On Writing

Stephen King's "On Writing" is a story that I honestly wasn't expecting to hear, the first 50 pages alone had me discovering new things about the author with nearly every line, but there were also quite a few things that resonated with me and had my mind lingering on specific sentences pages later. A lot of these resounding thoughts stem from King's own personal stories of his early childhood, his story of an illness that both disrupted and inspired his life and his musings on how his memories are random and broken apart are among some of my favorite pieces so far.

 I felt a great pang of nostalgia and recognition while reading King's anecdote on pg. 27. King's story in this part focuses on how after suffering from a long, intense illness, a young Stephen King was pulled back from school while his brother progressed onto the next grade. During this time King began to discover his passion for reading, writing, and creating his own works.

This was a very familiar situation to me, when I was in middle school I began to suffer from a seizure disorder and I spent a lot of time cooped up in the hospital or at home, by my sophomore year of high school I was unable to recover my grades and I was sent to an alternative school, it was a difficult period of my life but I developed a strong sense of who I was and am because of it and those experiences have essentially lead me to where I am now. 

On the subject of "where I am now" I'd like to reflect a bit on what I think is one of my favorite quotes  in the book so far. Early on in his story, before he truly begins to lament on his childhood and his beginnings as an author, King makes a brief statement about how Mary Karr is able to recount her childhood in an unbroken panorama, this is where I found a truly amazing quote, "Mine is a fogged-out landscape from which occasional memories appear like isolated trees...the kind that look as if they might like to grab and eat you."

This quote feels like it's perfectly describing every time I've ever lied awake in bed thinking about buried memories from my past, situations where I've been wronged or where I've wronged others, arguments from years ago that still hold a bitter place in my heart or off-handed comments that still leave me feeling rotten. I think his analogy perfectly envelopes the idea that even if an old memory is buried under thousands of new ones and they can no longer be seen or connected to anything else, they exist forever and are a part of you.

These examples are just a few things pulled from King's narrative and while I do feel a connection to these stories and phrases I also have to say that they don't give you the entire idea about who Stephen King is and what you learn about him from these passages doesn't really reflect who he is today. However, one thing in these 50 pages that does give you a good idea about the author, outside of just his home life and teenage exploits, is his deep rooted passion for action and horror. It's sort of like an underlying theme in the book, from his questions about death as a child to his fascination with horror movies and disinterest with domesticity and innocence, it's apparent that King has always felt an attachment to the darker side of fiction and one of the biggest things I learned about him was that his greatest passion had been with him since he was a child.

Another thing I learned from Stephen King, this time about writing, is that successful writing does not equal good writing. At the very beginning of his book King says that he could have written his book and profited from it because of his success in the industry, but the book wouldn't have had any meaning if he wrote simply because of his success, it wouldn't have been truly good.

I feel like this can be applied to Feature Writing in a variety of ways, but one in particular, stands out to me. In this class we all have to write, whether it's a blog post such as this one or a full on exam, this class focuses on who we are as writers. That being said, anyone can write, anyone can read 50 pages of a Stephen King book and blog about it, but good writing is more than just big words and lots of paragraphs and it's more than just a shiny grade or the title of "Best-Selling Author", it's about what we know and how we apply it, our experiences and what we make of them, that is how we get truly unique stories and the ability to turn good writing into memorable writing.