SK_OnWriting2

- 7 -
　　Let us now talk a little bit about dialogue, the audio portion of our programme. It's dialogue that gives your cast their voices, and is crucial in defining their characters - only what people do tells us more about what they're like, and talk is sneaky: what people say often conveys their character to others in ways of which they - the speakers - are completely unaware.
　　You can tell me via straight narration that your main character, Mistuh Butts, never did well in school, never even went much to school, but you can convey the same thing, and much more vividly, by his speech . . . and one of the cardinal rules of good fiction is never tell us a thing if you can show us, instead:
　　
　　"What you reckon?" the boy asked. He doodled a stick in the dirt without looking up. What he drew could have been a ball, or a planet, or nothing but a circle. "You reckon the earth goes around the sun like they say?" "I don't know what they say,"
　　Mistuh Butts replied. "I ain't never studied what thisun or thatun says, because eachun says a different thing until your head is finally achin and you lose your aminite."
　　"What's aminite?" the boy asked.
　　"You don't never shut up the questions!" Mistuh Butts cried. He seized the boy's stick and snapped it. "Aminite is in your belly when it's time to eat! Less you sick! And folks say I'm ignorant!"
　　"Oh, appetite," the boy said placidly, and began drawing again, this time with his finger.
　　
　　Well-crafted dialogue will indicate if a character is smart or dumb (Mistuh Butts isn't necessarily a moron just because he can't say appetite; we must listen to him awhile longer before making up our minds on that score), honest or dishonest, amusing or an old sobersides. Good dialogue, such as that written by George V. Higgins, Peter Straub, or Graham Greene, is a delight to read; bad dialogue is deadly.
　　Writers have different skill levels when it comes to dialogue. Your skills in this area can be improved, but, as a great man once said (actually it was Clint Eastwood), "A man's got to know his limitations." H. P. Lovecraft was a genius when it came to tales of the macabre, but a terrible dialogue writer. He seems to have known it, too, because in the millions of words of fiction he wrote, fewer than five thou-sand are dialogue. The following passage from "The Colour Out of Space," in which a dying farmer describes the alien presence which has invaded his well, showcases Lovecraft's dialogue problems. Folks, people just don't talk like this, even on their deathbeds:
　　
　　"Nothin' . . . nothin' . . . the colour . . . it burns . . . cold an' wet . . . but it burns . . . it lived in the well . . . I seen it . . . a kind o' smoke . . . jest like the flowers last spring . . . the well shone at night . . . everything alive . . . sucked the life out of everything . . . in the stone . . . it must a'come in that stone . . . pizened the whole place . . . dun't know what it wants . . . that round thing the men from the college dug out'n the stone . . . it was that same colour . . . jest the same, like the flowers an' plants . . . seeds . . . I seen it the fust time this week . . . it beats down your mind an' then gets ye . . . burns ye up . . . It come from some place whar things ain't as they is here . . . one o' them professors said so . . ."
　　
　　And so on and so forth, in carefully constructed elliptical bursts of information. It's hard to say exactly what's wrong with Lovecraft's dialogue, other than the obvious: it's stilted and lifeless, brimming with country cornpone ("some place whar things ain't as they is here"). When dialogue is right, we know. When it's wrong we also know - it jags on the ear like a badly tuned musical instrument.
　　Lovecraft was, by all accounts, both snobbish and painfully shy (a galloping racist as well, his stories full of sinister Africans and the sort of scheming Jews my Uncle Oren always worried about after four or five beers), the kind of writer who maintains a voluminous correspondence but gets along poorly with others in person - were he alive today, he'd likely exist most vibrantly in various Internet chat-rooms. Dialogue is a skill best learned by people who enjoy talking and listening to others - particularly listening, picking up the accents, rhythms, dialect, and slang of various groups. Loners such as Lovecraft often write it badly, or with the care of someone who is composing in a language other than his or her native tongue.
　　I don't know if contemporary novelist John Katzenbach is a loner or not, but his novel Hart's War contains some memorably bad dialogue. Katzenbach is the sort of novelist who drives creative-writing teachers mad, a wonderful storyteller whose art is marred by self-repetition (a fault which is cur-able) and an ear for talk that is pure tin (a fault which probably isn't). Hart's War is a murder mystery set in a World War II POW camp - a neat idea, but problematic in Katzen-bach's hands once he really gets the pot boiling. Here is Wing Commander Phillip Pryce talking to his friends just before the Germans in charge of Stalag Luft 13 take him away, not to be repatriated as they claim, but probably to be shot in the woods.
　　
　　Pryce grabbed at Tommy once again. "Tommy," he whispered, "this is not a coincidence! Nothing is what it seems! Dig deeper! Save him, lad, save him! For more than ever, now, I believe Scott is innocent! . . . You're on your own now, boys. And remember, I'm counting on you to live through this! Survive! Whatever happens!" He turned back to the Germans.
　　"All right, Haupt-mann," he said with a sudden, exceedingly calm deter-mination. "I'm ready now. Do with me what you will."
　　
　　Either Katzenbach does not realize that every line of the Wing Commander's dialogue is a cliché from a late-forties war movie or he's trying to use that similarity deliberately to awaken feelings of pity, sadness, and perhaps nostalgia in his audience. Either way, it doesn't work. The only feeling the passage evokes is a kind of impatient incredulity. You wonder if any editor ever saw it, and if so, what stayed his or her blue pencil. Given Katzenbach's considerable talents in other areas, his failure here tends to reinforce my idea that writing good dialogue is art as well as craft.
　　Many good dialogue writers simply seem to have been born with a well-tuned ear, just as some musicians and singers have perfect or near-perfect pitch. Here's a passage from Elmore Leonard's novel Be Cool. You might compare it to the Lovecraft and Katzenbach passages above, noting first of all that here we've got an honest-to-God exchange going on, and not a stilted soliloquy:
　　
　　Chili . . . looked up again as Tommy said, "You doing okay?"
　　"You want to know if I'm making out?"
　　"I mean in your business. How's it going? I know you did okay with Get Leo, a terrific picture, terrific. And you know what else? It was good. But the sequel - what was it called?"
　　"Get Lost."
　　"Yeah, well that's what happened before I got a chance to see it, it disappeared."
　　"It didn't open big so the studio walked away. I was against doing a sequel to begin with. But the guy running production at Tower says they're making the picture, with me or without me. I thought, well, if I can come up with a good story . . ."
　　
　　Two guys at lunch in Beverly Hills, and right away we know they're both players. They may be phonies (and maybe they're not), but they're an instant buy within the context of Leonard's story; in fact, we welcome them with open arms. Their talk is so real that part of what we feel is the guilty pleasure of anyone first tuning in and then eavesdropping on an interesting conversation. We're getting a sense of character, as well, although only in faint strokes. This is early on in the novel (page two, actually), and Leonard is an old pro. He knows he doesn't have to do it all at once. Still, don't we learn something about Tommy's character when he assures Chili that Get Leo is not only terrific, but also good?
　　We could ask ourselves if such dialogue is true to life or only to a certain idea of life, a certain stereotyped image of Hollywood players, Hollywood lunches, Hollywood deals. This is a fair enough question, and the answer is, perhaps not. Yet the dialogue does ring true to our ear; at his best (and although Be Cool is quite entertaining, it is far from Leonard's best), Elmore Leonard is capable of a kind of street poetry. The skill necessary to write such dialogue comes from years of practice; the art comes from a creative imagination which is working hard and having fun.
　　As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty. And if you are honest about the words coming out of your characters' mouths, you'll find that you've let yourself in for a fair amount of criticism. Not a week goes by that I don't receive at least one pissed-off letter (most weeks there are more) accusing me of being foul-mouthed, bigoted, homophobic, murderous, frivolous, or downright psychopathic. In the majority of cases what my correspondents are hot under the collar about relates to something in the dialogue: "Let's get the fuck out of Dodge" or "We don't cotton much to niggers around here" or "What do you think you're doing, you fucking faggot?"
　　My mother, God rest her, didn't approve of profanity or any such talk; she called it "the language of the ignorant." This did not, however, keep her from yelling "Oh shit!" if she burned the roast or nailed her thumb a good one while hammering a picture-hook in the wall. Nor does it preclude most people, Christian as well as heathen, from saying some-thing similar (or even stronger) when the dog barfs on the shag carpet or the car slips off the jack. It's important to tell the truth; so much depends upon it, as William Carlos Williams almost said when he was writing about that red wheelbarrow. The Legion of Decency might not like the word shit, and you might not like it much, either, but some-times you're just stuck with it - no kid ever ran to his mother and said that his little sister just defecated in the tub. I suppose he might say pushed or went woowoo, but took a shit is, I fear, very much in the ballpark (little pitchers have big ears, after all).
　　You must tell the truth if your dialogue is to have the resonance and realism that Hart's War, good story though it is, so sadly lacks - and that holds true all the way down to what folks say when they hit their thumb with the hammer. If you substitute "Oh sugar!" for "Oh shit!" because you're thinking about the Legion of Decency, you are breaking the unspoken contract that exists between writer and reader - your promise to express the truth of how people act and talk through the medium of a made-up story.
　　On the other hand, one of your characters (the protagonist's old maid aunt, for instance) really might say Oh sugar instead of Oh shit after pounding her thumb with the hammer. You'll know which to use if you know your character, and we'll learn something about the speaker that will make him or her more vivid and interesting. The point is to let each character speak freely, without regard to what the Legion of Decency or the Christian Ladies' Reading Circle may approve of. To do otherwise would be cowardly as well as dishonest, and believe me, writing fiction in America as we enter the twenty-first century is no job for intellectual cowards. There are lots of would-be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see . . . or to at least shut up about what you do see that's different. They are agents of the status quo. Not necessarily bad guys, but dangerous guys if you happen to believe in intellectual freedom.
　　As it happens, I agree with my mother: profanity and vulgarity is the language of the ignorant and the verbally challenged. Mostly, that is; there are exceptions, including profane aphorisms of great color and vitality. They always fuck you at the drive-thru; I'm busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest; wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first - these phrases and others like them aren't for the drawing- room, but they are striking and pungent. Or consider this passage from Brain Storm, by Richard Dooling, where vulgarity becomes poetry:
　　
　　"Exhibit A: One loutish, headstrong penis, a barbarous cuntivore without a flyspeck of decency in him. The capscallion of all rapscallions. A scurvy, vermiform scug with a serpentine twinkle in his solitary eye. An orgulous Turk who strikes in the dark vaults of flesh like a penile thunderbolt. A greedy cur seeking shadows, slick crevices, tuna fish ecstasy, and sleep . . ."
　　
　　Although not offered as dialogue, I want to reproduce another passage from Dooling here, because it speaks to the converse: that one can be quite admirably graphic without resorting to vulgarity or profanity at all:
　　
　　She straddled him and prepared to make the necessary port connections, male and female adapters ready, I/O enabled, server/client, master/slave. Just a couple of high-end biological machines preparing to hot-dock with cable modems and access each other's front-end processors.
　　
　　If I were a Henry James or Jane Austen sort of guy, writing only about toffs or smart college folks, I'd hardly ever have to use a dirty word or a profane phrase; I might never have had a book banned from America's school libraries or gotten a letter from some helpful fundamentalist fellow who wants me to know that I'm going to burn in hell, where all my millions of dollars won't buy me so much as a single drink of water. I did not, however, grow up among folks of that sort. I grew up as a part of America's lower middle class, and they're the people I can write about with the most honesty and knowledge. It means that they say shit more often than sugar when they bang their thumbs, but I've made my peace with that. Was never much at war with it in the first place, as a matter of fact.
　　When I get one of Those Letters, or face another review that accuses me of being a vulgar lowbrow - which to some extent I am - I take comfort from the words of turn-of-the-century social realist Frank Norris, whose novels include The Octopus, The Pit, and McTeague, an authentically great book. Norris wrote about working-class guys on ranches, in city laboring jobs, in factories. McTeague, the main character of Norris's finest work, is an unschooled dentist. Norris's books provoked a good deal of public outrage, to which Norris responded coolly and disdainfully: "What do I care for their opinions? I never truckled. I told them the truth."
　　Some people don't want to hear the truth, of course, but that's not your problem. What would be is wanting to be a writer without wanting to shoot straight. Talk, whether ugly or beautiful, is an index of character; it can also be a breath of cool, refreshing air in a room some people would prefer to keep shut up. In the end, the important question has nothing to do with whether the talk in your story is sacred or profane; the only question is how it rings on the page and in the ear. If you expect it to ring true, then you must talk yourself. Even more important, you must shut up and listen to others talk.
　　
- 8 -
　　Everything I've said about dialogue applies to building characters in fiction. The job boils down to two things: paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth about what you see. You may notice that your next-door neighbor picks his nose when he thinks no one is looking. This is a great detail, but noting it does you no good as a writer unless you're willing to dump it into a story at some point.
　　Are fictional characters drawn directly from life? Obviously not, at least on a one-to-one basis - you'd better not, unless you want to get sued or shot on your way to the mail-box some fine morning. In many cases, such as roman à clef novels like Valley of the Dolls, characters are drawn mostly from life, but after readers get done playing the inevitable guessing game about who's who, these stories tend to be unsatisfying, stuffed with shadowbox celebrities who bonk each other and then fade quickly from the reader's mind. I read Valley of the Dolls shortly after it came out (I was a cook's boy at a western Maine resort that summer), gobbling it up as eagerly as everyone else who bought it, I suppose, but I can't remember much of what it was about. On the whole, I think I prefer the weekly codswallop served up by The National Enquirer, where I can get recipes and cheesecake photographs as well as scandal.
　　For me, what happens to characters as a story progresses depends solely on what I discover about them as I go along - how they grow, in other words. Sometimes they grow a little. If they grow a lot, they begin to influence the course of the story instead of the other way around. I almost always start with something that's situational. I don't say that's right, only that it's the way I've always worked. If a story ends up that same way, however, I count it something of a failure no matter how interesting it may be to me or to others. I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven. Once you get beyond the short story, though (two to four thousand words, let's say), I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character study; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss. Hey, if you want a character study, buy a biography or get season tickets to your local college's theater-lab productions. You'll get all the character you can stand.
　　It's also important to remember that no one is "the bad guy" or "the best friend" or "the whore with a heart of gold" in real life; in real life we each of us regard ourselves as the main character, the protagonist, the big cheese; the camera is on us, baby. If you can bring this attitude into your fiction, you may not find it easier to create brilliant characters, but it will be harder for you to create the sort of one-dimensional dopes that populate so much pop fiction.
　　Annie Wilkes, the nurse who holds Paul Sheldon prisoner in Misery, may seem psychopathic to us, but it's important to remember that she seems perfectly sane and reasonable to her-self - heroic, in fact, a beleaguered woman trying to survive in a hostile world filled with cockadoodie brats. We see her go through dangerous mood-swings, but I tried never to come right out and say "Annie was depressed and possibly suicidal that day" or "Annie seemed particularly happy that day." If I have to tell you, I lose. If, on the other hand, I can show you a silent, dirty-haired woman who compulsively gobbles cake and candy, then have you draw the conclusion that Annie is in the depressive part of a manic-depressive cycle, I win. And if I am able, even briefly, to give you a Wilkes'-eye-view of the world - if I can make you understand her madness - then perhaps I can make her someone you sympathize with or even identify with. The result? She's more frightening than ever, because she's close to real. If, on the other hand, I turn her into a cackling old crone, she's just another pop-up bogeylady. In that case I lose bigtime, and so does the reader. Who would want to visit with such a stale shrew? That version of Annie was old when The Wizard of Oz was in its first run.
　　It would be fair enough to ask, I suppose, if Paul Sheldon in Misery is me. Certainly parts of him are . . . but I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you. When you ask yourself what a certain character will do given a certain set of circumstances, you're making the decision based on what you yourself would (or, in the case of a bad guy, wouldn't) do. Added to these versions of yourself are the character traits, both lovely and unlovely, which you observe in others (a guy who picks his nose when he thinks no one is looking, for instance). There is also a wonderful third element: pure blue-sky imagination. This is the part which allowed me to be a psychotic nurse for a little while when I was writing Misery. And being Annie was not, by and large, hard at all. In fact, it was sort of fun. I think being Paul was harder. He was sane, I'm sane, no four days at Disneyland there.
　　My novel The Dead Zone arose from two questions: Can a political assassin ever be right? And if he is, could you make him the protagonist of a novel? The good guy? These ideas called for a dangerously unstable politician, it seemed to me - a fellow who could climb the political ladder by showing the world a jolly, jes'-folks face and charming the voters by refusing to play the game in the usual way. (Greg Stillson's campaign tactics as I imagined them twenty years ago were very similar to the ones Jesse Ventura used in his successful campaign for the governor's seat in Minnesota. Thank good-ness Ventura doesn't seem like Stillson in any other ways.)
　　The Dead Zone's protagonist, Johnny Smith, is also an everyday, jes'-folks sort of guy, only with Johnny it's no act. The one thing that sets him apart is a limited ability to see the future, gained as the result of a childhood accident. When Johnny shakes Greg Stillson's hand at a political rally, he has a vision of Stillson becoming the President of the United States and subsequently starting World War III. Johnny comes to the conclusion that the only way he can keep this from happening - the only way he can save the world, in other words - is by putting a bullet in Stillson's head. Johnny is different from other violent, paranoid mystics in only one way: he really can see the future. Only don't they all say that?
　　The situation had an edgy, outlaw feel to it that appealed to me. I thought the story would work if I could make Johnny a genuinely decent guy without turning him into a plaster saint. Same thing with Stillson, only backwards: I wanted him to be authentically nasty and really scare the reader, not just because Stillson is always boiling with potential violence but because he is so goddam persuasive. I wanted the reader to constantly be thinking: "This guy is out of control - how come somebody can't see through him?" The fact that Johnny does see through him would, I thought, put the reader even more firmly in Johnny's corner.
　　When we first meet the potential assassin, he's taking his girl to the county fair, riding the rides and playing the games. What could be more normal or likable? The fact that he's on the verge of proposing to Sarah makes us like him even more. Later, when Sarah suggests they cap a perfect date by sleeping together for the first time, Johnny tells her he wants to wait until they're married. I felt I was walking a fine line on that one - I wanted readers to see Johnny as sincere and sincerely in love, a straight shooter but not a tight-assed prude. I was able to cut his principled behavior a bit by giving him a childish sense of humor; he greets Sarah wearing a glow-in-the- dark Halloween mask (the mask hopefully works in a symbolic way, too; certainly Johnny is perceived as a monster when he points a gun at candidate Stillson). "Same old Johnny," Sarah says, laughing, and by the time the two of them are headed back from the fair in Johnny's old Volkswagen Bug, I think Johnny Smith has become our friend, just an average American guy who's hoping to live happily ever after. The sort of guy who'd return your wallet with the money still in it if he found it on the street or stop and help you change your flat tire if he came upon you broke down by the side of the road. Ever since John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, the great American bogeyman has been the guy with the rifle in a high place. I wanted to make this guy into the reader's friend.
　　Johnny was hard. Taking an average guy and making him vivid and interesting always is. Greg Stillson (like most villains) was easier and a lot more fun. I wanted to nail his dangerous, divided character in the first scene of the book. Here, several years before he runs for the U.S. House of Representatives in New Hampshire, Stillson is a young travelling salesman hawking Bibles to midwest country folk. When he stops at one farm, he is menaced by a snarling dog. Stillson remains friendly and smiling - Mr. Jes' Folks - until he's positive no one's home at the farm. Then he sprays teargas into the dog's eyes and kicks it to death.
　　If one is to measure success by reader response, the opening scene of The Dead Zone (my first number-one hardcover best-seller) was one of my most successful ever. Certainly it struck a raw nerve; I was deluged with letters, most of them protesting my outrageous cruelty to animals. I wrote back to these folks, pointing out the usual things: (a) Greg Stillson wasn't real; (b) the dog wasn't real; (c) I myself had never in my life put the boot to one of my pets, or anyone else's. I also pointed out what might have been a little less obvious - it was important to establish, right up front, that Gregory Ammas Stillson was an extremely dangerous man, and very good at camouflage.
　　I continued to build the characters of Johnny and Greg in alternating scenes until the confrontation at the end of the book, when things resolve themselves in what I hoped would be an unexpected way. The characters of my protagonist and antagonist were determined by the story I had to tell - by the fossil, the found object, in other words. My job (and yours, if you decide this is a viable approach to storytelling) is to make sure these fictional folks behave in ways that will both help the story and seem reasonable to us, given what we know about them (and what we know about real life, of course). Sometimes villains feel self-doubt (as Greg Stillson does); sometimes they feel pity (as Annie Wilkes does). And some-times the good guy tries to turn away from doing the right thing, as Johnny Smith does . . . as Jesus Christ himself did, if you think about that prayer ("take this cup from my lips") in the Garden of Gethsemane. And if you do your job, your characters will come to life and start doing stuff on their own. I know that sounds a little creepy if you haven't actually experienced it, but it's terrific fun when it happens. And it will solve a lot of your problems, believe me.
　　
- 9 -
　　We've covered some basic aspects of good storytelling, all of which return to the same core ideas: that practice is invaluable (and should feel good, really not like practice at all) and that honesty is indispensable. Skills in description, dialogue, and character development all boil down to seeing or hearing clearly and then transcribing what you see or hear with equal clarity (and without using a lot of tiresome, unnecessary adverbs).
　　There are lots of bells and whistles, too - onomatopoeia, incremental repetition, stream of consciousness, interior dialogue, changes of verbal tense (it has become quite fashionable to tell stories, especially shorter ones, in the present tense), the sticky question of back story (how do you get it in and how much of it belongs), theme, pacing (we'll touch on these last two), and a dozen other topics, all of which are covered - sometimes at exhausting length - in writing courses and standard writing texts.
　　My take on all these things is pretty simple. It's all on the table, every bit of it, and you should use anything that improves the quality of your writing and doesn't get in the way of your story. If you like an alliterative phrase - the knights of nowhere battling the nabobs of nullity - by all means throw it in and see how it looks on paper. If it seems to work, it can stay. If it doesn't (and to me this one sounds pretty bad, like Spiro Agnew crossed with Robert Jordan), well, that DELETE key is on your machine for a good reason.
　　There is absolutely no need to be hidebound and conservative in your work, just as you are under no obligation to write experimental, nonlinear prose because The Village Voice or The New York Review of Books says the novel is dead. Both the traditional and the modern are available to you. Shit, write upside down if you want to, or do it in Crayola pictographs. But no matter how you do it, there comes a point when you must judge what you've written and how well you wrote it. I don't believe a story or a novel should be allowed outside the door of your study or writing room unless you feel confident that it's reasonably reader-friendly. You can't please all of the readers all of the time; you can't please even some of the readers all of the time, but you really ought to try to please at least some of the readers some of the time. I think William Shakespeare said that. And now that I've waved that caution flag, duly satisfying all OSHA, MENSA, NASA, and Writers' Guild guidelines, let me reiterate that it's all on the table, all up for grabs. Isn't that an intoxicating thought? I think it is. Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch once said, "Murder your darlings," and he was right.
　　I most often see chances to add the grace-notes and ornamental touches after my basic storytelling job is done. Once in awhile it comes earlier; not long after I began The Green Mile and realized my main character was an innocent man likely to be executed for the crime of another, I decided to give him the initials J.C., after the most famous innocent man of all time. I first saw this done in Light in August (still my favorite Faulkner novel), where the sacrificial lamb is named Joe Christmas. Thus death-row inmate John Bowes became John Coffey. I wasn't sure, right up to the end of the book, if my J.C. would live or die. I wanted him to live because I liked and pitied him, but I figured those initials couldn't hurt, one way or the other.*
　　Mostly I don't see stuff like that until the story's done. Once it is, I'm able to kick back, read over what I've written, and look for underlying patterns. If I see some (and I almost always do), I can work at bringing them out in a second, more fully realized, draft of the story. Two examples of the sort of work second drafts were made for are symbolism and theme.
　　If in school you ever studied the symbolism of the color white in Moby-Dick or Hawthorne's symbolic use of the forest in such stories as "Young Goodman Brown" and came away from those classes feeling like a stupidnik, you may even now be backing off with your hands raised protectively in front of you, shaking your head and saying gee, no thanks, I gave at the office.
　　But wait. Symbolism doesn't have to be difficult and relentlessly brainy. Nor does it have to be consciously crafted as a kind of ornamental Turkish rug upon which the furniture of the story stands. If you can go along with the concept of the story as a pre-existing thing, a fossil in the ground, then symbolism must also be pre-existing, right? Just another bone (or set of them) in your new discovery. That's if it's there. If it isn't, so what? You've still got the story itself, don't you?
　　If it is there and if you notice it, I think you should bring it out as well as you can, polishing it until it shines and then cutting it the way a jeweler would cut a precious or semi-precious stone.
　　Carrie, as I've already noted, is a short novel about a picked-on girl who discovers a telekinetic ability within her-self - she can move objects by thinking about them. To atone for a vicious shower-room prank in which she has participated, Carrie's classmate Susan Snell persuades her boyfriend to invite Carrie to the Senior Prom. They are elected King and Queen. During the celebration, another of Carrie's class-mates, the unpleasant Christine Hargensen, pulls a second prank on Carrie, this one deadly. Carrie takes her revenge by using her telekinetic power to kill most of her classmates (and her atrocious mother) before dying herself. That's the whole deal, really; it's as simple as a fairy-tale. There was no need to mess it up with bells and whistles, although I did add a number of epistolary interludes (passages from fictional books, a diary entry, letters, teletype bulletins) between narrative segments. This was partly to inject a greater sense of realism (I was thinking of Orson Welles's radio adaptation of War of the Worlds) but mostly because the first draft of the book was so damned short it barely seemed like a novel.
　　When I read Carrie over prior to starting the second draft, I noticed there was blood at all three crucial points of the story: beginning (Carrie's paranormal ability is apparently brought on by her first menstrual period), climax (the prank which sets Carrie off at the prom involves a bucket of pig's blood - "pig's blood for a pig," Chris Hargensen tells her boyfriend), and end (Sue Snell, the girl who tries to help Carrie, discovers she is not pregnant as she had half-hoped and half-feared when she gets her own period).
　　There's plenty of blood in most horror stories, of course - it is our stock-in-trade, you might say. Still, the blood in Carrie seemed more than just splatter to me. It seemed to mean something. That meaning wasn't consciously created, how-ever. While writing Carrie I never once stopped to think: "Ah, all this blood symbolism will win me Brownie Points with the critics" or "Boy oh boy, this should certainly get me in a college bookstore or two!" For one thing, a writer would have to be a lot crazier than I am to think of Carrie as anyone's intellectual treat.
　　Intellectual treat or not, the significance of all that blood was hard to miss once I started reading over my beer- and tea-splattered first-draft manuscript. So I started to play with the idea, image, and emotional connotations of blood, trying to think of as many associations as I could. There were lots, most of them pretty heavy. Blood is strongly linked to the idea of sacrifice; for young women it's associated with reaching physical maturity and the ability to bear children; in the Christian religion (plenty of others, as well), it's symbolic of both sin and salvation. Finally, it is associated with the handing down of family traits and talents. We are said to look like this or behave like that because "it's in our blood." We know this isn't very scientific, that those things are really in our genes and DNA patterns, but we use the one to summarize the other.
　　It is that ability to summarize and encapsulate that makes symbolism so interesting, useful, and - when used well - arresting. You could argue that it's really just another kind of figurative language.
　　Does that make it necessary to the success of your story or novel? Indeed not, and it can actually hurt, especially if you get carried away. Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create a sense of artificial profundity. None of the bells and whistles are about story, all right? Only story is about story. (Are you tired of hearing that yet? I hope not, 'cause I'm not even close to getting tired of saying it.)
　　Symbolism (and the other adornments, too) does serve a useful purpose, though - it's more than just chrome on the grille. It can serve as a focusing device for both you and your reader, helping to create a more unified and pleasing work. I think that, when you read your manuscript over (and when you talk it over), you'll see if symbolism, or the potential for it, exists. If it doesn't, leave well enough alone. If it does, however - if it's clearly a part of the fossil you're working to unearth - go for it. Enhance it. You're a monkey if you don't.
　　
　　*A few critics accused me of being symbolically simplistic in the matter of John Coffey's initials. And I'm like, "What is this, rocket science?" I mean, come on, guys.
　　
- 10 -
　　The same things are true of theme. Writing and literature classes can be annoyingly preoccupied by (and pretentious about) theme, approaching it as the most sacred of sacred cows, but (don't be shocked) it's really no big deal. If you write a novel, spend weeks and then months catching it word by word, you owe it both to the book and to yourself to lean back (or take a long walk) when you've finished and ask yourself why you bothered - why you spent all that time, why it seemed so important. In other words, what's it all about, Alfie?
　　When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you're done, you have to step back and look at the forest. Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language (they call it prose for a reason, y'know), but it seems to me that every book - at least every one worth reading - is about something. Your job during or just after the first draft is to decide what something or somethings yours is about. Your job in the second draft - one of them, anyway - is to make that something even more clear. This may necessitate some big changes and revisions. The benefits to you and your reader will be clearer focus and a more unified story. It hardly ever fails.
　　The book that took me the longest to write was The Stand. This is also the one my longtime readers still seem to like the best (there's something a little depressing about such a united opinion that you did your best work twenty years ago, but we won't go into that just now, thanks). I finished the first draft about sixteen months after I started it. The Stand took an especially long time because it nearly died going into the third turn and heading for home.
　　I'd wanted to write a sprawling, multi-character sort of novel - a fantasy epic, if I could manage it - and to that end I employed a shifting-perspective narrative, adding a major character in each chapter of the long first section. Thus Chapter One concerned itself with Stuart Redman, a blue-collar factory worker from Texas; Chapter Two first concerned itself with Fran Goldsmith, a pregnant college girl from Maine, and then returned to Stu; Chapter Three began with Larry Underwood, a rock-and-roll singer in New York, before going back first to Fran, then to Stu Redman again.
　　My plan was to link all these characters, the good, the bad, and the ugly, in two places: Boulder and Las Vegas. I thought they'd probably end up going to war against one another. The first half of the book also told the story of a man-made virus which sweeps America and the world, wiping out ninety-nine per cent of the human race and utterly destroying our technology-based culture.
　　I was writing this story near the end of the so-called Energy Crisis in the 1970s, and I had an absolutely marvellous time envisioning a world that went smash during the course of one horrified, infected summer (really not much more than a month). The view was panoramic, detailed, nationwide, and (to me, at least) breathtaking. Rarely have I seen so clearly with the eye of my imagination, from the traffic jam plugging the dead tube of New York's Lincoln Tunnel to the sinister, Nazi-ish rebirth of Las Vegas under the watchful (and often amused) red eye of Randall Flagg. All this sounds terrible, is terrible, but to me the vision was also strangely optimistic. No more energy crisis, for one thing, no more famine, no more massacres in Uganda, no more acid rain or hole in the ozone layer. Finito as well to saber-rattling nuclear superpowers, and certainly no more overpopulation. Instead, there was a chance for humanity's remaining shred to start over again in a God-centered world to which miracles, magic, and prophecy had returned. I liked my story. I liked my characters. And still there came a point when I couldn't write any longer because I didn't know what to write. Like Pilgrim in John Bunyan's epic, I had come to a place where the straight way was lost. I wasn't the first writer to discover this awful place, and I'm a long way from being the last; this is the land of writer's block.
　　If I'd had two or even three hundred pages of single-spaced manuscript instead of more than five hundred, I think I would have abandoned The Stand and gone on to something else - God knows I had done it before. But five hundred pages was too great an investment, both in time and in creative energy; I found it impossible to let go. Also, there was this little voice whispering to me that the book was really good, and if I didn't finish I would regret it forever. So instead of moving on to another project, I started taking long walks (a habit which would, two decades later, get me in a lot of trouble). I took a book or magazine on these walks but rarely opened it, no matter how bored I felt looking at the same old trees and the same old chattering, ill-natured jays and squirrels. Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam. I spent those walks being bored and thinking about my gigantic boondoggle of a manuscript.
　　For weeks I got exactly nowhere in my thinking - it all just seemed too hard, too fucking complex. I had run out too many plotlines, and they were in danger of becoming snarled. I circled the problem again and again, beat my fists on it, knocked my head against it . . . and then one day when I was thinking of nothing much at all, the answer came to me. It arrived whole and complete - gift-wrapped, you could say - in a single bright flash. I ran home and jotted it down on paper, the only time I've done such a thing, because I was terrified of forgetting.
　　What I saw was that the America in which The Stand took place might have been depopulated by the plague, but the world of my story had become dangerously overcrowded - a veritable Calcutta. The solution to where I was stuck, I saw, could be pretty much the same as the situation that got me going - an explosion instead of a plague, but still one quick, hard slash of the Gordian knot. I would send the survivors west from Boulder to Las Vegas on a redemptive quest - they would go at once, with no supplies and no plan, like Biblical characters seeking a vision or to know the will of God. In Vegas they would meet Randall Flagg, and good guys and bad guys alike would be forced to make their stand.
　　At one moment I had none of this; at the next I had all of it. If there is any one thing I love about writing more than the rest, it's that sudden flash of insight when you see how every-thing connects. I have heard it called "thinking above the curve," and it's that; I've heard it called "the over-logic," and it's that, too. Whatever you call it, I wrote my page or two of notes in a frenzy of excitement and spent the next two or three days turning my solution over in my mind, looking for flaws and holes (also working out the actual narrative flow, which involved two supporting characters placing a bomb in a major character's closet), but that was mostly out of a sense of this-is-too-good-to-be-true unbelief. Too good or not, I knew it was true at the moment of revelation: that bomb in Nick Andros's closet was going to solve all my narrative problems. It did, too. The rest of the book ran itself off in nine weeks.
　　Later, when my first draft of The Stand was done, I was able to get a better fix on what had stopped me so completely in mid-course; it was a lot easier to think without that voice in the middle of my head constantly yammering "I'm losing my book! Ah shit, five hundred pages and I'm losing my book! Condition red! CONDITION RED!!" I was also able to analyze what got me going again and appreciate the irony of it: I saved my book by blowing approximately half its major characters to smithereens (there actually ended up being two explosions, the one in Boulder balanced by a similar act of sabotage in Las Vegas).
　　The real source of my malaise, I decided, had been that in the wake of the plague, my Boulder characters - the good guys - were starting up the same old technological deathtrip. The first hesitant CB broadcasts, beckoning people to Boulder, would soon lead to TV; infomercials and 900 numbers would be back in no time. Same deal with the power plants. It certainly didn't take my Boulder folks long to decide that seeking the will of the God who spared them was a lot less important than getting the refrigerators and air conditioners up and running again. In Vegas, Randall Flagg and his friends were learning how to fly jets and bombers as well as getting the lights back on, but that was okay - to be expected - because they were the bad guys. What had stopped me was realizing, on some level of my mind, that the good guys and bad guys were starting to look perilously alike, and what got me going again was realizing the good guys were worshipping an electronic golden calf and needed a wake-up call. A bomb in the closet would do just fine.
　　All this suggested to me that violence as a solution is woven through human nature like a damning red thread. That became the theme of The Stand, and I wrote the second draft with it fixed firmly in my mind. Again and again characters (the bad ones like Lloyd Henreid as well as the good ones like Stu Redman and Larry Underwood) mention the fact that "all that stuff [i.e., weapons of mass destruction] is just lying around, waiting to be picked up." When the Boulderites pro-pose - innocently, meaning only the best - to rebuild the same old neon Tower of Babel, they are wiped out by more violence. The folks who plant the bomb are doing what Randall Flagg told them to, but Mother Abagail, Flagg's opposite number, says again and again that "all things serve God." If this is true - and within the context of The Stand it certainly is - then the bomb is actually a stern message from the guy upstairs, a way of saying "I didn't bring you all this way just so you could start up the same old shit."
　　Near the end of the novel (it was the end of the first, shorter version of the story), Fran asks Stuart Redman if there's any hope at all, if people ever learn from their mistakes. Stu replies, "I don't know," and then pauses. In story-time, that pause lasts only as long as it takes the reader to flick his or her eye to the last line. In the writer's study, it went on a lot longer. I searched my mind and heart for something else Stu could say, some clarifying statement. I wanted to find it because at that moment if at no other, Stu was speaking for me. In the end, however, Stu simply repeats what he has already said: I don't know. It was the best I could do. Sometimes the book gives you answers, but not always, and I didn't want to leave the readers who had followed me through hundreds of pages with nothing but some empty platitude I didn't believe myself. There is no moral to The Stand, no "We'd better learn or we'll probably destroy the whole damned planet next time" - but if the theme stands out clearly enough, those discussing it may offer their own morals and conclusions. Nothing wrong with that; such discussions are one of the great pleasures of the reading life.
　　Although I'd used symbolism, imagery, and literary homage before getting to my novel about the big plague (without Dracula, for instance, I think there is no 'Salem's Lot), I'm quite sure that I never thought much about theme before getting roadblocked on The Stand. I suppose I thought such things were for Better Minds and Bigger Thinkers. I'm not sure I would have gotten to it as soon as I did, had I not been desperate to save my story.
　　I was astounded at how really useful "thematic thinking" turned out to be. It wasn't just a vaporous idea that English professors made you write about on midterm essay exams ("Discuss the thematic concerns of Wise Blood in three well-reasoned paragraphs - 30 pts"), but another handy gadget to keep in the toolbox, this one something like a magnifying glass.
　　Since my revelation on the road concerning the bomb in the closet, I have never hesitated to ask myself, either before starting the second draft of a book or while stuck for an idea in the first draft, just what it is I'm writing about, why I'm spending the time when I could be playing my guitar or riding my motorcycle, what got my nose down to the grind-stone in the first place and then kept it there. The answer doesn't always come right away, but there usually is one, and it's usually not too hard to find, either.
　　I don't believe any novelist, even one who's written forty-plus books, has too many thematic concerns; I have many interests, but only a few that are deep enough to power novels. These deep interests (I won't quite call them obsessions) include how difficult it is - perhaps impossible! - to close Pandora's technobox once it's open (The Stand, The Tommy-knockers, Firestarter); the question of why, if there is a God, such terrible things happen (The Stand, Desperation, The Green Mile); the thin line between reality and fantasy (The Dark Half, Bag of Bones, The Drawing of the Three); and most of all, the terrible attraction violence sometimes has for fundamentally good people (The Shining, The Dark Half). I've also written again and again about the fundamental differences between children and adults, and about the healing power of the human imagination.
　　And I repeat: no big deal. These are just interests which have grown out of my life and thought, out of my experiences as a boy and a man, out of my roles as a husband, a father, a writer, and a lover. They are questions that occupy my mind when I turn out the lights for the night and I'm alone with myself, looking up into the darkness with one hand tucked beneath the pillow.
　　You undoubtedly have your own thoughts, interests, and concerns, and they have arisen, as mine have, from your experiences and adventures as a human being. Some are likely similar to those I've mentioned above and some are likely very different, but you have them, and you should use them in your work. That's not all those ideas are there for, perhaps, but surely it's one of the things they are good for.
　　I should close this little sermonette with a word of warning - starting with the questions and thematic concerns is a recipe for bad fiction. Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story. The only possible exceptions to this rule that I can think of are allegories like George Orwell's Animal Farm (and I have a sneaking suspicion that with Animal Farm the story idea may indeed have come first; if I see Orwell in the afterlife, I mean to ask him).
　　But once your basic story is on paper, you need to think about what it means and enrich your following drafts with your conclusions. To do less is to rob your work (and eventually your readers) of the vision that makes each tale you write uniquely your own.
　　
- 11 -
　　So far, so good. Now let's talk about revising the work - how much and how many drafts? For me the answer has always been two drafts and a polish (with the advent of word-processing technology, my polishes have become closer to a third draft).
　　You should realize that I'm only talking about my own personal mode of writing here; in actual practice, rewriting varies greatly from writer to writer. Kurt Vonnegut, for example, rewrote each page of his novels until he got them exactly the way he wanted them. The result was days when he might only manage a page or two of finished copy (and the waste-basket would be full of crumpled, rejected page seventy-ones and seventy-twos), but when the manuscript was finished, the book was finished, by gum. You could set it in type. Yet I think certain things hold true for most writers, and those are the ones I want to talk about now. If you've been writing awhile, you won't need me to help you much with this part; you'll have your own established routine. If you're a beginner, though, let me urge that you take your story through at least two drafts; the one you do with the study door closed and the one you do with it open.
　　With the door shut, downloading what's in my head directly to the page, I write as fast as I can and still remain comfortable. Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt. If I write rapidly, putting down my story exactly as it comes into my mind, only looking back to check the names of my characters and the relevant parts of their back stories, I find that I can keep up with my original enthusiasm and at the same time outrun the self-doubt that's always waiting to settle in.
　　This first draft - the All-Story Draft - should be written with no help (or interference) from anyone else. There may come a point when you want to show what you're doing to a close friend (very often the close friend you think of first is the one who shares your bed), either because you're proud of what you're doing or because you're doubtful about it. My best advice is to resist this impulse. Keep the pressure on; don't lower it by exposing what you've written to the doubt, the praise, or even the well-meaning questions of someone from the Outside World. Let your hope of success (and your fear of failure) carry you on, difficult as that can be. There'll be time to show off what you've done when you finish . . . but even after finishing I think you must be cautious and give yourself a chance to think while the story is still like a field of freshly fallen snow, absent of any tracks save your own.
　　The great thing about writing with the door shut is that you find yourself forced to concentrate on story to the exclusion of practically everything else. No one can ask you "What were you trying to express with Garfield's dying words?" or "What's the significance of the green dress?" You may not have been trying to express anything with Garfield's dying words, and Maura could be wearing green only because that's what you saw when she came into sight in your mind's eye. On the other hand, perhaps those things do mean something (or will, when you get a chance to look at the forest instead of the trees). Either way, the first draft is the wrong place to think about it.
　　Here's something else - if no one says to you, "Oh Sam (or Amy)! This is wonderful!," you are a lot less apt to slack off or to start concentrating on the wrong thing . . . being wonderful, for instance, instead of telling the goddam story.
　　Now let's say you've finished your first draft. Congratulations! Good job! Have a glass of champagne, send out for pizza, do whatever it is you do when you've got something to celebrate. If you have someone who has been impatiently waiting to read your novel - a spouse, let's say, someone who has perhaps been working nine to five and helping to pay the bills while you chase your dream - then this is the time to give up the goods . . . if, that is, your first reader or readers will promise not to talk to you about the book until you are ready to talk to them about it.
　　This may sound a little high-handed, but it's really not. You've done a lot of work and you need a period of time (how much or how little depends on the individual writer) to rest. Your mind and imagination - two things which are related, but not really the same - have to recycle themselves, at least in regard to this one particular work. My advice is that you take a couple of days off - go fishing, go kayaking, do a jig-saw puzzle - and then go to work on something else. Some-thing shorter, preferably, and something that's a complete change of direction and pace from your newly finished book. (I wrote some pretty good novellas, "The Body" and "Apt Pupil" among them, between drafts of longer works like The Dead Zone and The Dark Half.)
　　How long you let your book rest - sort of like bread dough between kneadings - is entirely up to you, but I think it should be a minimum of six weeks. During this time your manuscript will be safely shut away in a desk drawer, aging and (one hopes) mellowing. Your thoughts will turn to it frequently, and you'll likely be tempted a dozen times or more to take it out, if only to re-read some passage that seems particularly fine in your memory, something you'd like to go back to so you can re-experience what a really excellent writer you are.
　　Resist temptation. If you don't, you'll very likely decide you didn't do as well on that passage as you thought and you'd better retool it on the spot. This is bad. The only thing worse would be for you to decide the passage is even better than you remembered - why not drop everything and read the whole book over right then? Get back to work on it! Hell, you're ready! You're fuckin Shakespeare!
　　You're not, though, and you're not ready to go back to the old project until you've gotten so involved in a new one (or re-involved in your day-to-day life) that you've almost for-gotten the unreal estate that took up three hours of your every morning or afternoon for a period of three or five or seven months.
　　When you come to the correct evening (which you well may have marked on your office calendar), take your manuscript out of the drawer. If it looks like an alien relic bought at a junk-shop or yard sale where you can hardly remember stopping, you're ready. Sit down with your door shut (you'll be opening it to the world soon enough), a pencil in your hand, and a legal pad by your side. Then read your manuscript over.
　　Do it all in one sitting, if that's possible (it won't be, of course, if your book is a four- or five-hundred-pager). Make all the notes you want, but concentrate on the mundane housekeeping jobs, like fixing misspellings and picking up inconsistencies. There'll be plenty; only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, "Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for."
　　If you've never done it before, you'll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It's yours, you'll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It's always easier to kill someone else's darlings than it is to kill your own.
　　With six weeks' worth of recuperation time, you'll also be able to see any glaring holes in the plot or character development. I'm talking about holes big enough to drive a truck through. It's amazing how some of these things can elude the writer while he or she is occupied with the daily work of composition. And listen - if you spot a few of these big holes, you are forbidden to feel depressed about them or to beat up on yourself. Screw-ups happen to the best of us. There's a story that the architect of the Flatiron Building committed suicide when he realized, just before the ribbon-cutting ceremony, that he had neglected to put any men's rooms in his prototypical skyscraper. Probably not true, but remember this: someone really did design the Titanic and then label it unsinkable.
　　For me, the most glaring errors I find on the re-read have to do with character motivation (related to character development but not quite the same). I'll smack myself upside the head with the heel of my palm, then grab my legal pad and write something like p. 91: Sandy Hunter filches a buck from Shirley's stash in the dispatch office. Why? God's sake, Sandy would NEVER do anything like this! I also mark the page in the manuscript with a big symbol, meaning that cuts and/or changes are needed on this page, and reminding myself to check my notes for the exact details if I don't remember them.
　　I love this part of the process (well, I love all the parts of the process, but this one is especially nice) because I'm rediscovering my own book, and usually liking it. That changes. By the time a book is actually in print, I've been over it a dozen times or more, can quote whole passages, and only wish the damned old smelly thing would go away. That's later, though; the first read-through is usually pretty fine.
　　During that reading, the top part of my mind is concentrating on story and toolbox concerns: knocking out pro-nouns with unclear antecedents (I hate and mistrust pronouns, every one of them as slippery as a fly-by-night personal-injury lawyer), adding clarifying phrases where they seem necessary, and of course, deleting all the adverbs I can bear to part with (never all of them; never enough).
　　Underneath, however, I'm asking myself the Big Questions. The biggest: Is this story coherent? And if it is, what will turn coherence into a song? What are the recurring elements? Do they entwine and make a theme? I'm asking myself What's it all about, Stevie, in other words, and what I can do to make those underlying concerns even clearer. What I want most of all is resonance, something that will linger for a little while in Constant Reader's mind (and heart) after he or she has closed the book and put it up on the shelf. I'm looking for ways to do that without spoon-feeding the reader or selling my birthright for a plot of message. Take all those messages and those morals and stick em where the sun don't shine, all right? I want resonance. Most of all, I'm looking for what I meant, because in the second draft I'll want to add scenes and incidents that reinforce that meaning. I'll also want to delete stuff that goes in other directions. There's apt to be a lot of that stuff, especially near the beginning of a story, when I have a tendency to flail. All that thrashing around has to go if I am to achieve anything like a unified effect. When I've finished reading and making all my little anal-retentive revisions, it's time to open the door and show what I've written to four or five close friends who have indicated a willingness to look.
　　Someone - I can't remember who, for the life of me - once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one per-son. As it happens, I believe this. I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of a story, the writer is thinking, "I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part?" For me that first reader is my wife, Tabitha.
　　She has always been an extremely sympathetic and supportive first reader. Her positive reaction to difficult books like Bag of Bones (my first novel with a new publisher after twenty good years with Viking that came to an end in a stupid squabble about money) and relatively controversial ones like Gerald's Game meant the world to me. But she's also unflinching when she sees something she thinks is wrong. When she does, she lets me know loud and clear.
　　In her role as critic and first reader, Tabby often makes me think of a story I read about Alfred Hitchcock's wife, Alma Reville. Ms. Reville was the equivalent of Hitch's first reader, a sharp-eyed critic who was totally unimpressed with the suspense-master's growing reputation as an auteur. Lucky for him. Hitch say he want to fly, Alma say, "First eat your eggs."
　　Not long after finishing Psycho, Hitchcock screened it for a few friends. They raved about it, declaring it to be a suspense masterpiece. Alma was quiet until they'd all had their say, then spoke very firmly: "You can't send it out like that."
　　There was a thunderstruck silence, except for Hitchcock himself, who only asked why not. "Because," his wife responded, "Janet Leigh swallows when she's supposed to be dead." It was true. Hitchcock didn't argue any more than I do when Tabby points out one of my lapses. She and I may argue about many aspects of a book, and there have been times when I've gone against her judgment on subjective matters, but when she catches me in a goof, I know it, and thank God I've got someone around who'll tell me my fly's unzipped before I go out in public that way.
　　In addition to Tabby's first read, I usually send manuscripts to between four and eight other people who have critiqued my stories over the years. Many writing texts caution against asking friends to read your stuff, suggesting you're not apt to get a very unbiased opinion from folks who've eaten dinner at your house and sent their kids over to play with your kids in your backyard. It's unfair, according to this view, to put a pal in such a position. What happens if he/she feels he/she has to say, "I'm sorry, good buddy, you've written some great yarns in the past but this one sucks like a vacuum cleaner"?
　　The idea has some validity, but I don't think an unbiased opinion is exactly what I'm looking for. And I believe that most people smart enough to read a novel are also tactful enough to find a gentler mode of expression than "This sucks." (Although most of us know that "I think this has a few problems" actually means "This sucks," don't we?) Besides, if you really did write a stinker - it happens; as the author of Maximum Over-drive I'm qualified to say so - wouldn't you rather hear the news from a friend while the entire edition consists of a half-dozen Xerox copies?
　　When you give out six or eight copies of a book, you get back six or eight highly subjective opinions about what's good and what's bad in it. If all your readers think you did a pretty good job, you probably did. This sort of unanimity does happen, but it's rare, even with friends. More likely, they'll think that some parts are good and some parts are . . . well, not so good. Some will feel Character A works but Character B is far-fetched. If others feel that Character B is believable but Character A is overdrawn, it's a wash. You can safely relax and leave things the way they are (in baseball, tie goes to the runner; for novelists, it goes to the writer). If some people love your ending and others hate it, same deal - it's a wash, and tie goes to the writer.
　　Some first readers specialize in pointing out factual errors, which are the easiest to deal with. One of my first-reader smart guys, the late Mac McCutcheon, a wonderful high school English teacher, knew a lot about guns. If I had a character toting a Winchester .330, Mac might jot in the margin that Winchester didn't make that caliber but Remington did. In such cases you've got two for the price of one - the error and the fix. It's a good deal, because you come off looking like you're an expert and your first reader will feel flattered to have been of help. And the best catch Mac ever made for me had nothing to do with guns. One day while reading a piece of a manuscript in the teachers' room, he burst out laughing - laughed so hard, in fact, that tears went rolling down his bearded cheeks. Because the story in question, 'Salem's Lot, had not been intended as a laff riot, I asked him what he had found. I had written a line that went something like this: Although deer season doesn't start until November in Maine, the fields of October are often alive with gunshots; the locals are shooting as many peasants as they think their families will eat. A copyeditor would no doubt have picked up the mistake, but Mac spared me that embarrassment.
　　Subjective evaluations are, as I say, a little harder to deal with, but listen: if everyone who reads your book says you have a problem (Connie comes back to her husband too easily, Hal's cheating on the big exam seems unrealistic given what we know about him, the novel's conclusion seems abrupt and arbitrary), you've got a problem and you better do some-thing about it.
　　Plenty of writers resist this idea. They feel that revising a story according to the likes and dislikes of an audience is somehow akin to prostitution. If you really feel that way, I won't try to change your mind. You'll save on charges at Copy Cop, too, because you won't have to show anyone your story in the first place. In fact (he said snottily), if you really feel that way, why bother to publish at all? Just finish your books and then pop them in a safe-deposit box, as J. D. Salinger is reputed to have been doing in his later years.
　　And yes, I can relate, at least a bit, to that sort of resentment. In the film business, where I have had a quasi-professional life, first-draft showings are called "test screenings." These have become standard practice in the industry, and they drive most filmmakers absolutely bugshit. Maybe they should. The studio shells out somewhere between fifteen and a hundred million dollars to make a film, then asks the director to recut it based on the opinions of a Santa Barbara multiplex audience composed of hairdressers, meter maids, shoe-store clerks, and out-of-work pizza-delivery guys. And the worst, most maddening thing about it? If you get the demographic right, test screenings seem to work.
　　I'd hate to see novels revised on the basis of test audiences - a lot of good books would never see the light of day if it was done that way - but come on, we're talking about half a dozen people you know and respect. If you ask the right ones (and if they agree to read your book), they can tell you a lot.
　　Do all opinions weigh the same? Not for me. In the end I listen most closely to Tabby, because she's the one I write for, the one I want to wow. If you're writing primarily for one person besides yourself, I'd advise you to pay very close attention to that person's opinion (I know one fellow who says he writes mostly for someone who's been dead fifteen years, but the majority of us aren't in that position). And if what you hear makes sense, then make the changes. You can't let the whole world into your story, but you can let in the ones that matter the most. And you should.
　　Call that one person you write for Ideal Reader. He or she is going to be in your writing room all the time: in the flesh once you open the door and let the world back in to shine on the bubble of your dream, in spirit during the sometimes troubling and often exhilarating days of the first draft, when the door is closed. And you know what? You'll find yourself bending the story even before Ideal Reader glimpses so much as the first sentence. I.R. will help you get outside yourself a little, to actually read your work in progress as an audience would while you're still working. This is perhaps the best way of all to make sure you stick to story, a way of playing to the audience even while there's no audience there and you're totally in charge.
　　When I write a scene that strikes me as funny (like the pie-eating contest in "The Body" or the execution rehearsal in The Green Mile), I am also imagining my I.R. finding it funny. I love it when Tabby laughs out of control - she puts her hands up as if to say I surrender and these big tears go rolling down her cheeks. I love it, that's all, fucking adore it, and when I get hold of something with that potential, I twist it as hard as I can. During the actual writing of such a scene (door closed), the thought of making her laugh - or cry - is in the back of my mind. During the rewrite (door open), the question - is it funny enough yet? scary enough? - is right up front. I try to watch her when she gets to a particular scene, hoping for at least a smile or - jackpot, baby! - that big belly-laugh with the hands up, waving in the air.
　　This isn't always easy on her. I gave her the manuscript of my novella Hearts in Atlantis while we were in North Carolina, where we'd gone to see a Cleveland Rockers-Charlotte Sting WNBA game. We drove north to Virginia the following day, and it was during this drive that Tabby read my story. There are some funny parts in it - at least I thought so - and I kept peeking over at her to see if she was chuckling (or at least smiling). I didn't think she'd notice, but of course she did. On my eighth or ninth peek (I guess it could have been my fifteenth), she looked up and snapped: "Pay attention to your driving before you crack us up, will you? Stop being so goddam needy!"
　　I paid attention to my driving and stopped sneaking peeks (well . . . almost). About five minutes later, I heard a snort of laughter from my right. Just a little one, but it was enough for me. The truth is that most writers are needy. Especially between the first draft and the second, when the study door swings open and the light of the world shines in.
　　
- 12 -
　　Ideal Reader is also the best way for you to gauge whether or not your story is paced correctly and if you've handled the back story in satisfactory fashion.
　　Pace is the speed at which your narrative unfolds. There is a kind of unspoken (hence undefended and unexamined) belief in publishing circles that the most commercially successful stories and novels are fast-paced. I guess the underlying thought is that people have so many things to do today, and are so easily distracted from the printed word, that you'll lose them unless you become a kind of short-order cook, serving up sizzling burgers, fries, and eggs over easy just as fast as you can.
　　Like so many unexamined beliefs in the publishing business, this idea is largely bullshit . . . which is why, when books like Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose or Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain suddenly break out of the pack and climb the best-seller lists, publishers and editors are astonished. I suspect that most of them ascribe these books' unexpected success to unpredictable and deplorable lapses into good taste on the part of the reading public.
　　Not that there's anything wrong with rapidly paced novels. Some pretty good writers - Nelson DeMille, Wilbur Smith, and Sue Grafton, to name just three - have made millions writing them. But you can overdo the speed thing. Move too fast and you risk leaving the reader behind, either by confusing or by wearing him/her out. And for myself, I like a slower pace and a bigger, higher build. The leisurely luxury-liner experience of a long, absorbing novel like The Far Pavilions or A Suitable Boy has been one of the form's chief attractions since the first examples - endless, multipart epistolary tales like Clarissa. I believe each story should be allowed to unfold at its own pace, and that pace is not always double time. Nevertheless, you need to beware - if you slow the pace down too much, even the most patient reader is apt to grow restive.
　　The best way to find the happy medium? Ideal Reader, of course. Try to imagine whether he or she will be bored by a certain scene - if you know the tastes of your I.R. even half as well as I know the tastes of mine, that shouldn't be too hard. Is I.R. going to feel there's too much pointless talk in this place or that? That you've underexplained a certain situation . . . or overexplained it, which is one of my chronic failings? That you forgot to resolve some important plot point? Forgot an entire character, as Raymond Chandler once did? (When asked about the murdered chauffeur in The Big Sleep, Chandler - who liked his tipple - replied, "Oh, him. You know, I forgot all about him.") These questions should be in your mind even with the door closed. And once it's open - once your Ideal Reader has actually read your manuscript - you should ask your questions out loud. Also, needy or not, you might want to watch and see when your I.R. puts your manuscript down to do something else. What scene was he or she reading? What was so easy to put down?
　　Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that's what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings).
　　As a teenager, sending out stories to magazines like Fantasy and Science Fiction and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, I got used to the sort of rejection note that starts Dear Contributor (might as well start off Dear Chump), and so came to relish any little personal dash on these printed pink-slips. They were few and far between, but when they came they never failed to lighten my day and put a smile on my face.
　　In the spring of my senior year at Lisbon High - 1966, this would've been - I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: "Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%. Good luck."
　　I wish I could remember who wrote that note - Algis Budrys, perhaps. Whoever it was did me a hell of a favor. I copied the formula out on a piece of shirt-cardboard and taped it to the wall beside my typewriter. Good things started to happen for me shortly after. There was no sudden golden flood of magazine sales, but the number of personal notes on the rejection slips went up fast. I even got one from Durant Imboden, the fiction editor at Playboy. That communiqué almost stopped my heart. Playboy paid two thousand dollars and up for short stories, and two grand was a quarter of what my mother made each year in her housekeeping job at Pineland Training Center.
　　The Rewrite Formula probably wasn't the only reason I started to get some results; I suspect another was that it was just my time, coming around at last (sort of like Yeats's rough beast). Still, the Formula was surely part of it. Before the Formula, if I produced a story that was four thousand words or so in first draft, it was apt to be five thousand in second (some writers are taker-outers; I'm afraid I've always been a natural putter-inner). After the Formula, that changed. Even today I will aim for a second-draft length of thirty-six hundred words if the first draft of a story ran four thousand . . . and if the first draft of a novel runs three hundred and fifty thousand words, I'll try my damndest to produce a second draft of no more than three hundred and fifteen thousand . . . three hundred, if possible. Usually it is possible. What the Formula taught me is that every story and novel is collapsible to some degree. If you can't get out ten per cent of it while retaining the basic story and flavor, you're not trying very hard. The effect of judicious cutting is immediate and often amazing - literary Viagra. You'll feel it and your I.R. will, too.
　　Back story is all the stuff that happened before your tale began but which has an impact on the front story. Back story helps define character and establish motivation. I think it's important to get the back story in as quickly as possible, but it's also important to do it with some grace. As an example of what's not graceful, consider this line of dialogue:
　　
　　"Hello, ex-wife," Tom said to Doris as she entered the room.
　　
　　Now, it may be important to the story that Tom and Doris are divorced, but there has to be a better way to do it than the above, which is about as graceful as an axe-murder. Here is one suggestion:
　　
　　"Hi, Doris," Tom said. His voice sounded natural enough - to his own ears, at least - but the fingers of his right hand crept to the place where his wedding ring had been until six months ago.
　　
　　Still no Pulitzer winner, and quite a bit longer than Hello, ex-wife, but it's not all about speed, as I've already tried to point out. And if you think it's all about information, you ought to give up fiction and get a job writing instruction manuals - Dilbert's cubicle awaits.
　　You've probably heard the phrase in medias res, which means "into the midst of things." This technique is an ancient and honorable one, but I don't like it. In medias res necessitates flashbacks, which strike me as boring and sort of corny. They always make me think of those movies from the forties and fifties where the picture gets all swimmy, the voices get all echoey, and suddenly it's sixteen months ago and the mud-splashed convict we just saw trying to outrun the bloodhounds is an up-and-coming young lawyer who hasn't yet been framed for the murder of the crooked police chief.
　　As a reader, I'm a lot more interested in what's going to happen than what already did. Yes, there are brilliant novels that run counter to this preference (or maybe it's a prejudice) - Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, for one; A Dark-Adapted Eye, by Barbara Vine, for another - but I like to start at square one, dead even with the writer. I'm an A-to-Z man; serve me the appetizer first and give me dessert if I eat my veggies.
　　Even when you tell your story in this straightforward manner, you'll discover you can't escape at least some back story. In a very real sense, every life is in medias res. If you introduce a forty-year-old man as your main character on page one of your novel, and if the action begins as the result of some brand-new person or situation's exploding onto the stage of this fellow's life - a road accident, let's say, or doing a favor for a beautiful woman who keeps looking sexily back over her shoulder (did you note the awful adverb in this sentence which I could not bring myself to kill?) - you'll still have to deal with the first forty years of the guy's life at some point. How much and how well you deal with those years will have a lot to do with the level of success your story achieves, with whether readers think of it as "a good read" or "a big fat bore." Probably J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter stories, is the current champ when it comes to back story. You could do worse than read these, noting how effortlessly each new book recaps what has gone before. (Also, the Harry Potter novels are just fun, pure story from beginning to end.)
　　Your Ideal Reader can be of tremendous help when it comes to figuring out how well you did with the back story and how much you should add or subtract on your next draft. You need to listen very carefully to the things I.R. didn't understand, and then ask yourself if you understand them. If you do and just didn't put those parts across, your job on the second draft is to clarify. If you don't - if the parts of the back story your Ideal Reader queried are hazy to you, as well - then you need to think a lot more carefully about the past events that cast a light on your characters' present behavior.
　　You also need to pay close attention to those things in the back story that bored your Ideal Reader. In Bag of Bones, for instance, main character Mike Noonan is a fortyish writer who, as the book opens, has just lost his wife to a brain aneurysm. We start on the day of her death, but there's still a hell of a lot of back story here, much more than I usually have in my fiction. This includes Mike's first job (as a newspaper reporter), the sale of his first novel, his relations with his late wife's sprawling family, his publishing history, and especially the matter of their summer home in western Maine - how they came to buy it and some of its pre-Mike-and-Johanna history. Tabitha, my I.R., read all this with apparent enjoyment, but there was also a two- or three-page section about Mike's community-service work in the year after his wife dies, a year in which his grief is magnified by a severe case of writer's block. Tabby didn't like the community-service stuff.
　　"Who cares?" she asked me. "I want to know more about his bad dreams, not how he ran for city council in order to help get the homeless alcoholics off the street."
　　"Yeah, but he's got writer's block," I said. (When a novelist is challenged on something he likes - one of his darlings - the first two words out of his mouth are almost always Yeah but.) "This block goes on for a year, maybe more. He has to do something in all that time, doesn't he?"
　　"I guess so," Tabby said, "but you don't have to bore me with it, do you?"
　　Ouch. Game, set, and match. Like most good I.R.s, Tabby can be ruthless when she's right.
　　I cut down Mike's charitable contributions and community functions from two pages to two paragraphs. It turned out that Tabby was right - as soon as I saw it in print, I knew. Three million people or so have read Bag of Bones, I've gotten at least four thousand letters concerning it, and so far not a single one has said, "Hey, turkey! What was Mike doing for community-service work during the year he couldn't write?"
　　The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn't very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don't get carried away with the rest. Long life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour or so before closing time, and if you are buying.
　　
- 13 -
　　We need to talk a bit about research, which is a specialized kind of back story. And please, if you do need to do research because parts of your story deal with things about which you know little or nothing, remember that word back. That's where research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it. You may be entranced with what you're learning about flesh-eating bacteria, the sewer system of New York, or the I.Q. potential of collie pups, but your readers are probably going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.
　　Exceptions to the rule? Sure, aren't there always? There have been very successful writers - Arthur Hailey and James Michener are the first ones that come to my mind - whose novels rely heavily on fact and research. Hailey's are barely disguised manuals about how things work (banks, airports, hotels), and Michener's are combination travelogues, geography lessons, and history texts. Other popular writers, like Tom Clancy and Patricia Cornwell, are more story-oriented but still deliver large (and sometimes hard to digest) dollops of factual information along with the melodrama. I sometimes think that these writers appeal to a large segment of the reading population who feel that fiction is somehow immoral, a low taste which can only be justified by saying, "Well, ahem, yes, I do read [Fill in author's name here], but only on airplanes and in hotel rooms that don't have CNN; also, I learned a great deal about [Fill in appropriate subject here]."
　　For every successful writer of the factoid type, however, there are a hundred (perhaps even a thousand) wannabes, some published, most not. On the whole, I think story belongs in front, but some research is inevitable; you shirk it at your peril.
　　In the spring of 1999 I drove from Florida, where my wife and I had wintered, back to Maine. My second day on the road, I stopped for gas at a little station just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, one of those amusingly antique places where a fellow still comes out, pumps your gas, and asks how you're doing and who you like in the NCAA tournament.
　　I told this one I was doing fine and liked Duke in the tournament. Then I went around back to use the men's room. There was a brawling stream full of snowmelt beyond the station, and when I came out of the men's, I walked a little way down the slope, which was littered with cast-off tire-rims and engine parts, for a closer look at the water. There were still patches of snow on the ground. I slipped on one and started to slide down the embankment. I grabbed a piece of someone's old engine block and stopped myself before I got fairly started, but I realized as I got up that if I'd fallen just right, I could have slid all the way down into that stream and been swept away. I found myself wondering, had that happened, how long it would have taken the gas station attendant to call the State Police if my car, a brand-new Lincoln Navigator, just continued to stand there in front of the pumps. By the time I got back on the turnpike again, I had two things: a wet ass from my fall behind the Mobil station, and a great idea for a story.
　　In it, a mysterious man in a black coat - likely not a human being at all but some creature inexpertly disguised to look like one - abandons his vehicle in front of a small gas station in rural Pennsylvania. The vehicle looks like an old Buick Special from the late fifties, but it's no more a Buick than the guy in the black coat was a human being. The vehicle falls into the hands of some State Police officers working out of a fictional barracks in western Pennsylvania. Twenty years or so later, these cops tell the story of the Buick to the grief-stricken son of a State Policeman who has been killed in the line of duty.
　　It was a grand idea and has developed into a strong novel about how we hand down our knowledge and our secrets; it's also a grim and frightening story about an alien piece of machinery that sometimes reaches out and swallows people whole. Of course there were a few minor problems - the fact that I knew absolutely zilch about the Pennsylvania State Police, for one thing - but I didn't let any of that bother me. I simply made up all the stuff I didn't know.
　　I could do that because I was writing with the door shut - writing only for myself and the Ideal Reader in my mind (my mental version of Tabby is rarely as prickly as my real-life wife can be; in my daydreams she usually applauds and urges me ever onward with shining eyes). One of my most memorable sessions took place in a fourth-floor room of Boston's Eliot Hotel - me sitting at the desk by the window, writing about an autopsy on an alien bat-creature while the Boston Marathon flowed exuberantly by just below me and rooftop boomboxes blasted out "Dirty Water," by The Standells. There were a thousand people down there below me in the streets, but not a single one in my room to be a party-pooper and tell me I got this detail wrong or the cops don't do things that way in western Pennsylvania, so nyah-nyah-nyah.
　　The novel - it's called From a Buick Eight - has been set aside in a desk drawer since late May of 1999, when the first draft was finished. Work on it has been delayed by circum-stances beyond my control, but eventually I hope and expect to spend a couple of weeks in western Pennsylvania, where I've been given conditional permission to do some ride-alongs with the State Police (the condition - which seems eminently reasonable to me - was that I not make them look like meanies, maniacs, or idiots). Once I've done that, I should be able to correct the worst of my howlers and add some really nice detail-work.
　　Not much, though; research is back story, and the key word in back story is back. The tale I have to tell in Buick Eight has to do with monsters and secrets. It is not a story about police procedure in western Pennsylvania. What I'm looking for is nothing but a touch of verisimilitude, like the handful of spices you chuck into a good spaghetti sauce to really finish her off. That sense of reality is important in any work of fiction, but I think it is particularly important in a story dealing with the abnormal or paranormal. Also, enough details - always assuming they are the correct ones - can stem the tide of letters from picky-ass readers who apparently live to tell writers that they messed up (the tone of these letters is unvaryingly gleeful). When you step away from the "write what you know" rule, research becomes inevitable, and it can add a lot to your story. Just don't end up with the tail wagging the dog; remember that you are writing a novel, not a research paper. The story always comes first. I think that even James Michener and Arthur Hailey would have agreed with that.
　　
- 14 -
　　I'm often asked if I think the beginning writer of fiction can benefit from writing classes or seminars. The people who ask are, all too often, looking for a magic bullet or a secret ingredient or possibly Dumbo's magic feather, none of which can be found in classrooms or at writing retreats, no matter how enticing the brochures may be. As for myself, I'm doubtful about writing classes, but not entirely against them.
　　In T. Coraghessan Boyle's wonderful tragicomic novel East Is East, there is a description of a writer's colony in the woods that struck me as fairy-tale perfect. Each attendee has his or her own little cabin where he or she supposedly spends the day writing. At noon, a waiter from the main lodge brings these fledgling Hemingways and Cathers a box lunch and puts it on the front stoop of the cottage. Very quietly puts it on the stoop, so as not to disturb the creative trance of the cabin's occupant. One room of each cabin is the writing room. In the other is a cot for that all-important afternoon nap . . . or, perhaps, for a revivifying bounce with one of the other attendees.
　　In the evening, all members of the colony gather in the lodge for dinner and intoxicating conversation with the writers in residence. Later, before a roaring fire in the parlor, marshmallows are toasted, popcorn is popped, wine is drunk, and the stories of the colony attendees are read aloud and then critiqued.
　　To me, this sounded like an absolutely enchanted writing environment. I especially liked the part about having your lunch left at the front door, deposited there as quietly as the tooth fairy deposits a quarter under a kid's pillow. I imagine it appealed because it's so far from my own experience, where the creative flow is apt to be stopped at any moment by a message from my wife that the toilet is plugged up and would I try to fix it, or a call from the office telling me that I'm in imminent danger of blowing yet another dental appointment. At times like that I'm sure all writers feel pretty much the same, no matter what their skill and success level: God, if only I were in the right writing environment, with the right under-standing people, I just KNOW I could be penning my masterpiece.
　　In truth, I've found that any day's routine interruptions and distractions don't much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters. And the larger the work looms in my day - the more it seems like an I hafta instead of just an I wanna - the more problematic it can become. One serious problem with writers' workshops is that I hafta becomes the rule. You didn't come, after all, to wander lonely as a cloud, experiencing the beauty of the woods or the grandeur of the mountains. You're supposed to be writing, dammit, if only so that your colleagues will have something to critique as they toast their goddam marshmallows there in the main lodge. When, on the other hand, making sure the kid gets to his basketball camp on time is every bit as important as your work in progress, there's a lot less pressure to produce.
　　And what about those critiques, by the way? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. I love the feeling of Peter's story, someone may say. It had something . . . a sense of I don't know . . . there's a loving kind of you know . . . I can't exactly describe it . . .
　　Other writing-seminar gemmies include I felt like the tone thing was just kind of you know; The character of Polly seemed pretty much stereotypical; I loved the imagery because I could see what he was talking about more or less perfectly.
　　And, instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemnly thoughtful. In too many cases the teachers and writers in residence are nodding, smiling, and looking solemnly thoughtful right along with them. It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.
　　Non-specific critiques won't help when you sit down to your second draft, and may hurt. Certainly none of the comments above touch on the language of your piece, or its narrative sense; these comments are just wind, offering no factual input at all.
　　Also, daily critiques force you to write with the door constantly open, and in my mind that sort of defeats the purpose. What good does it do you to have the waiter tiptoe soundlessly up to the stoop of your cabin with your lunch and then tiptoe away with equal solicitous soundlessness, if you are reading your current work aloud every night (or handing it out on Xeroxed sheets) to a group of would-be writers who are telling you they like the way you handle tone and mood but want to know if Dolly's cap, the one with the bells on it, is symbolic? The pressure to explain is always on, and a lot of your creative energy, it seems to me, is therefore going in the wrong direction. You find yourself constantly questioning your prose and your purpose when what you should probably be doing is writing as fast as the Ginger-bread Man runs, getting that first draft down on paper while the shape of the fossil is still bright and clear in your mind. Too many writing classes make Wait a minute, explain what you meant by that a kind of bylaw.
　　In all fairness, I must admit to a certain prejudice here: one of the few times I suffered a full-fledged case of writer's block was during my senior year at the University of Maine, when I was taking not one but two creative-writing courses (one was the seminar in which I met my future wife, so it can hardly be counted as a dead loss). Most of my fellow students that semester were writing poems about sexual yearning or stories in which moody young men whose parents did not understand them were preparing to go off to Vietnam. One young woman wrote a good deal about the moon and her menstrual cycle; in these poems the moon always appeared as th m'n. She could not explain just why this had to be, but we all kind of felt it: th m'n, yeah, dig it, sister.
　　I brought poems of my own to class, but back in my dorm room was my dirty little secret: the half-completed manuscript of a novel about a teenage gang's plan to start a race-riot. They would use this for cover while ripping off two dozen loan-sharking operations and illegal drug-rings in the city of Harding, my fictional version of Detroit (I had never been within six hundred miles of Detroit, but I didn't let that stop or even slow me down). This novel, Sword in the Darkness, seemed very tawdry to me when compared to what my fellow students were trying to achieve; which is why, I suppose, I never brought any of it to class for a critique. The fact that it was also better and somehow truer than all my poems about sexual yearning and post-adolescent angst only made things worse. The result was a four-month period in which I could write almost nothing at all. What I did instead was drink beer, smoke Pall Malls, read John D. MacDonald paperbacks, and watch afternoon soap operas.
　　Writing courses and seminars do offer at least one undeniable benefit: in them, the desire to write fiction or poetry is taken seriously. For aspiring writers who have been looked upon with pitying condescension by their friends and relatives ("You better not quit your day job just yet!" is a popular line, usually delivered with a hideous Bob's-yer-uncle grin), this is a wonderful thing. In writing classes, if nowhere else, it is entirely permissible to spend large chunks of your time off in your own little dreamworld. Still - do you really need permission and a hall-pass to go there? Do you need someone to make you a paper badge with the word WRITER on it before you can believe you are one? God, I hope not.
　　Another argument in favor of writing courses has to do with the men and women who teach them. There are thou-sands of talented writers at work in America, and only a few of them (I think the number might be as low as five per cent) can support their families and themselves with their work. There's always some grant money available, but it's never enough to go around. As for government subsidies for creative writers, perish the thought. Tobacco subsidies, sure. Research grants to study the motility of unpreserved bull sperm, of course. Creative-writing subsidies, never. Most voters would agree, I think. With the exception of Norman Rockwell and Robert Frost, America has never much revered her creative people; as a whole, we're more interested in commemorative plates from the Franklin Mint and Internet greeting-cards. And if you don't like it, it's a case of tough titty said the kitty, 'cause that's just the way things are. Americans are a lot more interested in TV quiz shows than in the short fiction of Raymond Carver.
　　The solution for a good many underpaid creative writers is to teach what they know to others. This can be a nice thing, and it's nice when beginning writers have a chance to meet with and listen to veteran writers they may have long admired. It's also great when writing classes lead to business contacts. I got my first agent, Maurice Crain, courtesy of my sophomore comp teacher, the noted regional short story writer Edwin M. Holmes. After reading a couple of my stories in Eh-77 (a comp class emphasizing fiction), Professor Holmes asked Crain if he would look at a selection of my work. Crain agreed, but we never had much of an association - he was in his eighties, unwell, and died shortly after our first correspondence. I can only hope it wasn't my initial batch of stories that killed him.
　　You don't need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working in the Oxford, Mississippi, post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the Navy, working in steel mills, or doing time in America's finer crossbar hotels. I learned the most valuable (and commercial) part of my life's work while washing motel sheets and restaurant tablecloths at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach your-self. These lessons almost always occur with the study door closed. Writing-class discussions can often be intellectually stimulating and great fun, but they also often stray far afield from the actual nuts-and-bolts business of writing.
　　Still, I suppose you might end up in a version of that sylvan writer's colony in East Is East: your own little cottage in the pines, complete with word processor, fresh disks (what is so delicately exciting to the imagination as a box of fresh computer disks or a ream of blank paper?), the cot in the other room for that afternoon nap, and the lady who tiptoes to your stoop, leaves your lunch, and then tiptoes away again. That would be okay, I guess. If you got a chance to participate in a deal like that, I'd say go right ahead. You might not learn The Magic Secrets of Writing (there aren't any - bummer, huh?), but it would certainly be a grand time, and grand times are something I'm always in favor of.
　　
- 15 -
　　Other than Where do you get your ideas?, the questions any publishing writer hears most frequently from those who want to publish are How do you get an agent? and How do you make contact with people in the world of publishing?
　　The tone in which these questions are asked is often bewildered, sometimes chagrined, and frequently angry. There is a commonly held suspicion that most newcomers who actually succeed in getting their books published broke through because they had an in, a contact, a rabbi in the business. The underlying assumption is that publishing is just one big, happy, incestuously closed family.
　　It's not true. Neither is it true that agents are a snooty, superior bunch that would die before allowing their ungloved fingers to touch an unsolicited manuscript. (Well okay, yeah, there are a few like that.) The fact is that agents, publishers, and editors are all looking for the next hot writer who can sell a lot of books and make lots of money . . . and not just the next hot young writer, either; Helen Santmyer was in a retirement home when she published . . . And Ladies of the Club. Frank McCourt was quite a bit younger when he published Angela's Ashes, but he's still no spring chicken.
　　As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.
　　Still, I was aware that I had worlds to conquer beyond the pages of Cavalier, Gent, and Juggs. I wanted my stories to find the right markets, and that meant finding a way around the troubling fact that a good many of the best-paying ones (Cosmopolitan, for instance, which at that time published lots of short stories) wouldn't look at unsolicited fiction. The answer, it seemed to me, was to have an agent. If my fiction was good, I thought in my unsophisticated but not entirely illogical way, an agent would solve all my problems.
　　I didn't discover until much later that not all agents are good agents, and that a good agent is useful in many other ways than getting the fiction editor at Cosmo to look at your short stories. But as a young man I did not yet realize that there are people in the publishing world - more than a few, actually - who would steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes. For me, that didn't really matter, because before my first couple of novels actually succeeded in finding an audience, I had little to steal.
　　You should have an agent, and if your work is salable, you will have only a moderate amount of trouble finding one. You'll probably be able to find one even if your work isn't salable, as long as it shows promise. Sports agents represent minor leaguers who are basically playing for meal-money, in hopes that their young clients will make it to the bigs; for the same reason, literary agents are often willing to handle writers with only a few publishing credits. You'll very likely find someone to handle your work even if your publishing credits are limited strictly to the "little magazines," which pay only in copies - these magazines are often regarded by agents and book publishers as proving-grounds for new talent.
　　You must begin as your own advocate, which means reading the magazines publishing the kind of stuff you write. You should also pick up the writers' journals and buy a copy of Writer's Market, the most valuable of tools for the writer new to the marketplace. If you're really poor, ask someone to give it to you for Christmas. Both the mags and WM(it's a whop-per of a volume, but reasonably priced) list book and magazine publishers, and include thumbnail descriptions of the sort of stories each market uses. You'll also find the most salable lengths and the names of editorial staffs.
　　As a beginning writer, you'll be most interested in the "little magazines," if you're writing short stories. If you're writing or have written a novel, you'll want to note the lists of literary agents in the writing magazines and in Writer's Market. You may also want to add a copy of the LMP (Literary Market Place) to your reference shelf. You need to be canny, careful, and assiduous in your search for an agent or a publisher, but - this bears repeating - the most important thing you can do for yourself is read the market. Looking at the thumbnail rundowns in Writer's Digest may help (". . . publishes mostly mainstream fiction, 2,000-4,000 words, steer clear of stereotyped characters and hackneyed romance situations"), but a thumbnail is, leave us face it, just a thumb-nail. Submitting stories without first reading the market is like playing darts in a dark room - you might hit the target every now and then, but you don't deserve to.
　　Here is the story of an aspiring writer I'll call Frank. Frank is actually a composite of three young writers I know, two men and one woman. All have enjoyed some success in their twenties as writers; none, as of this writing, are driving Rolls-Royces. All three will probably break through, which is to say that by the age of forty, I believe, all three will be publishing regularly (and probably one will have a drinking problem).
　　The three faces of Frank all have different interests and write in different styles and voices, but their approaches to the hurdles between them and becoming published writers are similar enough for me to feel comfortable about putting them together. I also feel that other beginning writers - you, for instance, dear Reader - could do worse than follow in Frank's footsteps.
　　Frank was an English major (you don't have to be an English major to become a writer, but it sure doesn't hurt) who began submitting his stories to magazines as a college student. He took several creative-writing courses, and many of the magazines to which he made submissions were recommended to him by his creative-writing teachers. Recommended or not, Frank carefully read the stories in each magazine, and submitted his own stories according to his sense of where each would fit best. "For three years I read every story Story magazine published," he says, then laughs. "I may be the only person in America who can make that statement."
　　Careful reading or not, Frank didn't publish any stories in those markets while attending college, although he did publish half a dozen or so in the campus literary magazine (we'll call it The Quarterly Pretension). He received personal notes of rejection from readers at several of the magazines to which he submitted, including Story (the female version of Frank said, "They owed me a note!") and The Georgia Review. During this time Frank subscribed to Writer's Digest and The Writer, reading them carefully and paying attention to articles about agents and the accompanying agency lists. He circled the names of several who mentioned literary interests he felt he shared. Frank took particular note of agents who talked about liking stories of "high conflict," an arty way of saying suspense stories. Frank is attracted to suspense stories, also to stories of crime and the supernatural.
　　A year out of college, Frank gets his first acceptance letter - oh happy day. It is from a little magazine available at a few newsstands but mostly by subscription; let's call it Kingsnake. The editor offers to buy Frank's twelve-hundred-word vignette, "The Lady in the Trunk," for twenty-five dollars plus a dozen cc's - contributor's copies. Frank is, of course, delirious; way past Cloud Nine. All the relatives get a call, even the ones he doesn't like (especially the ones he doesn't like, is my guess). Twenty-five bucks won't pay the rent, won't even buy a week's worth of groceries for Frank and his wife, but it's a validation of his ambition, and that - any newly published writer would agree, I think - is priceless: Someone wants something I did! Yippee! Nor is that the only benefit. It is a credit, a small snowball which Frank will now begin rolling downhill, hoping to turn it into a snow-boulder by the time it gets to the bottom.
　　Six months later, Frank sells another story to a magazine called Lodgepine Review (like Kingsnake, Lodgepine is a composite). Only "sell" is probably too strong a word; proposed payment for Frank's "Two Kinds of Men" is twenty-five contributor's copies. Still, it's another credit. Frank signs the acceptance form (loving that line beneath the blank for his signature almost to death - PROPRIETOR OF THE WORK, by God!) and sends it back the following day.
　　Tragedy strikes a month later. It comes in the form of a form letter, the salutation of which reads Dear Lodgepine Review Contributor. Frank reads it with a sinking heart. A grant was not renewed, and Lodgepine Review has gone to that great writer's workshop in the sky. The forthcoming summer issue will be the last. Frank's story, unfortunately, was slated for fall. The letter closes by wishing Frank good luck in placing his story elsewhere. In the lower lefthand corner, some-one has scribbled four words: AWFULLY SORRY about this.
　　Frank is AWFULLY SORRY, too (after getting loaded on cheap wine and waking up with cheap wine hangovers, he and his wife are SORRIER STILL), but his disappointment doesn't prevent him from getting his almost-published short story right back into circulation. At this point he has half a dozen of them making the rounds. He keeps a careful record of where they have been and what sort of response they got during their visit at each stop. He also keeps track of magazines where he has established some sort of personal contact, even if that contact consists of nothing but two scribbled lines and a co-fee-stain.
　　A month after the bad news about Lodgepine Review, Frank gets some very good news; it arrives in a letter from a man he's never heard of. This fellow is the editor of a brand-new little magazine called Jackdaw. He is now soliciting stories for the first issue, and an old school friend of his - editor of the recently defunct Lodgepine Review, as a matter of fact - mentioned Frank's cancelled story. If Frank hasn't placed it, the Jackdaw editor would certainly like a look. No promises, but . . .
　　Frank doesn't need promises; like most beginning writers, all he needs is a little encouragement and an unlimited sup-ply of take-out pizza. He mails the story off with a letter of thanks (and a letter of thanks to the ex-Lodgepine editor, of course). Six months later "Two Kinds of Men" appears in the premiere issue of Jackdaw. The Old Boy Network, which plays as large a part in publishing as it does in many other white-collar/pink-collar businesses, has triumphed again. Frank's pay for this story is fifteen dollars, ten contributor's copies, and another all-important credit.
　　In the next year, Frank lands a job teaching high school English. Although he finds it extremely difficult to teach literature and correct student themes in the daytime and then work on his own stuff at night, he continues to do so, writing new short stories and getting them into circulation, collecting rejection slips and occasionally "retiring" stories he's sent to all the places he can think of. "They'll look good in my collection when it finally comes out," he tells his wife. Our hero has also picked up a second job, writing book and film reviews for a newspaper in a nearby city. He's a busy, busy boy. Nevertheless, in the back of his mind, he has begun to think about writing a novel.
　　When asked what is the most important thing for a young writer who's just beginning to submit his or her fiction to remember, Frank pauses only a few seconds before replying, "Good presentation."
　　Say what?
　　He nods. "Good presentation, absolutely. When you send your story out, there ought to be a very brief cover-letter on top of the script, telling the editor where you've published other stories and just a line or two on what this one's about. And you should close by thanking him for the reading. That's especially important.
　　"You should submit on a good grade of white bond paper - none of that slippery erasable stuff. Your copy should be double-spaced, and on the first page you should put your address in the upper lefthand corner - it doesn't hurt to include your telephone number, too. In the righthand corner, put an approximate word-count." Frank pauses, laughs, and says: "Don't cheat, either. Most magazine editors can tell how long a story is just by looking at the print and riffling the pages."
　　I'm still a bit surprised at Frank's answer; I expected something that was a little less nuts-and-bolts.
　　"Nah," he says. "You get practical in a hurry once you're out of school and trying to find a place for yourself in the business. The very first thing I learned was that you don't get any kind of hearing at all unless you go in looking like a professional." Something in his tone makes me think he believes I've forgotten a lot about how tough things are at the entry-level, and perhaps he's right. It's been almost forty years since I had a stack of rejection-slips pinned to a spike in my bedroom, after all. "You can't make them like your story," Frank finishes, "but you can at least make it easy for them to try to like it."
　　As I write this, Frank's own story is still a work in progress, but his future looks bright. He has published a total of six shorts now, and won a fairly prestigious prize for one of them - we'll call it the Minnesota Young Writers' Award, although no part of my Frank composite actually lives in Minnesota. The cash prize was five hundred dollars, by far his biggest paycheck for a story. He has begun work on his novel, and when it's finished - in the early spring of 2001, he estimates - a reputable young agent named Richard Chams (also a pseudonym) has agreed to handle it for him.
　　Frank got serious about finding an agent at about the same time he got serious about his novel. "I didn't want to put in all that work and then be faced with not knowing how to sell the damn thing when I was done," he told me.
　　Based on his explorations of the LMP and the lists of agents in Writer's Market, Frank wrote an even dozen letters, each exactly the same except for the salutation. Here is the template:
　　
　　June 19, 1999
　　Dear
　　I am a young writer, twenty-eight years old, in search of an agent. I got your name in a Writer 's Digest article titled "Agents of the New Wave," and thought we might fit each other. I have published six stories since getting serious about my craft. They are:
　　
　　"The Lady in the Trunk," Kingsnake,Winter 1996 ($25 plus copies)
　　
　　"Two Kinds of Men," Jackdaw,Summer 1997 ($15 plus copies)
　　
　　"Christmas Smoke," Mystery Quarterly,Fall 1997 ($35)
　　
　　"Big Thumps, Charlie Takes His Lumps," Cemetery Dance, January-February 1998 ($50 plus copies)
　　
　　"Sixty Sneakers," Puckerbrush Review, April-May 1998 (copies)
　　
　　"A Long Walk in These 'Yere Woods," Minnesota Review, Winter 1998-1999 ($70 plus copies)
　　
　　I would be happy to send any of these stories (or any of the half dozen or so I'm currently flogging around) for you to look at, if you'd like. I'm particularly proud of "A Long Walk in These 'Yere Woods," which won the Minnesota Young Writers' Award. The plaque looks good on our living room wall, and the prize money - $500 - looked excellent for the week or so it was actually in our bank account (I have been married for four years; my wife, Marjorie, and I teach school).
　　The reason I'm seeking representation now is that I'm at work on a novel. It's a suspense story about a man who gets arrested for a series of murders which occurred in his little town twenty years before. The first eighty pages or so are in pretty good shape, and I'd also be delighted to show you these.
　　Please be in touch and tell me if you'd like to see some of my material. In the meantime, thank you for taking the time to read my letter.
　　Sincerely yours,
　　
　　Frank included his telephone number as well as his address, and one of his target agents (not Richard Chams) actually called to chat. Three wrote back asking to look at the prize-winning story about the hunter lost in the woods. Half a dozen asked to see the first eighty pages of his novel. The response was big, in other words - only one agent to whom he wrote expressed no interest in Frank's work, citing a full roster of clients. Yet outside of his slight acquaintances in the world of the "little magazines," Frank knows absolutely nobody in the publishing business - has not a single personal contact.
　　"It was amazing," he says, "absolutely amazing. I expected to take whoever wanted to take me - if anybody did - and count myself lucky. Instead, I got to pick and choose." He puts down his bumper crop of possible agents to several things. First, the letter he sent around was literate and well-spoken ("It took four drafts and two arguments with my wife to get that casual tone just right," Frank says). Second, he could supply an actual list of published short stories, and a fairly substantial one. No big money, but the magazines were reputable. Third, there was the prize-winner. Frank thinks that may have been key. I don't know if it was or not, but it certainly didn't hurt.
　　Frank was also intelligent enough to ask Richard Chams and all the other agents he queried for a list of their bona fides - not a list of clients (I don't know if an agent who gave out the names of his clients would even be ethical), but a list of the publishers to whom the agent had sold books and the magazines to which he had sold short stories. It's easy to con a writer who's desperate for representation. Beginning writers need to remember that anyone with a few hundred dollars to invest can place an ad in Writer's Digest, calling himself or herself a literary agent - it isn't as if you have to pass a bar exam, or anything.
　　You should be especially wary of agents who promise to read your work for a fee. A few such agents are reputable (the Scott Meredith Agency used to read for fees; I don't know if they still do or not), but all too many are unscrupulous fucks. I'd suggest that if you're that anxious to get published, you skip agent-hunting or query-letters to publishers and go directly to a vanity press. There you will at least get a semblance of your money's worth.
　　
- 16 -
　　We're nearly finished. I doubt if I've covered everything you need to know to become a better writer, and I'm sure I haven't answered all your questions, but I have talked about those aspects of the writing life which I can discuss with at least some confidence. I must tell you, though, that confidence during the actual writing of this book was a commodity in remarkably short supply. What I was long on was physical pain and self-doubt.
　　When I proposed the idea of a book on writing to my publisher at Scribner, I felt that I knew a great deal about the subject; my head all but burst with the different things I wanted to say. And perhaps I do know a lot, but some of it turned out to be dull and most of the rest, I've discovered, has more to do with instinct than with anything resembling "higher thought." I found the act of articulating those instinctive truths painfully difficult. Also, something happened halfway through the writing of On Writing - a life-changer, as they say. I'll tell you about it presently. For now, just please know that I did the best I could.
　　One more matter needs to be discussed, a matter that bears directly on that life-changer and one that I've touched on already, but indirectly. Now I'd like to face it head-on. It's a question that people ask in different ways - sometimes it comes out polite and sometimes it comes out rough, but it always amounts to the same: Do you do it for the money, honey?
　　The answer is no. Don't now and never did. Yes, I've made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it. I have done some work as favors for friends - logrolling is the slang term for it - but at the very worst, you'd have to call that a crude kind of barter. I have written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side - I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.
　　There have been times when for me the act of writing has been a little act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair. The second half of this book was written in that spirit. I gutted it out, as we used to say when we were kids. Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life. That was something I found out in the summer of 1999, when a man driving a blue van almost killed me.
　　
ON LIVING: A POSTSCRIPT
- 1 -
　　When we're at our summer house in western Maine - a house very much like the one Mike Noonan comes back to in Bag of Bones - I walk four miles every day, unless it's pouring down rain. Three miles of this walk are on dirt roads which wind through the woods; a mile of it is on Route 5, a two-lane blacktop highway which runs between Bethel and Fryeburg.
　　The third week in June of 1999 was an extraordinarily happy one for my wife and me; our kids, now grown and scattered across the country, were all home. It was the first time in nearly six months that we'd all been under the same roof. As an extra bonus, our first grandchild was in the house, three months old and happily jerking at a helium balloon tied to his foot.
　　On the nineteenth of June, I drove our younger son to the Portland Jetport, where he caught a flight back to New York City. I drove home, had a brief nap, and then set out on my usual walk. We were planning to go en famille to see The General's Daughter in nearby North Conway, New Hampshire, that evening, and I thought I just had time to get my walk in before packing everybody up for the trip.
　　I set out on that walk around four o'clock in the afternoon, as well as I can remember. Just before reaching the main road (in western Maine, any road with a white line running down the middle of it is a main road), I stepped into the woods and urinated. It was two months before I was able to take another leak standing up.
　　When I reached the highway I turned north, walking on the gravel shoulder, against traffic. One car passed me, also headed north. About three-quarters of a mile farther along, the woman driving the car observed a light blue Dodge van heading south. The van was looping from one side of the road to the other, barely under the driver's control. The woman in the car turned to her passenger when they were safely past the wandering van and said, "That was Stephen King walking back there. I sure hope that guy in the van doesn't hit him."
　　Most of the sightlines along the mile of Route 5 which I walk are good, but there is one stretch, a short steep hill, where a pedestrian walking north can see very little of what might be coming his way. I was three-quarters of the way up this hill when Bryan Smith, the owner and operator of the Dodge van, came over the crest. He wasn't on the road; he was on the shoulder. My shoulder. I had perhaps three-quarters of a second to register this. It was just time enough to think, My God, I'm going to be hit by a schoolbus. I started to turn to my left. There is a break in my memory here. On the other side of it I'm on the ground, looking at the back of the van, which is now pulled off the road and tilted to one side. This recollection is very clear and sharp, more like a snapshot than a memory. There is dust around the van's taillights. The license plate and the back windows are dirty. I register these things with no thought that I have been in an accident, or of anything else. It's a snapshot, that's all. I'm not thinking; my head has been swopped clean.
　　There's another little break in my memory here, and then I am very carefully wiping palmfuls of blood out of my eyes with my left hand. When my eyes are reasonably clear, I look around and see a man sitting on a nearby rock. He has a cane drawn across his lap. This is Bryan Smith, forty-two years of age, the man who hit me with his van. Smith has got quite the driving record; he has racked up nearly a dozen vehicle-related offenses.
　　Smith wasn't looking at the road on the afternoon our lives came together because his rottweiler had jumped from the very rear of his van into the back-seat area, where there was an Igloo cooler with some meat stored inside. The rottweiler's name is Bullet (Smith has another rottweiler at home; that one is named Pistol). Bullet started to nose at the lid of the cooler. Smith turned around and tried to push Bul-let away. He was still looking at Bullet and pushing his head away from the cooler when he came over the top of the knoll; still looking and pushing when he struck me. Smith told friends later that he thought he'd hit "a small deer" until he noticed my bloody spectacles lying on the front seat of his van. They were knocked from my face when I tried to get out of Smith's way. The frames were bent and twisted, but the lenses were unbroken. They are the lenses I'm wearing now, as I write this.
　　
- 2 -
　　Smith sees I'm awake and tells me help is on the way. He speaks calmly, even cheerily. His look, as he sits on his rock with his cane drawn across his lap, is one of pleasant commiseration: Ain't the two of us just had the shittiest luck? it says. He and Bullet left the campground where they were staying, he later tells an investigator, because he wanted "some of those Marzes-bars they have up to the store." When I hear this little detail some weeks later, it occurs to me that I have nearly been killed by a character right out of one of my own novels. It's almost funny.
　　Help is on the way, I think, and that's probably good because I've been in a hell of an accident. I'm lying in the ditch and there's blood all over my face and my right leg hurts. I look down and see something I don't like: my lap now appears to be on sideways, as if my whole lower body had been wrenched half a turn to the right. I look back up at the man with the cane and say, "Please tell me it's just dislocated."
　　"Nah," he says. Like his face, his voice is cheery, only mildly interested. He could be watching all this on TV while he noshes on one of those Marzes-bars. "It's broken in five I'd say maybe six places."
　　"I'm sorry," I tell him - God knows why - and then I'm gone again for a little while. It isn't like blacking out; it's more as if the film of memory has been spliced here and there.
　　When I come back this time, an orange-and-white van is idling at the side of the road with its flashers going. An emergency medical technician - Paul Fillebrown is his name - is kneeling beside me. He's doing something. Cutting off my jeans, I think, although that might have come later.
　　I ask him if I can have a cigarette. He laughs and says not hardly. I ask him if I'm going to die. He tells me no, I'm not going to die, but I need to go to the hospital, and fast. Which one would I prefer, the one in Norway-South Paris or the one in Bridgton? I tell him I want to go to Northern Cumberland Hospital in Bridgton, because my youngest child - the one I just took to the airport - was born there twenty-two years before. I ask Fillebrown again if I'm going to die, and he tells me again that I'm not. Then he asks me if I can wiggle the toes on my right foot. I wiggle them, thinking of an old rhyme my mother used to recite sometimes: This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home. I should have stayed home, I think; going for a walk today was a really bad idea. Then I remember that sometimes when people are paralyzed, they think they're moving but really aren't.
　　"My toes, did they move?" I ask Paul Fillebrown. He says they did, a good healthy wiggle. "Do you swear to God?" I ask him, and I think he does. I'm starting to pass out again. Fillebrown asks me, very slowly and loudly, bending down into my face, if my wife is at the big house on the lake. I can't remember. I can't remember where any of my family is, but I'm able to give him the telephone numbers of both our big house and the cottage on the far side of the lake where my daughter sometimes stays. Hell, I could give him my Social Security number, if he asked. I've got all my numbers. It's just everything else that's gone.
　　Other people are arriving now. Somewhere a radio is crackling out police calls. I'm put on a stretcher. It hurts, and I scream. I'm lifted into the back of the EMT truck, and the police calls are closer. The doors shut and someone up front says, "You want to really hammer it." Then we're rolling.
　　Paul Fillebrown sits down beside me. He has a pair of clippers and tells me he's going to have to cut the ring off the third finger of my right hand - it's a wedding ring Tabby gave me in 1983, twelve years after we were actually married. I try to tell Fillebrown that I wear it on my right hand because the real wedding ring is still on the third finger of my left - the original two-ring set cost me $15.95 at Day's Jewelers in Bangor. That first ring only cost eight bucks, in other words, but it seems to have worked.
　　Some garbled version of this comes out, probably nothing Paul Fillebrown can actually understand, but he keeps nod-ding and smiling as he cuts that second, more expensive, wedding ring off my swollen right hand. Two months or so later, I call Fillebrown to thank him; by then I understand that he probably saved my life by administering the correct on-scene medical aid and then getting me to the hospital at a speed of roughly one hundred and ten miles an hour, over patched and bumpy back roads.
　　Fillebrown assures me that I'm more than welcome, then suggests that perhaps someone was watching out for me. "I've been doing this for twenty years," he tells me over the phone, "and when I saw the way you were lying in the ditch, plus the extent of the impact injuries, I didn't think you'd make it to the hospital. You're a lucky camper to still be with the program."
　　The extent of the impact injuries is such that the doctors at Northern Cumberland Hospital decide they cannot treat me there; someone summons a LifeFlight helicopter to take me to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. At this point my wife, older son, and daughter arrive. The kids are allowed a brief visit; my wife is allowed to stay longer. The doctors have assured her that I'm banged up, but I'll make it. The lower half of my body has been covered. She isn't allowed to look at the interesting way my lap has shifted around to the right, but she is allowed to wash the blood off my face and pick some of the glass out of my hair.
　　There's a long gash in my scalp, the result of my collision with Bryan Smith's windshield. This impact came at a point less than two inches from the steel driver's-side support post. Had I struck that, I likely would have been killed or rendered permanently comatose, a vegetable with legs. Had I struck the rocks jutting out of the ground beyond the shoulder of Route 5, I likely also would have been killed or permanently paralyzed. I didn't hit them; I was thrown over the van and fourteen feet in the air, but landed just shy of the rocks.
　　"You must have pivoted to the left just a little at the last second," Dr. David Brown tells me later. "If you hadn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
　　The LifeFlight helicopter lands in the parking lot of Northern Cumberland Hospital, and I am wheeled out to it. The sky is very bright, very blue. The clatter of the helicopter's rotors is very loud. Someone shouts into my ear, "Ever been in a helicopter before, Stephen?" The speaker sounds jolly, all excited for me. I try to answer yes, I've been in a helicopter before - twice, in fact - but I can't. All at once it's very tough to breathe.
　　They load me into the helicopter. I can see one brilliant wedge of blue sky as we lift off; not a cloud in it. Beautiful. There are more radio voices. This is my afternoon for hearing voices, it seems. Meanwhile, it's getting even harder to breathe. I gesture at someone, or try to, and a face bends upside down into my field of vision.
　　"Feel like I'm drowning," I whisper.
　　Somebody checks something, and someone else says,
　　"His lung has collapsed."
　　There's a rattle of paper as something is unwrapped, and then the someone else speaks into my ear, loudly so as to be heard over the rotors. "We're going to put a chest tube in you, Stephen. You'll feel some pain, a little pinch. Hold on."
　　It's been my experience (learned when I was just a wee lad with infected ears) that if a medical person tells you you're going to feel a little pinch, they're going to hurt you really bad. This time it isn't as bad as I expected, perhaps because I'm full of painkiller, perhaps because I'm on the verge of passing out again. It's like being thumped very high up on the right side of the chest by someone holding a short sharp object. Then there's an alarming whistle in my chest, as if I've sprung a leak. In fact, I suppose I have. A moment later the soft in-out of normal respiration, which I've listened to my whole life (mostly without being aware of it, thank God), has been replaced by an unpleasant shloop-shloop-shloop sound. The air I'm taking in is very cold, but it's air, at least, air, and I keep breathing it. I don't want to die. I love my wife, my kids, my afternoon walks by the lake. I also love to write; I have a book on writing that's sitting back home on my desk, half-finished. I don't want to die, and as I lie in the helicopter looking out at the bright blue summer sky, I realize that I am actually lying in death's doorway. Someone is going to pull me one way or the other pretty soon; it's mostly out of my hands. All I can do is lie there, look at the sky, and listen to my thin, leaky breathing: shloop-shloop-shloop.
　　Ten minutes later we set down on the concrete landing pad at CMMC. To me, it seems to be at the bottom of a concrete well. The blue sky is blotted out and the whap-whap-whap of the helicopter rotors becomes magnified and echoey, like the clapping of giant hands.
　　Still breathing in great leaky gulps, I am lifted out of the helicopter. Someone bumps the stretcher and I scream. "Sorry, sorry, you're okay, Stephen," someone says - when you're badly hurt, everyone calls you by your first name, everyone is your pal.
　　"Tell Tabby I love her very much," I say as I am first lifted and then wheeled, very fast, down some sort of descending concrete walkway. All at once I feel like crying.
　　"You can tell her that yourself," the someone says. We go through a door; there is air-conditioning and lights flowing past overhead. Speakers issue pages. It occurs to me, in a muddled sort of way, that an hour before I was taking a walk and planning to pick some berries in a field that overlooks Lake Kezar. I wouldn't pick for long, though; I'd have to be home by five-thirty because we were all going to the movies. The General's Daughter, starring John Travolta. Travolta was in the movie made out of Carrie, my first novel. He played the bad guy. That was a long time ago.
　　"When?" I ask. "When can I tell her?"
　　"Soon," the voice says, and then I pass out again. This time it's no splice but a great big whack taken out of the memory-film; there are a few flashes, confused glimpses of faces and operating rooms and looming X-ray machinery; there are delusions and hallucinations fed by the morphine and Dilaudid being dripped into me; there are echoing voices and hands that reach down to paint my dry lips with swabs that taste of peppermint. Mostly, though, there is darkness.
　　
- 3 -
　　Bryan Smith's estimate of my injuries turned out to be conservative. My lower leg was broken in at least nine places - the orthopedic surgeon who put me together again, the formidable David Brown, said that the region below my right knee had been reduced to "so many marbles in a sock." The extent of those lower-leg injuries necessitated two deep incisions - they're called medial and lateral fasciotomies - to release the pressure caused by the exploded tibia and also to allow blood to flow back into the lower leg. Without the fasciatomies (or if the fasciotomies had been delayed), it probably would have been necessary to amputate the leg. My right knee itself was split almost directly down the middle; the technical term for the injury is "comminuted intra-articular tibial fracture." I also suffered an acetabular fracture of the right hip - a serious derailment, in other words - and an open femoral intertrochanteric fracture in the same area. My spine was chipped in eight places. Four ribs were broken. My right collarbone held, but the flesh above it was stripped raw. The laceration in my scalp took twenty or thirty stitches.
　　Yeah, on the whole I'd say Bryan Smith was a tad conservative.
　　
- 4 -
　　Mr. Smith's driving behavior in this case was eventually examined by a grand jury, who indicted him on two counts: driving to endanger (pretty serious) and aggravated assault (very serious, the kind of thing that means jail time). After due consideration, the District Attorney responsible for prosecuting such cases in my little corner of the world allowed Smith to plead out to the lesser charge of driving to endanger. He received six months of county jail time (sentence su-pended) and a year's suspension of his privilege to drive. He was also put on probation for a year with restrictions on other motor vehicles, such as snowmobiles and ATVs. It is conceivable that Bryan Smith could be legally back on the road in the fall or winter of 2001.
　　
- 5 -
　　David Brown put my leg back together in five marathon surgical procedures that left me thin, weak, and nearly at the end of my endurance. They also left me with at least a fighting chance to walk again. A large steel and carbon-fiber apparatus called an external fixator was clamped to my leg. Eight large steel pegs called Schanz pins run through the fixator and into the bones above and below my knee. Five smaller steel rods radiate out from the knee. These look sort of like a child's drawing of sunrays. The knee itself was locked in place. Three times a day, nurses would unwrap the smaller pins and the much larger Schanz pins and swab the holes out with hydrogen peroxide. I've never had my leg dipped in kerosene and then lit on fire, but if that ever happens, I'm sure it will feel quite a bit like daily pin-care.
　　I entered the hospital on June nineteenth. Around the twenty-fifth I got up for the first time, staggering three steps to a commode, where I sat with my hospital johnny in my lap and my head down, trying not to weep and failing. You try to tell yourself that you've been lucky, most incredibly lucky, and usually that works because it's true. Sometimes it doesn't work, that's all. Then you cry.
　　A day or two after those initial steps, I started physical therapy. During my first session I managed ten steps in a downstairs corridor, lurching along with the help of a walker. One other patient was learning to walk again at the same time, a wispy eighty-year-old woman named Alice who was recovering from a stroke. We cheered each other on when we had enough breath to do so. On our third day in the down-stairs hall, I told Alice that her slip was showing.
　　"Your ass is showing, sonnyboy," she wheezed, and kept going.
　　By the Fourth of July I was able to sit up in a wheelchair long enough to go out to the loading dock behind the hospital and watch some of the fireworks. It was a fiercely hot night, the streets filled with people eating snacks, drinking beer and soda, watching the sky. Tabby stood next to me, holding my hand, as the sky lit up red and green, blue and yellow. She was staying in a condo apartment across the street from the hospital, and each morning she brought me poached eggs and tea. I could use the nourishment, it seemed. In 1997, after returning from a motorcycle trip across the Australian desert, I weighed two hundred and six-teen pounds. On the day I was released from Central Maine Medical Center, I weighed a hundred and sixty-five.
　　I came home to Bangor on July ninth, after a hospital stay of three weeks. I began a daily rehab program which includes stretching, bending, and crutch-walking. I tried to keep my courage and my spirits up. On August fourth I went back to CMMC for another operation. Inserting an IV into my arm, the anesthesiologist said, "Okay, Stephen - you're going to feel a little like you just had a couple of cocktails." I opened my mouth to tell him that would be interesting, since I hadn't had a cocktail in eleven years, but before I could get anything out, I was gone again. When I woke up this time, the Schanz pins in my upper thigh were gone. I could bend my knee again. Dr. Brown pronounced my recovery "on course" and sent me home for more rehab and physical therapy (those of us under-going P.T. know that the letters actually stand for Pain and Torture). And in the midst of all this, something else happened. On July twenty-fourth, five weeks after Bryan Smith hit me with his Dodge van, I began to write again.
　　
- 6 -
　　I actually began On Writing in November or December of 1997, and although it usually takes me only three months to finish the first draft of a book, this one was still only half-completed eighteen months later. That was because I'd put it aside in February or March of 1998, not sure how to continue, or if I should continue at all. Writing fiction was almost as much fun as it had ever been, but every word of the nonfiction book was a kind of torture. It was the first book I had put aside uncompleted since The Stand, and On Writing spent a lot longer in the desk drawer.
　　In June of 1999, I decided to spend the summer finishing the damn writing book - let Susan Moldow and Nan Graham at Scribner decide if it was good or bad, I thought. I read the manuscript over, prepared for the worst, and discovered I actually sort of liked what I had. The road to finishing it seemed clear-cut, too. I had finished the memoir ("C.V."), which attempted to show some of the incidents and life-situations which made me into the sort of writer I turned out to be, and I had covered the mechanics - those that seemed most important to me, at least. What remained to be done was the key section, "On Writing," where I'd try to answer some of the questions I'd been asked in seminars and at speaking engagements, plus all those I wish I'd been asked . . . those questions about the language.
　　On the night of June seventeenth, blissfully unaware that I was now less than forty-eight hours from my little date with Bryan Smith (not to mention Bullet the rottweiler), I sat down at our dining room table and listed all the questions I wanted to answer, all the points I wanted to address. On the eighteenth, I wrote the first four pages of the "On Writing" section. That was where the work still stood in late July, when I decided I'd better get back to work . . . or at least try.
　　I didn't want to go back to work. I was in a lot of pain, unable to bend my right knee, and restricted to a walker. I couldn't imagine sitting behind a desk for long, even in my wheelchair. Because of my cataclysmically smashed hip, sit-ting was torture after forty minutes or so, impossible after an hour and a quarter. Added to this was the book itself, which seemed more daunting than ever - how was I supposed to write about dialogue, character, and getting an agent when the most pressing thing in my world was how long until the next dose of Percocet?
　　Yet at the same time I felt I'd reached one of those cross-roads moments when you're all out of choices. And I had been in terrible situations before which the writing had helped me get over - had helped me forget myself for at least a little while. Perhaps it would help me again. It seemed ridiculous to think it might be so, given the level of my pain and physical incapacitation, but there was that voice in the back of my mind, both patient and implacable, telling me that, in the words of the Chambers Brothers, Time Has Come Today. It's possible for me to disobey that voice, but very difficult to disbelieve it.
　　In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I'd like to think I've done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tiebreaking vote when you just can't decide what you should do next.
　　My wife is the person in my life who's most likely to say I'm working too hard, it's time to slow down, stay away from that damn PowerBook for a little while, Steve, give it a rest. When I told her on that July morning that I thought I'd better go back to work, I expected a lecture. Instead, she asked me where I wanted to set up. I told her I didn't know, hadn't even thought about it.
　　She thought about it, then said: "I can rig a table for you in the back hall, outside the pantry. There are plenty of plug-ins - you can have your Mac, the little printer, and a fan." The fan was certainly a must - it had been a terrifically hot summer, and on the day I went back to work, the temperature outside was ninety-five. It wasn't much cooler in the back hall.
　　Tabby spent a couple of hours putting things together, and that afternoon at four o'clock she rolled me out through the kitchen and down the newly installed wheelchair ramp into the back hall. She had made me a wonderful little nest there: laptop and printer connected side by side, table lamp, manuscript (with my notes from the month before placed neatly on top), pens, reference materials. Standing on the corner of the desk was a framed picture of our younger son, which she had taken earlier that summer.
　　"Is it all right?" she asked.
　　"It's gorgeous," I said, and hugged her. It was gorgeous. So is she.
　　The former Tabitha Spruce of Oldtown, Maine, knows when I'm working too hard, but she also knows that some-times it's the work that bails me out. She got me positioned at the table, kissed me on the temple, and then left me there to find out if I had anything left to say. It turned out I did, a little, but without her intuitive understanding that yes, it was time, I'm not sure either of us would ever have found that out for sure.
　　That first writing session lasted an hour and forty minutes, by far the longest period I'd spent sitting upright since being struck by Smith's van. When it was over, I was drip-ping with sweat and almost too exhausted to sit up straight in my wheelchair. The pain in my hip was just short of apocalyptic. And the first five hundred words were uniquely terrifying - it was as if I'd never written anything before them in my life. All my old tricks seemed to have deserted me. I stepped from one word to the next like a very old man finding his way across a stream on a zigzag line of wet stones. There was no inspiration that first afternoon, only a kind of stubborn determination and the hope that things would get better if I kept at it.
　　Tabby brought me a Pepsi - cold and sweet and good - and as I drank it I looked around and had to laugh despite the pain. I'd written Carrie and 'Salem's Lot in the laundry room of a rented trailer. The back hall of our house in Bangor resembled it enough to make me feel almost as if I'd come full circle.
　　There was no miraculous breakthrough that afternoon, unless it was the ordinary miracle that comes with any attempt to create something. All I know is that the words started coming a little faster after awhile, then a little faster still. My hip still hurt, my back still hurt, my leg, too, but those hurts began to seem a little farther away. I started to get on top of them. There was no sense of exhilaration, no buzz - not that day - but there was a sense of accomplishment that was almost as good. I'd gotten going, there was that much. The scariest moment is always just before you start.
　　After that, things can only get better.
　　
- 7 -
　　For me, things have continued to get better. I've had two more operations on my leg since that first sweltering after-noon in the back hall, I've had a fairly serious bout of infection, and I continue to take roughly a hundred pills a day, but the external fixator is now gone and I continue to write. On some days that writing is a pretty grim slog. On others - more and more of them as my leg begins to heal and my mind reaccustoms itself to its old routine - I feel that buzz of happiness, that sense of having found the right words and put them in a line. It's like lifting off in an airplane: you're on the ground, on the ground, on the ground . . . and then you're up, riding on a magical cushion of air and prince of all you survey. That makes me happy, because it's what I was made to do. I still don't have much strength - I can do a little less than half of what I used to be able to do in a day - but I've had enough to get me to the end of this book, and for that I'm grateful. Writing did not save my life - Dr. David Brown's skill and my wife's loving care did that - but it has continued to do what it always has done: it makes my life a brighter and more pleasant place.
　　Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Some of this book - perhaps too much - has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.
　　Drink and be filled up.
　　
And Furthermore, Part I: Door Shut, Door Open
　　
　　Earlier in this book, when writing about my brief career as a sports reporter for the Lisbon Weekly Enterprise (I was, in fact, the entire sports department; a small-town Howard Cosell), I offered an example of how the editing process works. That example was necessarily brief, and dealt with nonfiction. The passage that follows is fiction. It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut - it's the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and under-shorts. I suggest that you look at it closely before going on to the edited version.
　　
　　The Hotel Story
　　
　　Mike Enslin was still in the revolving door when he saw Ostermeyer, the manager of the Hotel Dolphin, sitting in one of the overstuffed lobby chairs. Mike's heart sank a little. Maybe should have brought the damned lawyer along again, after all, he thought. Well, too late now. And even if Ostermeyer had decided to throw up another road-block or two between Mike and room 1408, that wasn't all bad; it would simply add to the story when he finally told it.
　　Ostermeyer saw him, got up, and was crossing the room with one pudgy hand held out as Mike left the revolving door. The Dolphin was on Sixty-first Street, around the corner from Fifth Avenue; small but smart. A man and woman dressed in evening clothes passed Mike as he reached out and took Ostermeyer's hand, switching his small overnight case to his left hand in order to do it. The woman was blonde, dressed in black, of course, and the light, flowery smell of her per-fume seemed to summarize New York. On the mezzanine level, someone was playing "Night and Day" in the bar, as if to underline the summary.
　　"Mr. Enslin. Good evening."
　　"Mr. Ostermeyer. Is there a problem?"
　　Ostermeyer looked pained. For a moment he glanced around the small, smart lobby, as if for help. At the concierge's stand, a man was discussing theater tickets with his wife while the concierge himself watched them with a small, patient smile. At the front desk, a man with the rumpled look one only got after long hours in Business Class was discussing his reservation with a woman in a smart black suit that could itself have doubled for evening wear. It was business as usual at the Hotel Dolphin. There was help for everyone except poor Mr. Ostermeyer, who had fallen into the writer's clutches.
　　"Mr. Ostermeyer?" Mike repeated, feeling a little sorry for the man.
　　"No," Ostermeyer said at last. "No problem. But, Mr. Enslin . . . could I speak to you for a moment in my office?"
　　So, Mike thought. He wants to try one more time.
　　Under other circumstances he might have been impatient. Now he was not. It would help the section on room 1408, offer the proper ominous tone the readers of his books seemed to crave - it was to be One Final Warning - but that wasn't all. Mike Enslin hadn't been sure until now, in spite of all the backing and filling; now he was. Ostermeyer wasn't playing a part. Ostermeyer was really afraid of room 1408, and what might happen to Mike there tonight.
　　"Of course, Mr. Ostermeyer. Should I leave my bag at the desk, or bring it?"
　　"Oh, we'll bring it along, shall we?" Ostermeyer, the good host, reached for it. Yes, he still held out some hope of persuading Mike not to stay in the room. Otherwise, he would have directed Mike to the desk . . . or taken it there himself. "Allow me."
　　"I'm fine with it," Mike said. "Nothing but a change of clothes and a toothbrush."
　　"Are you sure?"
　　"Yes," Mike said, holding his eyes. "I'm afraid I am."
　　For a moment Mike thought Ostermeyer was going to give up. He sighed, a little round man in a dark cutaway coat and a neatly knotted tie, and then he squared his shoulders again. "Very good, Mr. Enslin. Follow me."
　　
　　The hotel manager had seemed tentative in the lobby, depressed, almost beaten. In his oak-paneled office, with the pictures of the hotel on the walls (the Dolphin had opened in October of 1910 - Mike might publish without the benefit of reviews in the journals or the big-city papers, but he did his research), Ostermeyer seemed to gain assurance again. There was a Persian carpet on the floor. Two standing lamps cast a mild yellow light. A desk-lamp with a green lozenge-shaped shade stood on the desk, next to a humidor. And next to the humidor were Mike Enslin's last three books. Paperback editions, of course; there had been no hard-backs. Yet he did quite well. Mine host has been doing a little research of his own, Mike thought.
　　Mike sat down in one of the chairs in front of the desk. He expected Ostermeyer to sit behind the desk, where he could draw authority from it, but Ostermeyer surprised him. He sat in the other chair on what he probably thought of as the employees' side of the desk, crossed his legs, then leaned forward over his tidy little belly to touch the humidor.
　　"Cigar, Mr. Enslin? They're not Cuban, but they're quite good."
　　"No, thank you. I don't smoke."
　　Ostermeyer's eyes shifted to the cigarette behind Mike's right ear - parked there on a jaunty jut the way an oldtime wisecracking New York reporter might have parked his next smoke just below his fedora with the PRESS tag stuck in the band. The cigarette had become so much a part of him that for a moment Mike honestly didn't know what Ostermeyer was looking at. Then he remembered, laughed, took it down, looked at it him-self, then looked back at Ostermeyer.
　　"Haven't had a cigarette in nine years," he said. "I had an older brother who died of lung cancer. I quit shortly after he died. The cigarette behind the ear . . ." He shrugged. "Part affectation, part superstition, I guess. Kind of like the ones you sometimes see on people's desks or walls, mounted in a little box with a sign saying BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. I sometimes tell people I'll light up in case of nuclear war. Is 1408 a smoking room, Mr. Ostermeyer? Just in case nuclear war breaks out?"
　　"As a matter of fact, it is."
　　"Well," Mike said heartily, "that's one less worry in the watches of the night."
　　Mr. Ostermeyer sighed again, unamused, but this one didn't have the disconsolate quality of his lobby-sigh. Yes, it was the room, Mike reckoned. His room. Even this afternoon, when Mike had come accompanied by Robertson, the lawyer, Ostermeyer had seemed less flustered once they were in here. At the time Mike had thought it was partly because they were no longer drawing stares from the passing public, partly because Ostermeyer had given up. Now he knew better. It was the room. And why not? It was a room with good pictures on the walls, a good rug on the floor, and good cigars - although not Cuban - in the humidor. A lot of managers had no doubt conducted a lot of business in here since October of 1910; in its own way it was as New York as the blonde woman in her black off-the-shoulder dress, her smell of perfume and her unarticulated promise of sleek sex in the small hours of the morning - New York sex. Mike himself was from Omaha, although he hadn't been back there in a lot of years.
　　"You still don't think I can talk you out of this idea of yours, do you?" Ostermeyer asked.
　　"I know you can't," Mike said, replacing the cigarette behind his ear.
　　
　　What follows is revised copy of this same opening passage - it's the story putting on its clothes, combing its hair, maybe adding just a small dash of cologne. Once these changes are incorporated into my document, I'm ready to open the door and face the world.
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　The reasons for the majority of the changes are self-evident; if you flip back and forth between the two versions, I'm confident that you'll understand almost all of them, and I'm hopeful that you'll see how raw the first-draft work of even a so-called "professional writer" is once you really examine it.
　　Most of the changes are cuts, intended to speed the story. I have cut with Strunk in mind - "Omit needless words" - and also to satisfy the formula stated earlier: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%.
　　I have keyed a few changes for brief explanation:
　　1. Obviously, "The Hotel Story" is never going to replace "Killdozer!" or Norma Jean, the Termite Queen as a title. I simply slotted it into the first draft, knowing a better one would occur as I went along. (If a better title doesn't occur, an editor will usually supply his or her idea of a better one, and the results are usually ugly.) I like "1408" because this is a "thirteenth floor" story, and the numbers add up to thirteen.
　　2. Ostermeyer is a long and gallumphing name. By changing it to Olin via global replace, I was able to shorten my story by about fifteen lines at a single stroke. Also, by the time I finished "1408," I had realized it was probably going to be part of an audio collection. I would read the stories myself, and didn't want to sit there in the little recording booth, saying Ostermeyer, Ostermeyer, Ostermeyer all day long. So I changed it.
　　3. I'm doing a lot of the reader's thinking for him here. Since most readers can think for themselves, I felt free to cut this from five lines to just two.
　　4. Too much stage direction, too much belaboring of the obvious, and too much clumsy back story. Out it goes.
　　5. Ah, here is the lucky Hawaiian shirt. It shows up in the first draft, but not until about page thirty. That's too late for an important prop, so I stuck it up front. There's an old rule of theater that goes, "If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III." The reverse is also true; if the main character's lucky Hawaiian shirt plays a part at the end of a story, it must be introduced early. Otherwise it looks like a deus ex machina (which of course it is).
　　6. The first-draft copy reads "Mike sat down in one of the chairs in front of the desk." Well, duh - where else is he going to sit? On the floor? I don't think so, and out it goes. Also out is the business of the Cuban cigars. This is not only trite, it's the sort of thing bad guys are always saying in bad movies. "Have a cigar! They're Cuban!" Fuhgeddaboudit!
　　7. The first- and second-draft ideas and basic information are the same, but in the second draft, things have been cut to the bone. And look! See that wretched adverb, that "shortly"? Stomped it, didn't I? No mercy!
　　8. And here's one I didn't cut . . . not just an adverb but a Swiftie: "Well," Mike said heartily . . . But I stand behind my choice not to cut in this case, would argue that it's the exception which proves the rule. "Heartily" has been allowed to stand because I want the reader to understand that Mike is making fun of poor Mr. Olin. Just a little, but yes, he's making fun.
　　9. This passage not only belabors the obvious but repeats it. Out it goes. The concept of a person's feeling comfortable in one's own special place, however, seemed to clarify Olin's character, and so I added it.
　　
　　I toyed with the idea of including the entire finished text of "1408" in this book, but the idea ran counter to my determination to be brief, for once in my life. If you would like to listen to the entire thing, it's available as part of a three-story audio collection, Blood and Smoke. You may access a sample on the Simon and Schuster Web site, http://www.SimonSays.com. And remember, for our purposes here, you don't need to finish the story. This is about engine maintenance, not joyriding.
　　
And Furthermore,
Part II: A Booklist

　　When I talk about writing, I usually offer my audiences an abbreviated version of the "On Writing" section which forms the second half of this book. That includes the Prime Rule, of course: Write a lot and read a lot. In the Q-and-A period which follows, someone invariably asks: "What do you read?"
　　I've never given a very satisfactory answer to that question, because it causes a kind of circuit overload in my brain. The easy answer - "Everything I can get my hands on" - is true enough, but not helpful. The list that follows provides a more specific answer to that question. These are the best books I've read over the last three or four years, the period during which I wrote The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Hearts in Atlantis, On Writing, and the as-yet-unpublished From a Buick Eight. In some way or other, I suspect each book in the list had an influence on the books I wrote.
　　As you scan this list, please remember that I'm not Oprah and this isn't my book club. These are the ones that worked for me, that's all. But you could do worse, and a good many of these might show you some new ways of doing your work.
　　Even if they don't, they're apt to entertain you. They certainly entertained me.
　　
　　Abrahams, Peter: A Perfect Crime
　　Abrahams, Peter: Lights Out
　　Abrahams, Peter: Pressure Drop
　　Abrahams, Peter: Revolution #9
　　Agee, James: A Death in the Family
　　Bakis, Kirsten: Lives of the Monster Dogs
　　Barker, Pat: Regeneration
　　Barker, Pat: The Eye in the Door
　　Barker, Pat: The Ghost Road
　　Bausch, Richard: In the Night Season
　　Blauner, Peter: The Intruder
　　Bowles, Paul: The Sheltering Sky
　　Boyle, T. Coraghessan: The Tortilla Curtain
　　Bryson, Bill: A Walk in the Woods
　　Buckley, Christopher: Thank You for Smoking
　　Carver, Raymond: Where I'm Calling From
　　Chabon, Michael: Werewolves in Their Youth
　　Chorlton, Windsor: Latitude Zero
　　Connelly, Michael: The Poet
　　Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness
　　Constantine, K. C.: Family Values
　　DeLillo, Don: Underworld
　　DeMille, Nelson: Cathedral
　　DeMille, Nelson: The Gold Coast
　　Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist
　　Dobyns, Stephen: Common Carnage
　　Dobyns, Stephen: The Church of Dead Girls
　　Doyle, Roddy: The Woman Who Walked into Doors
　　Elkin, Stanley: The Dick Gibson Show
　　Faulkner, William: As I Lay Dying
　　Garland, Alex: The Beach
　　George, Elizabeth: Deception on His Mind
　　Gerritsen, Tess: Gravity
　　Golding, William: Lord of the Flies
　　Gray, Muriel: Furnace
　　Greene, Graham: A Gun for Sale (aka This Gun for Hire)
　　Greene, Graham: Our Man in Havana
　　Halberstam, David: The Fifties
　　Hamill, Pete: Why Sinatra Matters
　　Harris, Thomas: Hannibal
　　Haruf, Kent: Plainsong
　　Hoeg, Peter: Smilla's Sense of Snow
　　Hunter, Stephen: Dirty White Boys
　　Ignatius, David: A Firing Offense
　　Irving, John: A Widow for One Year
　　Joyce, Graham: The Tooth Fairy
　　Judd, Alan: The Devil's Own Work
　　Kahn, Roger: Good Enough to Dream
　　Karr, Mary: The Liars' Club
　　Ketchum, Jack: Right to Life
　　King, Tabitha: Survivor
　　King, Tabitha: The Sky in the Water (unpublished)
　　Kingsolver, Barbara: The Poisonwood Bible
　　Krakauer, Jon: Into Thin Air
　　Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird
　　Lefkowitz, Bernard: Our Guys
　　Little, Bentley: The Ignored
　　Maclean, Norman: A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
　　Maugham, W. Somerset: The Moon and Sixpence
　　McCarthy, Cormac: Cities of the Plain
　　McCarthy, Cormac: The Crossing
　　McCourt, Frank: Angela's Ashes
　　McDermott, Alice: Charming Billy
　　McDevitt, Jack: Ancient Shores
　　McEwan, Ian: Enduring Love
　　McEwan, Ian: The Cement Garden
　　McMurtry, Larry: Dead Man's Walk
　　McMurtry, Larry, and Diana Ossana: Zeke and Ned
　　Miller, Walter M.: A Canticle for Leibowitz
　　Oates, Joyce Carol: Zombie
　　O'Brien, Tim: In the Lake of the Woods
　　O'Nan, Stewart: The Speed Queen
　　Ondaatje, Michael: The English Patient
　　Patterson, Richard North: No Safe Place
　　 Price, Richard: Freedomland
　　Proulx, Annie: Close Range: Wyoming Stories
　　Proulx, Annie: The Shipping News
　　Quindlen, Anna: One True Thing
　　Rendell, Ruth: A Sight for Sore Eyes Robinson, Frank M.: Waiting
　　Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
　　Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azakaban
　　Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
　　Russo, Richard: Mohawk
　　Schwartz, John Burnham: Reservation Road
　　Seth, Vikram: A Suitable Boy
　　Shaw, Irwin: The Young Lions
　　Slotkin, Richard: The Crater Smith,
　　Dinitia: The Illusionist Spencer, Scott: Men in Black
　　Stegner, Wallace: Joe Hill
　　Tartt, Donna: The Secret History
　　Tyler, Anne: A Patchwork Planet
　　Vonnegut, Kurt: Hocus Pocus
　　Waugh, Evelyn: Brideshead Revisited
　　Westlake, Donald E.: The Ax








1