful for this call to action, and I definitely plan to act on it. I do recall that there is a live poetry reading at a nearby coffee shop every Saturday evening that might make for a good starting place.