This
being Hallowe’en Week I have Stephen King on my night table. Nothing is
spookier than ghostly autumn moonlight spilling through the bedroom window onto
the horror master’s words.
Tonight,
the master’s words have placed me in an old model Mustang speeding down a dark
country road with George Staub, who is smoking and talking about Riding the Bullet, and of course –
death. Cigarette smoke is leaking through the stitches on his throat, and the
inside of the Mustang smells of grave dirt and formaldehyde.
King
is underrated when people refer to him as the master of horror. He is the
master of story telling, master of imagination and a master of writing, whether
it be horror or not.
I
am not a horror fan but I love reading King’s writing, especially when it is
about himself and his writing. Reading the introductions to some of his books,
or On Writing, his 2000 book about
the writing trade, is like sitting in a kitchen having a beer with him. (He no
longer drinks because he is a reformed alcoholic-drug addict).
Reading
the personal stuff puts you inside King’s head. And, when you are inside a
great writer’s head, you begin to learn a lot about writing.
Some
serial writers keep churning out the same formulaic stuff. Sell more books,
make more money, become more famous. The stories begin to sound the same, with
different places and different names.
King
is unlike others. He keeps experimenting, looking for ways to keep his writing
fresh. Besides novels he has written screenplays, radio scripts, TV series and
even a musical, Ghost Brothers of
Darkland County, with John Mellencamp.
“I
like to goof whiddit, do a little media cross-pollination and envelope
pushing,” he wrote in the introduction to Everything’s
Eventual, a book of his short stories. “It’s not about making more money or
even precisely about creating new markets; It’s about trying to see the act,
art and craft of writing in different ways. . . .”
He
certainly does not need more money nor more fame. He has sold roughly 350
million books since 1974 when Carrie
was published and has earned hundreds of millions of dollars.
Despite
all his fame, money and busy writing life, King continues to write short
stories, a genre that has been in the death rattle stage for some time. He
writes one or two a year to help keep his craft fresh.
He
says writing short stories is not easy or even pleasurable some times. It’s not
like riding a bicycle, but more like working out in the gym.
Once
a staple of any reading person’s life, and a feature of many high-profile
magazines, short stories are nearing extinction. Their popularity peaked in the
first half of the 20th century and has been declining since.
Popular
magazines such as The Saturday Night Post, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and Esquire
published one or more short stories in each issue. Short stories were so popular
that writers actually could make a living from them. Magazines paid so well for
them that novelist F.
Scott Fitzgerald wrote them to pay his many debts.
King
has published a dozen short story collections, the latest being The Bazaar of Bad Dreams released in
late 2015. It is a mix of new writing and stories already published in
magazines.
The
collection includes writing tips and biography. Each story has an introduction
with his comments on how and why he came to write it.
“There’s something to be said for a shorter,
more intense experience,” he writes in the introduction to The Bazaar. “It can
be invigorating, sometimes even shocking, like a waltz with a stranger you will
never see again, or a kiss in the dark, or a beautiful curio for sale laid out
on a cheap blanket at a street bazaar. . . . Feel free to examine them, but
please be careful. The best of them have teeth.”
Some
people say that the Internet will help to save the short story. I’m not sure
how but I hope something does.
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