Course:Stephen King
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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Stephen King. The man doesn't need an introduction. But Stephen King is a best selling American author of 65 (and counting) books. Many of his works are dark, genre and revolve around themes of redemption, good vs evil, fear and horror.
The "King of Horror" has influenced me since I accidentally saw Shawshank Redemption at an age in which I should not have seen Shawshank Redemption, aka ten. I was perturbed at the darker parts of the film and did not understand the implications of being in jail for "maybe" murdering your wife but I was captivated by the storytelling, the narration of Morgan Freeman and cinematography. One of the older kids who put the movie on in the first place said it was the movie version of a book by a man named Stephen King.
I wanted to know more about this King character so I begged my mother to take me to the library to pick out one of his books. I have no idea why she let me do this but I took out IT, one of King's lengthier endeavours and after trying so hard to read through three of its whopping 1168 pages I gave up and stuck to movies. My love of horror movies grew and grew and I deserted Mr. King's books. They were too long and I didn't get them whatsoever.
Fast foreword six years. I'm in the basement of a girlfriend's place at a halloween slumber party and what do we decide to watch but the 1990 TV adaptation of IT. The first half was amazing! I was scared out of my mind and Tim Curry as Pennywise will forever be burned into my psyche as the best way to play a psychotic clown. The second half included a very janky stop-motion spider and we ripped on it pretty hard. But it was still such fun! Being older, I decided to take another stab at reading IT once again. I got halfway through and abandoned it. It's really long. But I thought maybe his other books would be alright. I took out Dolores Claiborne and was captivated by how the story was told this strange voice — a woman telling the police her life story after she's brought in under suspicion of murder.
Then over the course of a decade I watched/read The Shining, Misery, 1408, The Mist, Maximum Overdrive, Carrie, Christine, Stand By Me, The Running Man, The Green Mile and Doctor Sleep. This doesn't even begin to touch King's iceberg that is his 65 written works but he's always been there for me throughout the years. Old Faithful.
When I was about 28 my sister-in-law gave me Stephen King's memoir/craft book On Writing, which ultimately (and I don't want to be dramatic) changed my life. I read/listen to it once a year. Reading about his very poor, blue collar upbringing to "The King of Horror" showed me that anybody could be an author if they really stuck with it and wrote every day and also got a book deal. I adopted his 'sit down and write everyday' policy, treating writing like any other job in which you show up (relatively) at the same time every day, and tried to come to terms with the fact that on some days you love it and others you can't stand it.
When I first started out writing I wrote genre: horror, sci-fi and thriller mostly, without much thought for the literary-ness of prose or theme. This was because of King. Because I loved a good tale. I just had fun! Ultimately, this is what gets writers into writing in the first place: fun.
This is what King taught me (I try to live by these three things): work hard, work consistently and for god's sake write what you want to. I'm very glad King has been there throughout every stage of my nascent writing journey to teach me such things because it taught me to write whatever the story wants to be whether its horror, poetry, screenplay and to show up everyday in one form or another.
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