Stephen King: Wise Words

Thriller Guy's pal Larry has been working for several years to clean out much of the junk that has accumulated during his long and distinguished career as an author. Non-writers would be amazed at how this stuff can mount up, particularly files of printed material that seemed important at one time, or actually is still important but no longer needed. In that latter category, Larry came across an article Stephen King wrote 38 years ago for the New York Times. He sent it along to TG because King makes many of the same points concerning writing and publishing that TG has been ranting about for years. So TG is appropriating the piece and putting it up here in all its entirety. With apologies to the NYTs, if they are necessary; ditto Stephen King. Pay particular attention to his explanation of the term Plain Style. TG himself couldn’t have said it better.

October 24, 1976

Not Guilty: The Guest Word

By STEPHEN KING

It was one of those bizarre coincidences that make living in this best of all possible worlds

the decidedly queer game that it is. At noon, the mailman brought my Sept. 19 issue of The Times Book Review, with a Book Ends column under the best seller list titled “Money Talk”—in it I learned that David Madden, the author of “Bijou,” one of the books I admire most in the world, made about $15,000 in cash as a result of his labors on that book, or about $2,500 for each of the six years he worked on it. At three, Jane Heller of the New American Library, my paperback publisher, called to tell me that my novel, “’Salem’s Lot,” was going to reach number one on The Times paperback best seller list the following week—Sept. 26.

Madden worked on “Bijou” for six years and made $15,000. I worked on “Salem’s Lot” for about eight months (three months first; three months second draft; two months third draft) and stand to make nearly half a million dollars, if all falls together. This is before taxes, in case any potential kidnappers happen to read The Times.

How does the contrast make me feel? In a word, guilty. But in another two words, not guilty. The two feelings are perfectly joined at hip and shoulder like Siamese twins, and I’m going to try to cut them apart before your very eyes.

As a sustained piece of craft, as an evocation of place and time, as a synthesis of plot, mood and style, Madden’s “Bijou” beats “Salem’s Lot” to the finish line by several lengths—which is a metaphoric and less painful way of saying that “Bijou” is a better book. That’s why I feel guilty.

Not guilty is less clear-cut, and I beg the indulgence of the court (what court? The one that will still be sitting while David Madden and I are looking up at the lids of our coffins with our mouldering hands crossed on our chests) while I try to explain that. It has something to do with accessibility, although that’s not everything. “’Salem’s Lot”—along with other books I could name, “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” and “Trinity” are two wildly contrasting examples—is an extremely accessible book. If “Lot” was the water off a bit of Maine beach, it would be extremely warm water, easy to slip into, pleasant to stroke around in for the next 400-odd pages. “Bijou” is a cooler ocean, and the footing underneath shelves off much more suddenly. To get through “Bijou,” you have to make a commitment; to get through “’Salem’s Lot” all you need is a sunpad and a pair of eyes and you’re in business.

But there’s an art to accessibility, too, although it may be of a more humble sort than that which belongs to the artist who will not hew his peg to fit accessibility’s hole. Warm water books have been given a bad name by the Robbinses and the Susanns—but “Ordinary People” is an accessible book, as is “Watership Down,” “Dog Soldiers” and Tolkien’s Rings trilogy. Robertson Davies, who is perhaps Canada’s accessible white to Joyce Carol Oates’s more difficult black, calls this accessibility the Plain Style. The Plain Style is not flashy, it is rarely practiced in the little magazines, and is rarely represented in the small presses. But to use the Plain Style is always to drive directly at the point, and if the point is minor, the author always ends up with well-advertised pie on his face.

Accessibility is half of it, but I would like to add one other thing to my not-guilty plea, because accessibility cannot stand alone—the directions for cooking a roast may be accessible, but that does not make those directions literature. The addendum has nothing to do with talent either, because the recognition of talent is almost always an affair of luck. Talent can be fully used, as in the case of Faulkner’s best work; half-used, as in the case of the more recent Ross Macdonald novels, or barely used at all—a kind of twitch. Talent has nothing at all to do with money, writing or the wrath of God. It’s the cheapest commodity on earth, with the possible exceptions of mongrel dogs and table salt.

The item which must be added to accessibility to acquit the author is the honest intent to do as well as possible. I’ll give you an example that the more literary-minded among you will probably scoff at “Harvest Home,” by Thomas Tryon. It isn’t a great book, not a great horror novel, not even a great suspense novel. My own editor at Doubleday once told me that his fingers itched to get at it and cut out the deadwood; my guess is that Tryon’s editor at Knopf experienced a similar itch in his own extremities and was rebuffed by Tryon. Rightly so, maybe. Never mind the best seller list. Mind this, instead: Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it is a true book; it is an honest book in the sense that it says exactly what Tryon wanted to say. And if what he wanted to say wasn’t exactly Miltonian, it does have this going for it: in forty years, when most of us are underground, there will still be a routine rebinding once a year for the library copies of “Harvest Home,” and, I hope, for “’Salem’s Lot.”

For all its huge sales, “’Salem’s Lot” is a humble book. It isn’t going to find a niche in the college bookstores. But for all that, I feel a certain pride in the book. Because I think it can stand on its own after I leave it behind—as I most certainly hope I will.

The honest intent to do as well as possible—that has to stand at the base of any writing career. The object in view is to not let the money sway you from that, or the critics, or the wrath of God. Honest intent has nothing to do with art, one way or the other; art is its own master and talent is merely its whore. Honest intent only applies to the more humble side of writing: the craft. You sit down in front of the typewriter and do the best you can. You play fair. You keep your hands clean. And then, if the money comes:

Not guilty.

Stephen King is the author, also, of “Carrie.”

How Many Words Did You Write Today?

Many years ago TG was having a conversation with his pal writer Henry Allen. We were

discussing a mutual writer friend who was working on a novel and had been working on it for some time. TG asked Henry how far along he was on it, how many words he had written. Henry laughed. “He says he has no idea how many words he has written, that he doesn’t think that sort of thing is important. Bullshit. Every writer knows how many words he has done, down to the single digits.” TG agrees. Every professional writer TG knows keeps a careful word count. Words are more precious than gold and watching them mount up is little different than watching Scrooge McDuck bathe in his basement coin vault. (When TG was a lad he used to daydream about Scrooge rolling in these coins. Could it be true? A quick internet search reveals that to replicate the vault would take 32.6 billion dollars in coins.)

A novelist knows that a “regular” novel should be between 80,000 and 120,000 words, though agents and publishers these days discourage more than 100,000 words because of printing costs. That’s the number you aim for, and every day after work you tote up a tally so you can see how far you’ve come. You think “a third of the way, half the way, three-quarters there,” and are solaced by how far along you are, or upset at how far you have to go. It’s kind of like if you’re on a diet: every day you step on the scale and assess the results.

The other day TG was trolling the book blogs and came upon one of Keith Thompson’s entries on the subject. TG is going to lift a big chunk of the blog and add some stats he dug up on his own. Keith Thomson is a thriller writer (among other types of books). Thriller Guy reviewed two of his books, Once a Spy and Twice a Spy and thought they were terrific. Here’s Keith.

I’ve noticed a lot of writers posting their daily word output on social media. The single common denominator of these posts, unfortunately, has been word counts that exceed my own. In hope of feeling better, I compiled some data on the typical daily productivity of writers I admire. What follows is a selection that provides a representative sample. Bear in mind that no heed is given to the relative merits of such numbers, and, as Mark Twain said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

Speaking of Twain, every morning he would get up and eat a hearty breakfast, then go to his study to write, staying there until about five, except in case of emergency—if anyone needed him, they had to sound a horn. The result was 1,000 words per day.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King says that he writes 2,000 words a day without fail, even on holidays. And that’s with no adverbs.

Lee Child uses word counts as mile markers. His record is 4000 words in a single day. His low is 600. His average: 1800. It takes him 80-85 working days to complete a book, but not 80-85 consecutive days, because he tends to (not?) write for more than four days in a row.

Trollope, too, wrote by volume. He put his pocket watch on his desk next and produced 500 words every thirty minutes for three hours—a daily total of 3,000 words.

In contrast, Hemingway clocked in at just 500.

Tolkein wrote The Lord of the Rings trilogy—670,000 words—in eleven years. That’s about 250 words per working day.

Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full is 370,000 words long. Writing it took him eleven years, of which he says, “My children grew up thinking that was all I did: write, and never finish, a book called A Man in Full.”  The average: 135 words per day.

Jack London: 1500 words per day, every day. Before breakfast. Norman Mailer and Arthur Conan Doyle were both 3,000-words-per-day guys. Anne Rice hits 5,000. The Babe Ruth of this category is Michael Crichton, who routinely hit the daily ten grand mark.

Thankfully we also have Graham Greene, who counted each word, and would stop for the day at 500, even if he were in the middle of a sentence. Maya Angelou, who each day writes about nine pages, but saves just three. James Joyce, who proudly considered the completion of two perfect sentences a full day of work. And Dorothy Parker, who frequently wrote as few as five words—of which, she said, she changed seven.

TG here. TG would like to add that Twain, on arising in the morning, would have a shot of whiskey before brushing his teeth. His wife had strict instructions to have the shot in his bathroom when he climbed out of bed. (TG would like to remind readers that Twain is a major character in the Pastmaster series of novels by Allen Appel. Find him in Twice Upon a Time, now available as a Kindle, as are all five of the series.)

  

Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason novels, wrote a million words a year, which is about thirteen pages each working day. Victor Hugo wrote twenty pages each day.  John Grisham wrote The Pelican Brief in one hundred days, and The Client in six months.  Samuel Johnson often produced forty printed pages in a day.

And some writers are markedly slow.  More on Greene. According to the legendary Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda, Graham Greene “without crossing out anything, and in neat, square handwriting, the letters so tiny and cramped that it looked like an attempt to write the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin, wrote over the next hour or so exactly five hundred words.”

Rudyard Kipling worked in the middle of the day, from ten until four.  John O’Hara would write all night, then would rise in the late afternoon.  Anne Perry says, “I work probably eight or nine hours a day, six days a week.”  After much procrastination, Harold Robbins would lock himself in a hotel room, hide the clocks, and work round-the-clock to exhaustion.

And King has now recanted this oft quoted fact, the 2,000 words a day, saying that 1,000 words is more like it and that he doesn’t really write every single day. But the guy has a roomful of excellent books to prove his massive output. See below for another King description of his output.

King works on his new novel in the mornings. “Afternoons are for naps and letters.  Evenings are for reading, family, Red Sox games on TV, and any revisions that just cannot wait.  Basically, mornings are my prime writing time.” 

From an interview with Neil Gamin, King writes every day. If he doesn't write he's not happy. If he writes, the world is a good place. So he writes. It's that simple. “I sit down maybe at quarter past eight in the morning and I work until quarter to twelve and for that period of time, everything is real. And then it just clicks off. I think I probably write about 1200 to 1500 words. It's six pages. I want to get six pages into hardcopy.”

So how many words do you write or try to write each day? And how do you feel if you make your goal, or don’t make your goal? TG would like to point out that this blog entry comes in at 1300 words. Just about exactly what Stephen King shoots for. Unfortunately, they’re not words that will be in the current novel that TG is working on. But that’s another blog entry.

More On First and Last Lines

After finishing up the Five (or so) Mistakes Thriller Writers make, Thriller Guy is instituting some new changes in the blog. TG is going to try and make the entries shorter and more varied and post much more often. He is also going to allow AdSense to put up ads as it should prove at least mildly interesting as to what they choose. If what they do annoys TG, he will take them down. TG wants everyone to know that he is in no way asking you to click on anything you aren’t interested in.

In the last several posts, TG has addressed the difficulties and possibilities of the opening and ending lines of a manuscript or book. Several interesting additions came in over the last several days. Yesterday, TG listened to Bob Edwards interviewing Clive Cussler on

Edwards’ XM Radio show. Clive sounded like what he is, a mega-selling thriller writer who’s been around a lot of years who simply tries to give readers the types of stories they like to read. He answered a question I’ve been interested for a while: How does he work with the writers who write his books with (or maybe for) him? He said he first has the writer come to his place and they hash out a plot and an ending to aim for. Note the itals: “and an ending to aim for.” So if you want to make money like Clive, it’s way smart to have your ending before you even start writing.

Stephen King has a new article in The Atlantic titled: Why Stephen King Spends ‘Months and Even Years’ Writing Opening Sentences. TG recommends the article to all writers and offers a couple of quick quotes.

“An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You

want to know about this.”

“But for me, a good opening sentence really begins with voice. You hear people talk about "voice" a lot, when I think they really just mean "style." Voice is more than that. People come to books looking for something. But they don't come for the story, or even for the characters. They certainly don't come for the genre. I think readers come for the voice.”

“My favorite example is from Douglas Fairbairn's novel, Shoot, which begins with a confrontation in the woods. There are two groups of hunters from different parts of town. One gets shot accidentally, and over time tensions escalate. Later in the book, they meet again in the woods to wage war -- they re-enact Vietnam, essentially. And the story begins this way:

“This is what happened.”

“For me, this has always been the quintessential opening line. It's flat and clean as an affidavit. It establishes just what kind of speaker we're dealing with: someone willing to say, I will tell you the truth. I'll tell you the facts. I'll cut through the bullshit and show you exactly what happened. It suggests that there's an important story here, too, in a way that says to the reader: and you want to know.”

“When I'm starting a book, I compose in bed before I go to sleep. I will lie there in the dark and think. I'll try to write a paragraph. An opening paragraph. And over a period of weeks and months and even years, I'll word and reword it until I'm happy with what I've got. If I can get that first paragraph right, I'll know I can do the book.”

“A book won't stand or fall on the very first line of prose -- the story has got to be there, and that's the real work. And yet a really good first line can do so much to establish that crucial sense of voice -- it's the first thing that acquaints you, that makes you eager, that starts to enlist you for the long haul. So there's incredible power in it, when you say, come in here. You want to know about this. And someone begins to listen.”

All this talk about first lines got TG – or rather his alter ego, Allen Appel – thinking about his own first lines. So he went and looked up the first chapter and the first line of the book he’s now writing, the sixth book in his Pastmaster Series. Here it is:

“Alex Balfour stood at the second-story window and watched as the one woman and three men who were about to die were walked out into the courtyard and up onto the scaffolding where they would shortly hang.”

Not bad. It will probably get some tweaking on the many rounds of rewrites coming up, but all in all it fills the bill for an evocative first sentence and an indication of the voice of the writer. What do you think? Any comments? Any first lines of your own or other favorite writers?

Under the Dome

Before beginning today's entry, just a quick note. Eagle Eyed Marlene comments that TG misspelled the word “judgement” in the entry below. Au contraire, Marlene, you are applying the American spelling (AE) whereas TG has inadvertently slipped into the British spelling (BE). That is because TG spent several years training in England with the Royal Marines in their Special Boat Service (SBS) ((motto” “Not By Strength, By Guile”)) and occasionally applies the BE spelling to certain words. Sorry about that. God, those were the days. TG would really love to talk about that period of his life, but modesty and the Military Secrecy Act (MSA) forbid.

Today, (Sat., Nov. 14^th) the Washington Post gave Stephen King's Under the Dome pretty much a rave review. Publishers Weekly did as well. TG wishes King and his book only the best, but a sigh of relief was heard in these environs when it was clear that there would be no review required from TG. A thousand pages? Spare me.

When TG was a young man, he eagerly awaited each year's new King novel. He and his mates in the Marines would hang around the barracks, oops, sorry, can't talk about that. Suffice it so say that each book, Misery, etc. would get passed from hand to hand among the lads until it became tattered beyond repair. But as TG grew older, there seemed to be less and less time for King, and, really, the books just didn't seem as interesting. Then there came a point when TG would find one in the library, attempt to read it and just couldn't get through to the end. The last attempt was with Cell. After that, TG quit.

Can someone out there give TG a good reason to try again? All other books, books for which TG is paid American dollars to read and review, would have to go on hold, so it's going to have to be a pretty good reason. Oh, how he loved, so many years ago, reading The Stand. Will Under the Dome return him to those days of yesteryear?

And finally, a Stephen King story. About a decade ago, TG, who lives in a small hamlet just outside Washington, DC, was getting his hair cut. In the next chair a woman was asked by the stylist how her son was doing. She replied he was doing very well because he had come up with the money to attend the local college. Where did he get the money? It turns out that he's a very distant relative of Stephen King, who has a special fund set up to pay for the college education of even his farest flung relations. Good for the kid. Good for Stephen King. The man deserves his gazillion dollars.

And here's a recent video of the master speaking at a signing for Under the Dome. And how he keeps from going berserk when he's asked, probably for the millionth time, “Where do you get your inspiration?” I'll never know.

Here's the talk.

The Dome Cover

This week's guest blog, actually it's Thriller Guy's first guest blog, goes to Frank Zubek who is a writer and who keeps TG apprised of all things geeky and cool. Frank chimes in here on the new Stephen King cover, which is really one fabulous piece of art. You may ask why TG didn't upload this new cover? He can't get it to work. Probably part of some vast Stephen King conspiracy. To see it, click on the word "here" in the following...

Allen,

A small, critical suggestion about book covers and selling books, from a Stephen King fan.

Over the past few weeks, Scribner has been slowly unveiling the cover to the new Stephen King novel, Under the Dome, in small chunks. (Front, back cover and then the spine and the text.)

The final cover design can be seen here-

Granted, it’s a striking cover and will definitely stand out from the rest of the few dozen other books that will be on sale November 10. But personally? I don’t see what the big deal is about releasing the cover. After all, this is the new Stephen King novel! A huge one that weighs in at 1,088 pages. His other ‘paperweights’, IT, has 1,152 pages and The Stand, has 1,153 pages, respectively.

The book will sell. In fact, Stephen King’s name on a plain brown wrapper would sell.

To be fair, considering the current state of the economy, I can see the reasoning behind the move. Scribner, no doubt, would like a few hundred thousand people who haven’t yet read a Stephen King novel to try this one out.

Still, if it were me, in addition to the cover, I’d build up the novel over the next five weeks by releasing choice chapter excerpts in five different venues. For example, USA Today, The New York Times, TIME or Newsweek, maybe one of the better literary magazines, and just to spice it up, a small sample through Kindle. That way, the book attracts a much larger demographic of potential new readers than just a small web page on the internet showing off the cover. ( No offense to the marketing folks).

While I do understand the point of the big cover unveiling (attracting new readers), fans of King, while they may like the new cover, get Stephen King, to read Stephen King. I think (as a fan), that it would make more sense to release a five week teaser (with five different, exciting chapters) that will get everyone excited about November 10^th, which is the release date of the novel. But that’s me.

If you are interested in an excerpt, 15 pages worth can be found in the back of the new paperback edition of his latest short story collection, Just After Sunset. There is one other excerpt scheduled in an upcoming issue of Entertainment Weekly as well. But that hardly strikes me as an exciting build up to November 10. Though I could be wrong since there is still a full month left and all the campaign plans have yet to be released ( I have timed this cover critique with the date of the cover reveal).

While a great looking cover has been known to help sell a book, times have changed and the need to attract paying customers is more important than ever. While releasing 50 pages (over a five week period) to sell a 1,088 page novel VS. showing off one cover might not be a good marketing plan (for whatever reason), it would sure get ME interested in buying the book.

Especially if I had never bought a Stephen King book before now.

But that’s just my opinion. I do hope the book sells out since over the long term, it will help bookstores in these tough times.

Frank Zubek