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and if you give him ten pages of your time,
he's got you hooked for another hundred. Easy. I think he could
even turn the Los Angeles phone book into a pageturner, if you
gave him a couple hours with an editing pencil. (King's dependably
strong storytelling skills are at least partly the reason he's
managed to remain an A-list writer for a quarter of a century,
even when his books' plots have sometimes read like King parodies.)
But what is autobiography doing in a book
about writing? Simple: King thought it might be useful to see
how at least one successful writer began. It's undoubtedly heartening
for young, unpublished writers to see how unnoticed and downright
poor King was for years, and how swiftly the paperback rights
to his first novel, Carrie (they sold for $400,000), swooped
him out of teaching high school English. And it goes without
saying, of course, that King's myriad fans will find these autobiographical
pages to be informative and fun.
The heavy-duty talk about writing doesn't
come until more than a hundred pages into the text, and it is,
through little fault of its own, the least engaging of the book's
three sections. (Damn that storytelling ability!) King's goal,
he writes, is to help "make a good writer out of a merely
competent one." (Sadly, bad writers will remain bad, no
matter what they try, in King's opinion, and a good writer simply
can't be made great through instruction. Great writers, he opines,
are "divine accidents.") Many of the technical issues
King goes over here can be found readily in such books as Strunk
and White's The Elements of Style (to which King refers
frequently), and King does little to make them any more engaging,
frankly. Perhaps more troubling, he sometimes assumes too little
of his audience and writes beneath his obvious intelligence,
as we can see in this passage:
If in school, you ever studied the symbolism
of the color white in Moby-Dick or Hawthorne's symbolic
use of the forest in such stories as "Young Goodman Brown"
and came away from those classes feeling like a stupidnik, you
may even now be backing off with your hands raised protectively
in front of you, shaking your head and saying gee, no thanks,
I gave at the office.
This middle section isn't without its appeal,
though. Some of its best passages reveal how King developed his
own manuscripts, letting characters develop naturally and rendering
his themes more complex in the second drafts, and it gives writers
a wonderful opportunity to see King's flexibility with a developing
story as well as showing us his decidedly intelligent discipline
in the rewrite phases of a book.
King was halfway through writing this book
when he was struck by a van while walking on the side of the
road near his summer home. In the final section of On Writing,
he tells--beautifully--how the accident happened, and what treatments
followed. His description of the van driver--"His look,
as he sits on his rock with his cane drawn across his lap, is
one of pleasant commiseration: Ain't the two of us just had
the shittiest luck?"--is perfect, and we can't help
feeling an empathic need to throttle the man with his own cane
on King's behalf (if he were still alive, that is; the van driver
was found dead from apparently natural causes in his house on
September 22nd):
Help is on the way,
I think, and that's probably good because I've been in a hell
of an accident. I'm lying in the ditch and there's blood all
over my face and my right leg hurts. I look down and see something
I don't like: my lap now appears to be on sideways, as if my
whole lower body had been wrenched half a turn to the right.
I look back up at the man with the cane and say, "Please
tell me it's just dislocated."
"Nah," he says. Like his face, his
voice is cheery, only mildly interested. He could be watching
all this on TV while he noshes on one of those Marzes-bars. "It's
broken in five I'd say maybe six places."
"I'm sorry," I tell him--God knows
why--and then I'm gone again for a little while. It isn't like
blacking out; it's more as if the film of memory has been spliced
here and there.
As it turns out, the driver was wrong--King's
leg was broken in at least nine places (the orthopedic
surgeon told King that the region below his right knee was "so
many marbles in a sock" after the accident). In addition,
King's right hip was fractured, his spine was chipped in eight
places, four ribs were broken, the cut on his scalp from hitting
the van's windshield took twenty or thirty stitches to close,
and one of his lungs collapsed in the helicopter ride to the
hospital.
King stayed in the hospital for three weeks
and underwent a series of extensive surgical operations (there
were five procedures just for his leg). Miraculously, two weeks
after he went home, King began writing again--on this new book.
(Hey, he did say a writer's life is a matter of reading
a lot and writing a lot, right?) He had begun the book in late
1997, he writes, but he had set it aside because "Writing
fiction was almost as much fun as it had ever been, but every
word of the nonfiction book was a kind of torture." The
first five hundred words "were uniquely terrifying,"
King writes of his first writing session after the accident,
and "There was no sense of exhilaration, no buzz--not that
day--but there was a sense of accomplishment that was almost
as good." Writing didn't save him, King admits (his surgeon's
skill and his wife's love did, he says), but it did make his
life "a brighter and more pleasant place."
On Writing is
a mixed bag, much of it remarkably good and some of it not quite
so enthralling. I'm not convinced that it works as a single,
whole book, but it's a great, often moving ride. If you're holding
out for more monsters, though, never fear: King tells us in On
Writing that he's got an unfinished novel (left in a desk
drawer as a completed first draft before the accident) that he's
getting back to now that On Writing is done. The subject:
an alien "machine" that looks like a Buick Special
from the late 1950s "sometimes reaches out and swallows
people whole."
Gulp.
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