Writing on Writing

I learned the essentials of writing at the age of twelve, sitting in an iron framed sling style chair, the same one that sits in my room today. I always read from a variety of authors, but when I held a Stephen King novel, something strange happened to me; I gained the ability to read in the dark. But I’ll get back to that point in a moment.

 I fell in love with Steinbeck as soon I read East of Eden. I floated from the pages and my mind took flight. His characters were so real to me that I couldn’t separate my life from theirs. In hindsight, I wish I had sat at my type writer, yes it was a Smith Corona back then filled with good old crackly onion skin, to capture some of my thoughts. But I didn’t see myself as a writer then, only a dreamer.

When Hemingway came into my life, I scoffed up everything he wrote. I was bitterly jealous of Gertrude Stein. I wanted to be the female welcome at his round table in the cafés in Paris. I wanted to have the circle of intellectually stimulating minds sitting around my flat smoking cigarettes and complaining about the lack of pay for their short stories in magazines, as they considered ideas for their next great novels. I wanted a lot of things, but I had not yet realized what I wanted most of all was to become a writer.

So back to Stephen King and my abilities to see in the dark. When I read one of his novels, time would pass, the phone would ring, people would enter my room to pick something up or drop something off. I was oblivious to it all. His hypnotic words created a protective shell in which I read. And just like in the movie Somewherein Time, as long as a penny from my world didn’t enter the story, I remained transfixed. At some point, I would be released from the grips of his tale and look around the room at the darkness that enveloped me. I would glance back at the page I had just been reading and would see nothing but the darkness.

If it were with any other author I would say there was a reasonable explanation; the moon was out and became obscured by clouds, anything, but not with King. After all, he is the writer who didn’t stop at scaring us with the idea of the Boogieman. King is the writer who made us believe in the Boogieman.

So how does he do it? Easy, he’s a magician with words. In the introduction to Night Shift he described how one word is enough to shake a person from his grasp. Just one word has the ability to separate the story from the reader and once that spell is broken, it can’t be fixed. Hence the need for great editors. Their job is to keep your illusion and prevent your audience from leaving before you pull a rabbit from your hat.

Stephen King didn’t stop helping authors with a book he published over thirty years ago. He also wrote a book for us struggling neophytes apply called, On Writing. If you haven’t read it, you should. When I set out to edit my first novel, Daniel’s Story, I was realistic enough to know I had no skills to prepare me for this task. I also had no bank account sufficient to hire someone. And like everything I’ve faced in life before, I gritted my teeth, researched, and taught myself what I hopefully needed to know to get the job done well. And that’s how I found the book On Writing.

When I believed my story had come to a successful end, I was curious. Was it long enough? Was it actually a novel? Something I created sitting at my kitchen table on my laptop and upstairs staying awake through the night typing in bed. Was this actually a novel, not just a rambling, yet interesting story of teens taking on their world? But how could I know? So I picked up a book from my son’s dresser and counted how many words were on a random page and it came to two hundred fifty six. It was a book from the Series of Unfortunate Events, if you are interested. I multiplied the number by the pages in the book and then ran back to my computer. I hit control A, then went to the toolbar and checked word count Daniel’s Story was over sixty thousand words. It was a novel by YA standards and I sat back amazed at myself for what I had accomplished. I was a writer. Never realizing before how important this had always been in my life, I sat frozen, appreciative, awed, and yes, reverent.

Some kids grew up mastering the piano. I struggled at it. Others found their place in sports. I played soccer and ran track, but was second string all the way. Some kids found their strength in the theater. I was better suited for painting sets once they were built. Everyone had a moment in the sun that highlighted their natural gifts. I had but brief moments of being seen the poet, the philosopher, the dreamer of my friends. This wasn’t glorious and it didn’t help me through school or college. It just caused me to flounder through life searching for meaning.

But then everything changed. I was sitting at my computer and I felt that moment in the sun. But now I had to take the novel, (yes a novel. I kept pinching myself through this process) and I had to turn it into something worthy of being published. As I sat reading Stephen King’s words, one message was striking a familiar cord from back in my childhood. He wrote about the moment a reader gets to a page when they can put the book down and take a bathroom break or get a glass of water, and that’s when the author fails. That page should not be there.

He was right of course. He’s mesmerized me throughout my life with his words and that was the secret behind his magic trick. He ripped words out of his stories and pages from his books that weren’t essential and I needed to do the same. I’m thinking the same thing about this blog as I write. There is a lot of deleting I will be doing when I am through and hopefully you aren’t peeing in the bathroom as I write, thinking I should have cut more.

Five thousand words were removed from my story. Five thousand beloved words that I slaved over, believed in and fretted over, I ripped out as easily as weeds from my garden. You probably need to do the same. Because although the words are beautiful and moving and telling, your story can exist without them and that is at the heart of a great writer. Let the story stand on its own. Don’t let words get in the way.