Review 85: On Writing

On Writing by Stephen King

When I was in college, I sent a letter to Stephen King. It was the first letter I'd ever sent to an author - to any famous person, as far as I can recall - and I did my best to not sound completely fannish in it. I told him that I really liked his work, especially The Stand, and how I looked forward to seeing how other books came out, The Dark Tower series in particular. As far as I can remember, I kept my head. I was cool.

But I also did what I reckon many people do when they write to their favorite authors - I told him that I enjoyed writing as well, and I hoped I could be an author someday. In retrospect, I imagine King gets a lot of these letters, and after I'd sent it, I figured that was my stupid fanboy move. I knew what I wanted to happen next - I'd get a call from Stephen King who says, "You know, judging from the well-written letter you sent me, I would like to see an example of your fiction," and so I'd send him the short story I was working on and he'd write back and say, "You're BRILLIANT! I'm going to devote my remaining days to seeing that you become a writer of greatness! Stick with me, kid, and the world is your oyster!"

The advantage I have over other people with overactive imaginations is that I know when mine is bullshitting me. Honestly, I figured I'd never hear from him at all.

On that point, at least, I was wrong.

A few weeks later, I got a letter from none other than Stephen King himself! Included was a card, on which he thanked me for my kind words about his work, as well as a couple of photocopies of articles he had done about writing. I figure he had a whole stack of these, ready to send to every prospective writer out there, but it meant a lot to me that he had taken the time. The articles talked about how he wrote, and the advice he always gave to budding writers.

I figure he must have gotten a lot of letters like mine, because he eventually wrote this book. In it is nearly everything he knows about how to write well. I figure that he hoped people would stop asking when he published it, though I doubt people did. Those who want to be writers - and you can ask any published writer about this - believe that there's a Secret to getting published. That there's some special club of writers and agents and publishers who all know each other and in order to get in you have to go to live with John Scalzi and become his personal cat waxer for a year.

But it ain't so. What those who are already in publishing will tell you is that the best way to get a story published is to write a great story. Do that, and your chances of success are much improved.

How, then, do you write a great story? All King can tell us - all any writer can tell us - is how he does it.

The first of the book is his Curriculum Vitae, in which he tells us about how he became a writer. It's not a particularly surprising story, really. He gives us his memories of writing as a child, from knock-offs of horror comics to original works of horror and fantasy. The stories he tells, the memories that he relays to us show that he was interested in writing all his life, and the desire to write - no, the need to write - was something that has always been with him.

It follows him through his days as a neophyte novelist, breaking into the big time with the sale of Carrie, and how the personal and financial success he gained from that propelled him to write more and better. And, of course, there were the Dark Days. The drugs and the alcohol, the books he can't remember writing and the days he can't remember drinking through. He's sober now, of course, but this is a warning - one of many peppered throughout the book: beware the Writers' Traps. The illusion that you must be a drunk, a la Hemingway, to be a good writer, is one. He fell for it and, fortunately for us, he climbed his way out again.

Much like any trade, skill in writing is built by experience, and having the faith that you have something worth saying to the world. But even just having something to say and an unshakable faith won't make you a good writer, so the second part of the book is a bit more practical: how do you make a story? Well, much like any trade, you need your tools. You need your grammar and structure and vocabulary so that you can present your ideas in a comprehensible form. You need your metaphor and simile, so that you're not being too obvious in what you want to say. You need your symbolism, description and characterization, foreshadowing and nuance and dialog. But what you need the most is practice, patience and faith.

He walks through the steps of composition, character creation, and coming up with the essential through-line of your story. He gives us his own pet peeves as a writer (he hates adverbs passionately and says that the passive voice is to be avoided at all cost) and exhorts us to read as many different writers as we can. He gives us the benefit of his years of experience and the things he has learned, and says to us, "Now you try."

King sets a very challenging bar, though - 2,000 words a day, every day, no exceptions. Well, for people just getting started he's willing to be a little lenient: 1,500 words a day and you can have Sundays off. And you have to take it seriously, as you would any true craft. King recommends that you establish a Writing Space, ideally somewhere where you can close the door. Lose the distractions and take care of the reasons not to write.

And, as the fine folks at Nike would say, just do it.

Of course, if you're new at this, most of what you write will be crap. In fact, even if you're not new, the odds are that your first draft will be a mess. But if you have something to say, and you know what that is, then the story will shine through. You can polish it, revise, tweak and massage it until it's something that you're willing to let the rest of the world see.

It's hard work, that's for sure. At no point does King say that being a writer will be easy. He says that it's sometimes thrilling, scary, exquisite, weird, toilsome, difficult, Sisyphean even. But never, ever easy. And there's no guarantee that you'll end up where he is. In fact, the odds are that you won't be able to make a living as a writer. It's certainly not impossible, of course - many men and women make that bar every year. But to write consistently at that level requires even more practice, patience and faith.

In the end, King is one writer who has most certainly made it big. He avoided destroying himself, and survived an accident that should have destroyed him, and he's still writing. And if you get nothing else from this book, perhaps it is this lesson: a writer writes. No matter what, no matter why, a writer writes because that is what a writer must do to survive. If you're willing to do that, if you have stories that you need to tell, then you might be a writer. It's a scary thing to do, but who knows scary better than Stephen King? Take a read through this book, open up a fresh Word file, and get to work.

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"What follows is everything I know about how to write good fiction. I'll be as brief as possible, because your time is valuable and so is mine, and we both understand that the hours we spend talking about writing is time we don't spend actually doing it. I'll be as encouraging as possible, because it's my nature and because I love this job. I want you to love it, too. But if you don't want to work your ass off, you have no business trying to write well - settle back into competency and be grateful you have even that much to fall back on."
- Stephen King, On Writing
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Stephen King on Wikipedia
On Writing on Wikipedia
On Writing on Amazon.com
Stephen King's website

Review 84: Story

Story by Robert McKee

Why are there so many bad movies out there? I mean seriously - you and I both know that of all the films that are released every year, we probably get only one or two that are actually good. There's some that are good enough to spend an afternoon watching, maybe enjoyable enough that we'll want to watch it again on DVD later. But so many are just... bad.

It is my own fault, I think, for seeing Transformers 2. I have no one to blame but myself.

The really scary thing is that, in the summer of Transformers 2 and G.I. Joe, these were the best stories they had available. Seriously. If they had a better movie to make, one that would get a bigger audience and thereby bring in more money, don't you think they would have made it? The only reason you put a piece of misery like TF2 together is because you have no better options available.

Why, then, should this be so? What happened to the great scripts of long ago? You know, back in my day, when we had good movies, dammit, and we didn't need all this fancy See-Gee-Eye to fill up screen time. When we could go home quoting movie lines and we had characters that inspired us and stories that shaped our lives?

Well, it's probably important to note that even in the Good Old Days, the good stories were still grossly outnumbered by the mediocre and bad ones, and there's a very good reason for that: writing is hard.

If you take nothing else away from this book, you will remember that - writing a good story is work, and if you're not willing to do the work that it takes, then you're not going to write a good story. Oh, you might luck out and write a story that's good enough, and there might be enough truly bad stuff out there that someone will be willing to publish or produce your "good enough" story. But that won't make people like it, watch it, read it or care about it. If you want your work to have real resonance, to have an effect on people long after they've put it down or walked out of the theater, then you have to be willing to do more than just type a couple thousand words every day. You have to know your story from the inside out, know the characters better than they know themselves, and have a clear vision of what it is you want to say.

A good story, McKee believes, is the writer telling us "Life is like this." And if it's a good story, well-told, then we'll believe him.

And that's the reason for the title of this book - STORY. Everything serves the story, McKee says, including you. But if you know how the story works, and how to make the story serve your own ends, then you can create a piece that will live on in memory.

This book is not an instruction manual, and the things that McKee talks about are not rules or even guidelines. They are principles of storytelling, guiding ideas that underpin every good story ever told, and the lack of which are what leads to mediocre or even bad storytelling. If you follow these principles, McKee believes, keep them in your mind and be willing to work with them, then you'll be able to produce work that will sell.

One of the examples that gets used throughout the book is the idea of the Gap. People who want something, you see, will usually do the minimum required to get that thing. So if I want to get into my friend's home, I won't bring my lockpicks and jimmy open the door. I'll probably just knock on it and ask to be let in. If that happens, then I get what I expected to get, and that scene should therefore be cut from the manuscript.

What if, however, I knock on the door and my friend refuses to let me in? There is the Gap, a difference between what I expected to happen and what actually happened. Now I have to react to that, and his reaction to my reaction will drive the scene on. By asking yourself what the character expects, and then asking, "Okay - what's the opposite of that," you can drive the story along, make it interesting, and provide your characters with more to do than just knock on doors.

He also talks about the Controlling Idea of a story - what is the meaning of your story? It could be something like, "Love brings people together through adversity," or "Those who use others lead meaningless lives," or "The best life is one where challenges are overcome." It is the spine of your story, the idea that holds everything together. By knowing what your story is really about, you can make sure that every scene, every chapter serves that end.

From the big ideas of characterization, symbolism and the Controlling Idea, McKee moves to structure and the true nuts and bolts of screenwriting - the beat/scene/sequence/act structure that governs a film and determines how the overall structure works. He looks at different movies and analyzes how the story is structured, both in regards to the main plot and any sub-plots (which are really good for propping up a slower second act), points out different ways to introduce the Inciting Incident of your story, where the climaxes and turning points might go, and how to get there and keep your audience interested.

There's so much in the book, it really is like a handbook of story-writing. While it's geared towards screenwriters, the principles of storytelling can apply to any medium. He does talk a little bit about other media as well, mainly in the section on adaptation. If you're a playwright or a novelist, there's lessons in this book that you can definitely use, while ignoring the exhortations not to try and put stage and camera directions into your screenplay.

I've had an on-again, off-again love of writing since I was a kid. There have been times when I wrote non-stop, putting out stories left and right. Not necessarily good ones, mind you, but writing nonetheless. And then there have been periods - like now, for example - where there are no stories that burn to be told. I miss it, honestly, but reading this book kind of stoked the flames a little. I got to thinking about old stories that I could revise, and a couple of ideas that I had consigned to the filing cabinet of my brain proved to be good guinea pigs for some of McKee's principles.

Does that mean I'm on my way to literary superstardom? Not without a whole lot of hard work it doesn't. Much like with Stephen King's On Writing, one of the biggest lessons you get from this book is that creating a story of any quality requires hard, consistent work, and lots of it. McKee gives some good tips on the kind of writing process you should use to shorten the writing time - making more efficient use of your time and creativity, essentially - but at no time does he claim that making a good story is easy. What he does do, though, is make you believe that the hard work is worth doing.

As much as I would like to heap praise on McKee, though, there was something that stuck in my brain like a splinter when I read this. It's a little thing, it's a very nerdy thing, but it's a thing nonetheless.

At various points in the book, in order to illustrate one principle of storytelling or another, McKee uses the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Vader reveals that he is Luke's father. McKee is right in that it's an excellent example of a perfect storytelling moment. At that instant, we re-think everything we've seen before with regards to Luke and Vader. We understand that Yoda and Obi-Wan weren't necessarily worried that Luke needed training just to be a good Force user - they were worried that he'd turn out like his father. Everything we thought we knew about those characters had to be re-evaluated, and in terms of simple storytelling, it was a brilliant moment.

Take the Gap principle I talked about earlier. There's Luke, at Vader's mercy. Luke expects that Vader is going to kill him, but what happens? He says, "I am your father." And then what does Vader expect? He certainly doesn't expect Luke to throw himself off the antenna, choosing death over giving in to the Dark Side. The viewer doesn't have any idea what to expect either, and that's what makes for a great movie moment.

The trouble is, I don't think McKee has actually watched that movie in a very long time. He gets lines wrong ("You can't kill me, Luke. I'm your father") and gets entire sequences of events wrong - he has Vader reveal his paternity to Luke, who then attacks him, forcing Vader to cut off his son's hand. Vader offers to let Luke rule by his side, in response to which Luke hurls himself to what he imagines is his death. And every time McKee brings up Star Wars as an example, I found myself wanting to scream, "Did you even see the movie? Or at least look up the script??" I mean, I know the book was published in 1997, but if he's big in Hollywood, he should at least be able to get his hands on one precious copy. Or go to Blockbuster and rent the damn movie.

Anyway, that was my one little gripe with McKee, and it did make me wonder what else he might have gotten wrong in his details. I mean, his reading of the scene worked, and wouldn't have been any different if he had gotten it right, but still - it's a pretty big mistake to make. I can only hope that he managed to fix it in later editions.

That much aside, the principles he puts forward are sound, and it's the kind of book that you want to keep close at hand while you're putting your story together. If you find yourself hitting a wall, just start browsing through the book again and something will come to you. Whether you're a writer of screenplays, stage plays, novels or short stories, this is a book you really should read. It'll help you see what you're doing in a whole new light.

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"Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence."
- Robert McKee, Story
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Robert McKee on Wikipedia
Robert McKee's homepage
Story on Amazon.com

Review 52: Maps and Legends

Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon

In this book, Michael Chabon has done something very interesting - he has uplifted me and humbled me at the same time. It's a weird feeling, that combination, probably because I'm reviewing a book about literary criticism and the telling of stories, which put me in a kind of meta-reviewer mindset. Reading this book not only forced me to think about myself as a reader, but as a reviewer of and writer about books.

Let's do the first part and then I'll get to the second.

The beginning and ending of this collection of essays focuses on something very important regard the telling of stories: the idea that reading is entertainment. Reading a book or a short story, Chabon maintains, should be, first and foremost, fun. It should be a good way to rest your mind and give it a break from the rigors and stresses of daily life. Movies, music, juggling - those are all labeled entertainment and are generally accepted as being fun, so why not books?

With me as a reader, Chabon was certainly preaching to the choir. I've always regarded reading as fun, and if I have time to spend with a book, then it's time well spent. But even I, the reader looking for a good time, have fallen prey to the idea that reading a book should Mean Something. I mean, look back on these reviews for a moment. How many times have I dug deep to find some kind of moral or philosophical "lesson" in a book that was probably written with nothing more in mind than to pass a few pleasant hours on an airplane? Far too often, and more often than not it was born of a desire to make the review a little longer than, "I liked this book and you will too."

Many readers have this secret shame that we're reading for fun. This drives us to pick up books that we wouldn't normally read - and in my case here I'm thinking about pretty much anything written by a Russian in the 19th and 20th centuries - in order to pick up some kind of intellectual cachet. We wander around the bookstore, dawdling before the "literature" section in the hopes that someone will see us there instead of in the science fiction/fantasy ghetto, which is where we really want to be. Chabon suggests that it is this ghettoization of books that contributes to such book snobbery and, if he had his way, he would see it gone. Every bookshop would be one section - Books.

The title of his book, Maps and Legends evokes this feeling. Maps, you see, serve two purposes. They chronicle where you have already been, showing you the roads you took and the things you saw. But, and possibly more importantly, they show you where you haven't been yet. Who among you has never sat down and looked at a map and thought, I wonder what's there? Even a map of the town in which you live can be oddly alluring. I lived in Kyoto for nearly nine years, and yet I could still look at a map and wonder where I should go next.

Books, Chabon maintains, should have the same quality. When I go into a modern bookstore, I head straight for the ports I know. I don't explore distant shores or unknown islands. I'm provincial, a homebody of the literary sort. Perhaps if there were a store where the map was different, the layout unfamiliar, I might discover new worlds that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

So this is where the uplift comes - Chabon inspires me to be a better reader. To not only read more, but to read better. To not gloss over the details in order to enjoy the book, but to actively search for them. To stare at some part of a story and wonder, What is that? Have I been there before?

Where he humbles me is simply in his writing. For the purposes of this book, he and I are in the same field - talking about books and writing and how they affect us. And Chabon is much, much better at it than I am. His writing is a pleasure to read - not in that frenetic, sensory overload Tom Wolfe kind of way, but more in the same way one would enjoy a really good meal. You want to pause and roll the words around in your head for a moment before you move on. He digresses and wanders and then comes back again, just when you were wondering where he was going with all this.

In the essays to be found in this book, he looks at the immortal allure of Sherlock Holmes, the bleak horror of The Road, and the unfortunate lack of anything worthwhile for children to read. He talks of golems and death and imaginary homelands for speakers of dying languages, and makes it all compelling and enthralling. I want to write like Chabon when I grow up.

If there's higher praise, I don't know it.

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"The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth, and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve."
- Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends
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Michael Chabon on Wikipedia
Maps and Legends on Wikipedia
Maps and Legends at Amazon.com