Posts Tagged "Stephen King"
Top Shelf Tuesday
What I’m reading this week. No surprises here, huh?
Danse Macabre
I recognize terror as the finest emotion (used to almost quintessential effect in Robert Wise’s film The Haunting,where, as in The Monkey’s Paw, we are never allowed to see what is behind the door), and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.
Monday Muse
I am averaging about 200 words per session with the new novel, where my typical output is closer to 2,000 per day. I’d been aiming for 1,000 per day in order to keep to my schedule. But this helps:
“This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things – fish and unicorns and men on horseback – but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.”
–Stephen King, Bag of Bones
CANNES-ED Goods: Monday Muse
In honor of Noah’s movie, Return, debuting at the Cannes Film Festival this week, today’s Monday Muse comes from one of my very favorite book-to-movies, Stand By Me (based on the novella, “The Body,” by Stephen King). Stellar works, the both of ‘em.
“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?”
In the movie that line was changed to, “Jesus, does anyone?” It was also upgraded to the very last line of the screenplay. I’m not sure it’s the most poignant line in the entire piece, but to me, it encapsulates the vivid urgency of (pre)adolescence. There’s something about the memories we form at that formative age that cut to the bone and follow us sharply. At that age, every emotion simmers just beneath the surface.
And writing — and reading — YA is, to my mind, the best way to access that intensity, again and again.
Monday Muse
*This week, with the grace of some god — or at the very least, much in the way of Nespresso — I will be working toward conquering ‘The Thing I Fear I Cannot Write” (a phrase I’ll attribute to E. Lockhart, though she may well have been quoting when she exhorted a room full of rapt, wide-eyed writers to tackle just that).
Hence, the Musing. With any luck, it shall ward off the Fear.
It seemed appropriate to kick off this feature with one from The Master himself; the first writer to show me the sublime thrill of fear as entertainment, and to date, the only one who has perfectly articulated for me – and recreated through art, time and again – the urge that humans have toward self-destruction, and how we are, essentially, our own worst demons (sometimes, even, in the best possible ways)….
I’m speaking of Stephen King, obvs.
But then, I couldn’t narrow it down to one. So here are a few of my favorites.
Have at it, writers.
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
“You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
“Stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel [crap] from a sitting position.”
“When asked, ‘How do you write?’ I invariably answer, ‘One word at a time,’ and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That’s all. One stone at a time. But I’ve read you can see that [mother] from space without a telescope.”
“If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things – fish and unicorns and men on horseback – but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page.
This is how we go on.”
