Daniel Goodwin

I came to Stephen King late in life and indirectly: through his non-fiction. Growing up, I had the usual literary reader’s snobbish (and clichéd) attitude to the horrormeister.

Literary readers and writers love to hate Stephen King, and I think he loves to be hated. It’s not just part of his image: it’s partly how he defines himself. It reminds him of what he is kicking against, an old-fashioned, rarefied, class-system view of books. It was reading King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft in my early thirties that changed my mind and enticed me to pick up his novels.

On Writing – part autobiography, part King’s take on the art of writing – is one of the best books on the subject that I have read. For most writers, writing is a mystery. Yes, they work hard at, but still it’s something that comes to them amidst the rarefied reaches of a Mount Olympus rarely trod upon by lesser mortals.

King sweats it out and can explain in his typical unpretentious way exactly what he is doing or what is happening to him. His account of how his teenage babysitter used to sit and fart on his face has to be the antithesis and antidote to how Hemingway so carefully arranges his short Anglo-Saxon words to pay homage to grace under pressure.

I enjoyed King’s book and learned three things about being a writer, each of which has been influential in the development of my craft.

One, you don’t have to know where you’re going when you’re writing a novel. You don’t have to have a mental diagram of the plot. In fact it’s better for some writers that they don’t. This was a revelation for me. How could a master of suspense not know where every chapter was heading? But King’s view is that if he knew where he was going with his story, then he would be bored, and if he was bored, the reader would be too.

Years later when I started working with my editor Marc Coté at Cormorant Books, I was reminded of this when he said that every book is a double journey. First the writer has to take it and figure out where he or she is going. And only then can the reader embark on the same journey.

Two, a story is like a fossil. At least it is in King’s understanding. He means that you don’t make it up in the way a writer is supposed to construct a clever plot. Instead, you uncover it. You find it. The story writes itself in a way, propelled by the destiny of its DNA and the pressures of time and place.

I didn’t really understand this one until years later when I was working on the manuscript that became The Art of Being Lewis, my second novel. I was having trouble with the ending, and had rewritten it three times, but still it was wrong. It was false. It was made up.

It took me many walks to think through, to excavate, using King’s metaphor, Lewis’s childhood and adulthood and what the novel was about it before I figured out what absolutely had to happen and where. The two chapters that make up Lewis’s epiphany and mid-life coming of age wrote themselves. I had uncovered the story.

Third, and this insight had nothing to do with the creative process but rather with the long journey of becoming a writer: rejection is an oft-repeated rite of passage along that journey, at least for most of us. One has to learn to embrace it if possible, or if not, to at least to ignore it. This too had the weight of a thunderbolt for me. I had always looked at Stephen King as a popular and successful writer. I had always assumed that every editor loved him from the moment he first spilled ink on the page.

But, with apologies to Chumbawamba, it had taken years of getting knocked down by editors and getting up again for King to become who he was meant to be. To read about how he put his hundreds of rejection letters on a spike until the pile grew so heavy that the spike fell out of the wall was simply amazing to me. He had applied Winston Churchill’s dictum of “Never surrender” to the eminently unheroic life of the writer.

This too reminded me of an earlier experience, in a creative writing class I took in college. One day the teacher asked all of us what we thought was most important to being a writer. Everyone had deep and important thoughts: Sensitivity. Commitment to truth. A story to tell. My eighteen-year old self came up with something more prosaic: persistence. The teacher nodded with a little too much understanding. Little did I know how prophetic I was being about my own writerly evolution.

Decades later, I still consider an indomitable sense of persistence to be the most valuable quality for anyone hoping to be a writer. Everything in the world, not just in the publishing system, but in our economy and society, is designed to discourage the novice writer, to sow doubt, to have you throw in the towel with frustration and disappointment and decide to do something more sensible and financially sound and socially valued with your time.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that literary rejection is the gauntlet the universe throws down to test whether a would-be writer has something to say on which their very existence depends.

Everything I’ve listed above has been important to me as a writer. But if this were all, I’m not sure it would be worth writing about. What’s perhaps more important is how King changed how I think about reading.

As one of the writers of what the literary establishment likes to label genre novels – John le Carré is another one who comes easily to mind – King pleasantly reminds us of Virgil’s two millennia-old dictum. The Roman poet who gave his empire a founding myth of their own to help dispel their inferiority complex in relation to the Greeks, Virgil tells us that the writer’s job is “to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life.”

Fifteen hundred years after Virgil, in his Apology for Poetry, Philip Sydney would write, in his lovely, alliterative, Elizabethan poetic fashion, of the twin aims of “sentence and solas.”

Five hundred years later, we can have great bun fights about the competing charms of genre and literary fiction but in many ways it comes down to this: writing is meant to delight and instruct us. We moderns might use more mundane language like “thrill and teach” but it amounts to the same thing.

The reason why writers can debate with great gusto whether Shakespeare would be writing TV scripts or crime fiction if he were alive today is that very few writers have ever come close to that perfect balance of sentence and solas that Shakespeare reaches, seemingly without trying very hard, in every line of his plays and sonnets. Tolstoy as well, perhaps, comes close. (I happen to believe that if Shakespeare were alive today he’d be writing novels, but that’s another essay.) Most of us humble practitioners err on one side or the other of the delight-and-instruct formula.

But if there is one great criticism of genre fiction – and I consume as much of it as I do literary fiction –  it’s that its primary purpose is to entertain. (Think of Graham Greene’s “entertainments”, his self-deprecating term of hesitant endearment for his espionage novels.) Everything in the genre novel – language, character, plot, setting – is designed to primarily support that aim. Literary fiction often attempts the reverse maneuver: any measure of entertainment is designed to teach us something about Life! Or Ourselves! Or about The Human Condition!

But King, despite what critics sometimes call out as sloppy language, floats triumphantly above the confining walls of the genre ghetto. Even the language which some of his characters use to express their thoughts, as banal and icky as might be, is high realism. Very few of us think regularly in ineffable, eternal prose. Most of us have ill-formed thoughts and use trite language, at least most of the time.

King’s main purpose in his universe of horror, just like le Carré’s in his world of espionage, is never primarily to thrill or frighten. Like all literary writers, King has a great theme, one he keeps coming back to again and again. I wouldn’t call it the supernatural. I’d say it was the nature of evil. Human evil. For King, the supernatural is simply the slanting way through which he can explore the inexplicable mystery of evil that even the most ordinary among us is capable of committing.

In much the same way, le Carré uses the world of espionage as a metaphor in all his books to explore the nature of betrayal. Like James Bond, le Carré’s has an arsenal of nifty tools at his disposal: literary language, pitch-perfect dialogue, his internalization of the aftermath of Empire, and a sense of suspense that is both languid and propulsive.

But unlike in a genre novel, these are ultimately techniques drafted in the service of le Carré’s great theme. This is why le Carré is a literary writer and why he rises above almost all espionage fiction. His primary purpose is to say something about the human capacity for betrayal: of one’s country, of one’s friends, and ultimately of oneself.

It is this ability to say something important about humans and our mysterious, inexplicable capacity for evil that keeps most people coming back to King. And it’s why his novels resonate and remain with us long after the work of many other talented – even supremely entertaining – writers of genre fiction fade quickly into the background of our minds after we put down their books.