Yet again, in the last remaining minutes of the day, I’d like to relate to you some personal information. I picked up a new read today at the very nice Barnes and Noble in Des Moines. On recommendation from my brother:
The Gunslinger by
Stephen King. So far it is very good. I’ve only read one page of the book, but that’s not what I mean.
First of all, the cover art is really great.
Michael Whelan did a fantastic job establishing what I would call a neo-romantic (I'll define it later) atmosphere with that cover. However, that’s not what I mean by its good so far. I have never read anything by or heard much about Stephen King, and so I have nearly no preconceived notions about him. This gives me a relatively fresh view of him, and so far I really like what I’ve read in the introduction and forward of the book. As I was reading the introduction and forward of The Gunslinger, some things really struck me and reminded me of things I have thought about recently and figured they were definitely worth mentioning. Ergo, here are some things to think about, maybe you can listen and implement some of these things to your unique human situation. Oh, lastly, I feel I should mention the book is not a horror book, but rather an epic in the spirit of Tolkien (read on to understand more).
Stephen King, on Epic. A long quote from the introduction (forgive me): Then . . . I saw a film directed by Sergio Leone. It was called The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and before the film was even half over, I realized that what I wanted to write was a novel that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic but set against Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop. If you’ve only seen this gonzo Western on your television screen, you don’t understand what I’m talking about—cry your pardon, but it’s true. On a movie screen, projected through the correct Panavision lenses, TG, TB, & TU is an epic to rival Ben-Hur. Clint Eastwood appears roughly eighteen feet tall, with each wiry jut of stubble on his cheeks looking roughly the size of a young redwood tree. The grooves bracketing Lee Van Cleef’s mouth are as deep as canyons, and there could be a thinny (see Wizard and Glass) at the bottom of each one. The desert settings appear to stretch at least out as far as the orbit of the planet Neptune. And the barrel of each gun looks to be roughly as large as the Holland Tunnel.
What I wanted even more than the setting was that feeling of epic, apocalyptic size. The fact that Leone knew jack shit about American geography (according to one of the characters, Chicago is somewhere in the vicinity of Phoenix, Arizona) added to the film’s sense of magnificent dislocation. And in my enthusiasm—the sort only a young person can muster, I think—I wanted to write not just a long book, but the longest popular novel in history. I did not succeed in doing that, but I feel I had a decent rip; The Dark Tower, volumes one through seven, really comprise a single tale, and the first four volumes run to just over two thousand pages in paperback. The final three volumes run another twenty-five hundred in manuscript. I’m not trying to imply here that length has anything whatsoever to do with quality; I’m just saying that I wanted to write an epic, and in some ways, I succeeded. If you were to ask me why I wanted to do that, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe it’s a part of growing up American: build the tallest, dig the deepest, write the longest. And that head-scratching puzzlement when the question of motivation comes up? Seems to me that that is also part of being an American. In the end we are reduced to saying It seemed like a good idea at the time.
I, too, have felt this unique pull toward epics. There is something spectacular about the sheer immensity of the scale of some stories, music, movies, and art. I think this is part of the reason I am lured by the Ancient Greek tradition and culture; if you look at everything it seems to be
monumental. Even the poses of statues give off an air of vastness. The fact that there are mountainous gods and there tremendous offspring roaming the Earth in the stories of the time is quite a colossal concept. I don’t mean to imply that things must be physically large or encompass decisions that affect all of humanity, because I certainly believe that an epic can be derived from the life of a small and relatively unimportant person (example: movie: “Rocky”). At any rate, for some reason, I have always dreamed of writing the kind of music that just makes peoples jaw drop with immensity; my dream is to have someone shake in awe of the sheer power of a piece, to be hit in the chest by the gargantuan, monolithic, and monstrous sound. In some ways this epic concept can make you feel small, but in my opinion, the reason it is great isn’t that it makes you feel small, but rather it makes everything else seem so big. It may sound cliché, but I really think there is something to that.
Stephen King, on Notes: I once had an outline, but I lost it along the way. (It probably wasn’t worth a tin shit, anyway.) All I had was a few notes (“Chussit, chissit, chassit, something-something-basket” reads one lying on the desk as I write this)
I had to laugh at this one just because I’ve come across notes that apparently were intended to be helpful or have some meaning at some time but that seemed very trivial later. Example: I found an “idea for a short story” on my computer the other day that read “guys are looking for something, guy hides it in a box of
Malt-O-Meal.” How on Earth this could have even appeared to be a good idea (or even a complete idea) at one time is unexplainable to me.
Stephen King, on Attack: . . . but my method of attack has always been to plunge in and go as fast as I can, keeping the edge of my narrative blade as sharp as possible by constant use, and trying to outrun the novelist’s most insidious enemy, which is doubt. Looking back prompts too many questions: How believable are my characters? How interesting is my story? How good is this, really? Will anyone care? Do I care myself?
When my first draft of a novel is done, I put it away, warts and all, to mellow. Some period of time later—six months, a year, two years, it doesn’t really matter—I can come back to it with a cooler (but still loving) eye, and begin the task of revising.
I really think this is a good approach. Too often for me, I get too sidetracked by everything that I actually get to the point where I’m not even focusing on the thing I’m trying to accomplish. While practicing flute, I ask myself “is this as good as my peers?” or “is this getting better?” I recently realized thanks to Mike Giles that that just isn’t what it’s about most of the time. It more important that I do what I can, in the way that I can do it, and that is a hard concept. Looking back
does prompt too many questions; the thing that really matters is that you’re doing something right then to the best of your ability. If I’m writing music and I realize that people would hate it, I feel a really bad emotional sting, and I really need to persevere… beat on against that feeling, because otherwise I won’t ever write anything that is mine.
Well, the last minutes of the day have slipped by and we’re now in tomorrow. I’m fairly sure there are quite a few typos and unclarities (a word I just made up) in there, but so be it (see above paragraph on why I don’t care). Until next time.
RTA
