No Pictures Today: Is this the end?

Is this the final entry on the blog?

 

On Writing by Stephen King  

published 2000

 

I have decided to close down this blog. Here’s why. One of the most successful & best-selling writers alive today says this:

I’m not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they’re wearing (I find wardrobe inventory particularly irritating: if I want to read descriptions of clothes, I can always get a J.Crew catalogue)…For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.

This is Stephen King in his book On Writing.

Oh dear, I thought (once I'd recovered from my faint), I’d better stop doing this, I shouldn’t be encouraging people.

But then a couple of pages later he sets out to show good descriptive writing, with a passage he has just made up.

…the maitre d’, his tie undone and his shirt cuffs rolled back to show his hairy wrists, was talking with the bartender…

And then he says: ‘[this is] pretty good, I think; I love the tie and the cuffs, it’s like a photograph’.

I stopped dead. How is that not clothes description of the kind I like best?

He says that he likes details that enable the reader to see his characters, and for me that includes clothes.

He says: the key to good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary.

Examples he gives of writers who do this well include Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald. Then he moves on to poets – ‘TS Eliot (those ragged claws scuttling across the ocean floor; those coffee spoons), and William Carlos Williams (white chickens, red wheelbarrow, the plums that were in the ice box, so sweet and so cold).’

Only WCW has NOT appeared on the blog. Eliot’s entries do not particularly feature clothes, the others do: none of them holds back on describing clothes. (Chandler and the powder blue suit  here– Hammett and the unionsuit here).

Oh well, I guess the blog is reprieved! I will carry on. But in honour of Stephen King, and the date, there will be no pictures today, an all-time first for the blog…

On Writing is an intriguing and very readable book.

It is fascinating to read about his methods, but strange the way he insists this is the ‘right’ way to do it. He is generous and helpful but he absolutely insists that his way of working doesn’t just suit him, good for his books, he wants everyone to do it that way. (I’d love to hear if any now-very-successful author says ‘I learned it all from that Stephen King book’. It’s been more than 20 years, plenty of time for someone to have made it through)

He talks about his drinking which became a problem – he is now in recovery. He says plotting isn’t that important and he doesn’t bother much in advance. Honestly, the guy is full of surprises.

He criticizes a number of other writers, straightforwardly. This is interesting because one notable thing about him is that he is always being featured on other writers’ covers – he is very lavish with a quote. That suggests a great generosity, but – given his openness here – that he is not just puffing any old book out of kindness.

There is a famous sentence quoted in the book, which he says he read in another writer’s novel:

He sat solidly beside the corpse, waiting for the medical examiner as patiently as a man waiting for a turkey sandwich

This he gives as an example of a simile that doesn’t work, that is funny and embarrassing. It is much discussed online, and the consensus view seems to be that he made it up for the example, no-one has ever tracked down that sentence… (For sure he didn’t give a cover quote for the theoretical author).

He has many helpful and useful things to say about writing, and I think anyone would find something new or helpful or eye-opening here.

However I would say that he doesn’t know which things are particular and special to him and which are universal. I often think – people who are phenomenally successful in a certain area (business, sport) are able to become very-well-paid motivational speakers. But those people will have little in common with their listeners. You really want a middling performer, who has failed as well as succeeded.

But – it is a charming and most enjoyable book: the memoir section about his life growing up, then the long description of how he works (and how EVERYONE SHOULD work), and then finally the story about his being run down by a truck while out for a walk, not long before this book was published, and how he recovered from his life-threatening injuries. He seems to have a spectacularly happy marriage and family life. His wife Tabitha famously pulled the first outline of Carrie out of the trashcan where he had chucked it, and made him try again: it was his first novel and became a huge success.

And by the way, Carrie has ‘a fashion-victim’s wardrobe’ but he’s not going to give you a ‘skirt-by-skirt rundown’.

Interestingly, this seems to make it clear that Stephen King does not understand what the phrase ‘fashion victim’ means.

On this topic, then - No further questions, m’lud.

But he still is a great writer and sounds like a delightful man.

His The Shining has featured on the blog in a Halloween entry, with, naturally, some quite nice clothes.

Thanks to EW for pointing this passage out and sending me the book.

And finally, I would love to hear from readers: which clothes moments in books do you think prove Stephen King wrong? The moments where clothes are shown as important, beautiful, significant. Bring them on in the comments please.