Why Read?

“My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people’s.”

- Oscar Wilde

The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing . . . It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn’t, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

- Stephen King

I am a part of all I have read.

- John Kieran

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.

- Kathleen Norris

When I pass a bookshelf, I like to pick out a book from it and thumb through it. When I see a newspaper on the couch, I like to sit down with it. When the mail arrives, I like to rip it open. Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is an escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss. 

- Nora Ephron, from I Feel Bad About My Neck

I did most of my reading as a child on my bed or on a rattan sofa in the sunroom of the house I grew up in. Here’s a strange thing: Whenever I read a book I love, I start to remember all the other books that have sent me into rapture, and I can remember where I was living and the couch I was sitting on when I read them.

- also from Nora Ephron in same.

Read, because it means you are not one of these people.

Related Links:

1. What do TV characters read? from Flavorwire

2. How many books will you read in your lifetime: from The Telegraph

3. The pleasures of Reading in the Age of Distraction

4. 8 Major Benefits of Reading

5. Toronto scientists determine that fiction can change personalities:

“We found the people who read the [whole] story changed a bit in their personality,” Oatley says. “What we found interesting was that they all changed in somewhat different ways.”

More here, after The Guardian picked it up. See also: The Business Case For Reading Novels, HBR, which references the same study.

6. 5 Ways To Make More Time For Reading, from Michael Hyatt

7. Bookshelf Porn

8. Reading a book really is better the second time round, and can even offer mental health benefits, from Mail Online

9. 10 Novels That Will Sharpen Your Mind, according to Scientific American

Stephen King on Short Stories

Only Stephen King can get away with saying this without sounding arrogant.

Why people don’t read short stories

Just After Sunset – short stories by Stephen King

Michael Chabon, editor of McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasure of Thrilling Tales, calls Stephen King ‘the Last Master of the Plotted Short Story’.

Here’s what King himself says on that same issue:

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

He says plots are artificial but short stories are organisms which grow out of characters and situations. He says a short story can be stripped down to three basic elements:

1. Narration – moving the story from A to B

2. Description – creating a sensory reality

3. Dialogue – bringing characters to life

This is what he has to say about the short-story as an art-form:

‘It never occurred to me that writing short stories is a fragile craft, one that can be forgotten if it isn’t used almost constantly.’ – Stephen King, in the Introduction to his short story collection: ‘Just After Sunset’.

I agree with him on that. With short stories, a writer has to keep their hand in. Even a writing break of a few months can send you stale.

2. THE GINGERBREAD GIRL

I would call this a novella rather than a short story. The scenes are divided into chapters in much the same way as a novel would be. Each chapter has its own title: a creepy quotation from somewhere inside that chapter. I like the technique.

I like the idea of turning a popular children’s fairy tale into the horror genre, and I think most all of them can be rewritten King-style!

What happens:

Emmy’s baby has died of cot death so she takes up running marathon distances to cope with the pain of loss. Her marriage breaks down. She decides to move to Vermillion Key, where her father lives nearby and where she continues to run along the beach for miles each day.

Then Deke Hollis turns up. Deke is an old fellow who runs the drawbridge between Vermillion and the mainland. He is friends with her Dad and warns Emmy to steer clear of Jim Pickering. Pickering lives at number 366 and always has a different ‘niece’ with him (young, attractive women). He made his money in computers.

Right after that, Emmy finds a dead body in the open trunk of Pickering’s Mercedes. The body has been stabbed. There’s blood and shit everywhere. She blacks out.

Next, Emmy finds herself bound up in Pickering’s house. He’s torturing her, threatening to cut out her eye-ball. For some reason he decides not to kill her then and there. He leaves the room. The pace slows right down as King describes Emmy’s attempt to escape in fine detail. Her strong legs push against the duct tape securing her to the chair and she can hear a sucking noise as it lifts. Tension is created because the serial killer is about to come back into the room.

In the next chapter, the escape attempt continues. She’s almost broken free when Pickering arrives home. There is a scuffle. The crazy guy gets mad because he falls against the fridge and hurts his head. Emmy thumps him good with the arm of her chair. Finally, she stabs him.

Emmy explores his house, finds photographs in his bedroom and so on. But Pickering’s not quite dead. He’s coming to get her. With him on the other side of a door, Emmy throws a piece of furniture through the window and escapes through the jagged hole.

In Chapter 9 there’s a bit of back story about what a tom-boy Em had been as a girl. This comes in handy as she jumps ten feet to the patio from the window. Pickering appears above her but quickly disappears – he’s coming after her. She runs away.

At the beginning of Chapter 10 she is still running. We’re not sure if this is continuous action or if there has been a time-jump to a more serene time. But after a few sentences we realise he is still chasing her. He chases her along the beach; she is fitter than he is. Eventually she meets a Latino who only speaks Spanish – each of them try to explain in broken Spanish that the other is crazy. The Latino gets stabbed in the mouth.

This part is reminiscent of The Gingerbread Man:

She tried as hard as she could and knew it wasn’t going to be enough. She could outrun an old lady, she could outrun an old man, she could outrun her poor sad husband, but she couldn’t outrun the mad bastard behind her.

She goes into the water. Pickering almost dies chasing her into the surf but resurfaces just as she hopes he has drowned. Finally he sinks with a ‘glub’. She is happy and applauds. She walks home.

*

This story was one of King’s earliest, and there are places where the prose feels clunky:

Thunder rumbled. Almost directly overhead now. The courtyard was empty except for

the car (and the blond in the trunk, there was her).

This doesn’t work for me:

‘Even as her rational mind was telling her that was bullshit, the part of her that specialized in rationalization was nodding frantically.’

‘To Em, he looked like he was trying to play creep-mouse with her. He also looked crazy.’

(I had to look up creep-mouse: “Here, comes, the, creep, mouse, from, the, barn, into, the, house”.) What stands out to me here is that King decided to tell rather than show how the man looked crazy. My instinct would have been to give a few specific details which show the reader he looks crazy. Maybe King just wanted to get on with the story.

I don’t feel this story works very well. The reader must avoid certain questions to enjoy it:

• Why is Pickering crazy?
• Why did he leave the stabbed woman in the trunk of his car for Emmy to find?
• Why didn’t the police find him first, if people around the neighbourhood don’t trust him? Surely he’s under surveillance in a small town.
• Why didn’t Emmy just run into someone’s house instead of all along the beach? Where was everyone… etc.

But it pays not to look for inconsistencies when reading because stories can often be picked to bits. I envy those readers who can suspend disbelief better than I can.

At the end, King writes:

In a horror movie, Pickering would make one last stand: either come roaring out of the surf or be waiting for her, dripping but still his old lively self, in the bedroom closet when she got back. But this wasn’t a horror movie, it was her life.

I wonder if King thought of ending his story like that before changing his mind. That would be too clichéd, after all. Instead, he points out that his ending is not clichéd. It is almost Chekhovian, with Emmy walking home. We are left to wonder what happened (Did the police contact her? Did she get back with her husband?). I prefer endings like this, especially when preceded by drama bordering on melodrama.

*

GRADUATION AFTERNOON

From Postscripts Magazine, issue #10 (2007)

Anthologised in Just After Sunset (2008)

Characters

Stephen King likes to set up the characters with a little backstory before embarking upon the rest of the story. He manages this where other writers might fail:

1. Because he has a large, loyal following who expect this of him

2. His characterisations are interesting in their own right

3. All the while he’s foreshadowing what’s to come.

Janice Gandolewski

Will graduate from Fairhaven High in two weeks’ time. She has a well-off boyfriend called Buddy. She is good-looking and smart enough to pull-off a relationship with a boy socially out of her own league, because she is ‘a townie’.

Bruce ‘Buddy’ Hope

Buddy goes to ‘The Academy’ rather than Fairhaven High. He lives in a place ‘too big to be a house, too small to be an estate’. There is a tennis court, swimming pool These details alone tell us that Buddy comes from a rich family – though not super rich – there is a nouveau riche whiff about a large house going by the name of ‘Harborlights’. The Hope family lives in Connecticut. Crucially, they have a good view over New York.

Gran Hope

Doesn’t like Janice because she’s worried Buddy will get her pregnant, and then the family will be stuck with a woman of lower class than themselves. She says what she thinks with little self-editing: ‘If it enters her head, it exits her mouth.’

Mrs Hope

A minor character who serves only to slap Janice near the end.

Story

The viewpoint character is Janice and we see the story unfold from her eyes. She and her boyfriend, from each from a different social milieu are about to go their separate ways. The story takes place at Buddy’s graduation party – hers will be much smaller, two weeks later. She will then go to ‘educational halls far less grand or traditional’ to become a journalist.

Through Janice’s imaginings of the future, this story covers a much longer timespan than the gradution party itself; she lets us see into their imagined future:

Short term:

‘Tonight the kids will go out and party down in a more righteous mode. Alcohol and not a few tabs of X will be ingested…’

Long term:

‘By the age of thirty-five or so, she guesses he will have lost most or all of his enthusiasm for eating pussy and will be more interested in collecting coins. Or refinishing Colonial rockers, like his father does out in the—ahem—carriage-house.’

Time is flexible in this short-story, flitting from the past (via flashbacks), the present (what’s happening at the party) and the imagined future. Nothing much is happening, and this helps flesh out the story, to make it an interesting one, and then:

‘Bruce’s mother comes out on the patio and stands next to [Janice], shading her eyes. She is wearing a new blue dress. A tea-dress. Her shoulder brushes Janice’s and they look south at the crimson mushroom climbing, eating up the blue. Smoke is rising from around the edges—dark purple in the sunshine—and then being pulled back in. The red of the fireball is too intense to look at, it will blind her, but Janice cannot look away. Water is gushing down her cheeks in broad warm streams, but she cannot look away.’

From here they can see that New York City has been bombed.

The story quickly draws to a close, after Janice is slapped by Buddy’s mother for ‘joking’ about a nuke. In slow-motion, we see Gran walking down the path like a ‘dispossessed warhag’.

Theme

The epiphanic moment takes place over the final paragraph, as Janice realises the impact of the bomb:

‘She thinks about the hike Bruce and his friends won’t be taking. She thinks about the party at Holy Now! they won’t be attending tonight. She thinks about the records by Jay-Z and Beyoncé and The Fray they won’t be listening to—no loss there. And she thinks of the country music her dad listens to in his pickup truck on his way to and from work. That’s better, somehow. She will think of Patsy Cline or Skeeter Davis and in a little while she may be able to teach what is left of her eyes not to look.’

The final sentence is ambiguous. We don’t know exactly why Janice thinks this way – why she mulls over trivial things like pop music rather than the (unmentioned) fact that the Janice’s home and school has been destroyed in an instant.

This story is like the modern, horror equivalent of Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party. It is about class differences and how little these things really matter in the end, when we’re all facing death. In both of these stories, the viewpoint character responds to death in the final paragraph, and is to be interpreted by the reader.

On Inverted Commas

Here is the opening paragraph from ‘Apt Pupil’, a short story by Stephen King. I have changed one thing about it. Can you see what it is?

He looked like the total ‘all-American’ kid as he pedalled his twenty-six-inch Schwinn with the ‘ape-hanger’ handlebars up the residential suburban street, and that’s just what he was: Todd Bowden, thirteen years old, five-feet-eight and a ‘healthy’ one hundred and forty pounds, hair the colour of ‘ripe corn’, blue eyes, white even teeth, lightly tanned skin marred by not even the first ‘shadow’ of adolescent acne.

Yeah. I’ve ruined it.

I’ve taken every instance of original language use and put those words inside inverted commas. I’ve gone completely overboard to hammer it home, but if even one of these phrases had been enclosed inside inverted commas I would have been pulled out of the story.

I dislike inverted commas in fiction as much as I like air-quotes in conversation and I think they should be avoided.

• It’s as if the writer has snapped on rubber gloves, dealing with his very own work with an antiseptic look on his face. This distances the writer from his own words and therefore distances the reader. It also makes the writer seem timid.
• Either that, or the writer is drawing attention to her own cleverness.
• Or, the writer doesn’t trust the reader to pick up on his  special words. The reader is pulled up, forced to focus on words when the story’s the thing.
• Look at me! Look at me! I just cracked a ‘joke’!

I’m no ‘fan’.

Three Ways of Introducing Characters

How do authors introduce a new character into a story or novel?

1. OMNISCIENT NARRATION LEADING INTO CLOSE THIRD PERSON

Michael Crichton introduces a character like this, in the second paragraph of ‘The Lost World’:

Malcolm was forty years old, and a familiar figure at the Institute. He had been one of the early pioneers in chaos theory, but his promising career had been disrupted by a severe injury during a trip to Costa Rica; Malcolm had, in fact, been reported dead in several newscasts. “I was sorry to cut short the celebrations in mathematics departments around the country,” he later said, “but it turned out I was only slightly dead. The surgeons have done wonders, as they will be the first to tell you. So now I am back – in my next iteration, you might say.

Dressed entirely in black, leaning on a cane, Malcolm gave the impression of severity. He was known within the institute for his unconventional analysis, and his tendency to pessimism. His talk that August, entitled “Life at the Edge of Chaos”, was typical of his thinking. In it, Malcolm presented his analysis of chaos theory as it applied to evolution.

He could not have wished for a more knowledgeable audience…

So, who is ‘speaking’ to the reader in those first two paragraphs? The narrator, of course. An omniscient narrator who just happens to know these things. The narrator is like the author, but has a personality of his own. The narrator MUST have a personality of its own, otherwise the writing style won’t hold the reader’s interest. Here, the narrator has a dry sense of humour, picking things about Malcolm’s life that he thinks the reader will find interesting.

After two paragraphs, however, it is time for the omniscient narrator to take a back seat so the reader can get to know Malcolm at close range. ‘He could not have wished for a more knowledgeable audience’ shows that the reader is now inside MALCOLM’S head rather than inside the narrator’s head. This transition took place less often in 19^th century novels, but is now accepted practice. If we’re not allowed inside the head of the characters it means we can’t make conclusions ourselves without having every event interpreted by the narrator.

2. CLOSE THIRD PERSON

This is how Stephen King introduces ‘Dudley’ in Willa:

Dudley was walking by. David didn’t know if Dudley was the man’s first or last name, only that he was an executive with Staples office supply and had been on his way to Missoula for some sort of regional meeting. He was ordinarily very quiet, so the donkey heehaw of laughter he expelled into the growing shadows was beyond surprising; it was shocking. “If the train comes and you miss it,” he said, “you can hunt up a justice of the peace and get married right here. When you get back east, tell all your friends you had a real Western shotgun wedding. Yeehaw, partner.”

The story is written in close third person, with David as the viewpoint character. The phrase ‘David didn’t know if…’ tells the reader that the following assessment of Dudley is from David’s limited point of view. This rids the need for authorial intrusion.

3. FIRST PERSON

When writing in first person, a narrator can flit from one thing to another with little provocation, in something close to stream-of-consciousness at times.

The viewpoint character does one thing and is suddenly reminded of someone. This is now a perfect opportunity to introduce the character.

This is the mother-in-law from ‘North Wind’ by John Morrison:

She was already in bed when I got home last night, so doesn’t yet know how complete are the plans for her departure. What a wicked creature she is! One of the last things I told her before going out was that she is the kind of woman who gets mothers-in-law a bad name. By then her fury had nearly exhausted itself and she just glowered at me. I don’t know what kind of reception I’ll get this morning, but I’m glad that the chips are finally down, even though I’m apprehensive about how Jean will react when she arrives and finds her mother gone. Lil’s influence over her daughter is quite frightening.

The main thing we need to know about the mother-in-law is that she’s controlling. In first person, Morrison has made use of a few techniques in that single paragraph:

1. ‘She was already in bed when I got home last night, so doesn’t yet know how complete are the plans for her departure.’

Action

2. ‘What a wicked creature she is!’

Internal monologue

3. ‘One of the last things I told her before going out was that she is the kind of woman who gets mothers-in-law a bad name.’

Indirect speech

Of course, he could have made use of direct speech too (the kind that comes in speech marks) but be careful when using too much direct speech when writing in first person. If the viewpoint character starts to sound too much like a ‘narrator’, making use of accepted narrators’ techniques such as quoted dialogue, you might reconsider whether writing in first person is the best choice for your story.

*

There are several dangers for writers when introducing characters.

DON’T BORE THE READER.

By the time we start writing we know far more about our characters than the reader ever needs to know, and the temptation is to tell everything or our planning will go to ‘waste’. If a writer is good at character sketches it is tempting to sketch every minor character in full whether they need it or not. It is also too easy to go on at length about a character when a few, well-chosen details would allow the reader’s mind some scope to imagine.

There are few things more boring than taking your seat on a long-distance coach only to hear the life story of some old codger who shares your seat – unless he’s a very entertaining and gifted story-teller. But say you’d been observing that old codger at the terminal as he had a loud argument with the cross-dresser who dropped him off. Say this old codger had a black eye and was dressed in an Armani suit. That’d get you interested.

In fiction, make sure your reader gets to wondering about your character before you go on at length about the life story. Drop character tid-bits here and there. Make use of dialogue, breaking it up with action sequences.

LET THE READER DO SOME OF THE WORK.

When writing with an omniscient narrator, the narrator knows everything. So, what to tell? What to hold back?

Note Crichton’s sentence above: ‘Dressed entirely in black, leaning on a cane, Malcolm gave the impression of severity.’

This is an example of showing then telling. First we are given a visual representation of severity, and then we get the explanation, just in case we missed it. Who has drawn this conclusion? The omniscient narrator, not the reader. Crichton gets away with it because he doesn’t do it too often, and this sort of writing is a feature of the thriller genre. But if the reader is NEVER left to deduce anything, the writing can become boring or worse: condescending.

I guess we should trust our readers. Let them draw their conclusions.