Books that try to teach writing often run into trouble, because writing is not a one-size-fits-all occupation. What works for one writer might not work at all for another.
In a great number of articles and emails over the years I have praised Stephen King’s book On Writing for its usefulness, even to the point of calling it a modern classic. But as I’ve matured as a writer I have also discovered I disagree with a number of assertions King makes in it.
When I embarked on composing my first novel – the first one I completed, anyway – I took King’s word as gospel. It had to be 180,000 words, which he refers to as a “goodish length for a first novel”. (I would later learn this was an elephantine word count for an unestablished author.) I tried writing to music and gave up after about ten minutes (I have always preferred silence or white noise). I aimed for 2000 words per day and soon discovered this was pure fantasy on top of a full-time journalism gig.
There was one decree I held onto for much longer than the others before discovering it was bulldust (for me, anyway). King insists that a novelist should not take time off from a manuscript and try to come back to it later. The characters will “stale off”, he says, and the story will start to fade in the writer’s mind. I did find this was the case for a goodly part of my writing career, but I wonder now how much of that was due to the power of suggestion.
What made me become really sceptical about this precept was a story called ‘The Devils of Cain Island’, which will shortly be republished in a ‘best of’ anthology by Dark Moon Books. I had written about half of it when my mother-in-law, who was battling leukaemia, took a turn for the worse. I suddenly had neither the time nor the inclination to write. It would be another two months before I picked up my laptop.
And when I started to write again, the experience was lacklustre. I almost gave up on ‘The Devils of Cain Island’ more than once. But I loved the story’s premise and I wanted to salvage it. So I set my jaw, as they sometimes say in bad fiction, and began to hammer out the story.
When I came back to the completed article a few weeks later, I liked what I read. And the parts I had feared were the worst – the journal of the 18th century ship’s captain – were actually the best.
I began to wonder if that staling off – i.e. a slump in the writer’s enthusiasm for the project – was just down to mindset. I had done something not dissimilar with my novel Hollywood Hearts Ablaze a few years earlier, leaving it to cure for several months before picking it up and completing it. And I did it again more recently: I wrote 10,000 words of a novel, abandoned it for eight months, and then realised I had given it away because I didn’t like the way the storyline was progressing. So I picked it up again, cut out a glut of superfluous scenes, and then went on with it.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is artistic temperament. Many writers like to think what they do is transcendental, that ‘real art’ can’t be forced. But one thing a journalism career has taught me is that writing can be forced if necessary and that the results from writing in “cold blood” (as King calls it) are usually just as good as the fun, floaty kind that makes writing such a jazz most of the time.
One of the great triumphs of another book about how to write, The Elements of Style, is that it is prescriptive only in matters of practical usage. Its author, William Strunk Jr., didn’t try to pass off his own writing preferences and superstitions as facts. King’s book has other things going for it, not least entertainment and humour, but for brevity and timelessness, it’s hard to see anything ever besting The Elements of Style. Fledgling authors should put it in their electronic shopping carts along with On Writing.
