A Book Review of Sorts

Exploring A Whole New World

            When I think of writing, I see a world, entirely its own, a parallel universe to the one we live in. This world has beautiful areas: pastures, forests, oceans, caves, mountains, large cities and quaint towns, all worth exploring and each one with hidden secrets only revealed by frequent visits. Early on in my life, I was forced into child labor in the industrial sector of this world, with gigantic factories all bent on one thing: showing my fellow workers and I how to turn out well-structured, logical writing. Now I find myself with some vacation time away from the factory, but completely at a loss in deciding where to go. The world beyond the factory is immense; the weather is fickle, sometimes clearly showing the splendid features of this new world, and other times veiling everything in fog so that I am completely and utterly lost.

            Luckily for me, in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King creates a guide to the world of prose that lies outside of the factory. I found King’s book very helpful, but above all, honest. King writes with a deep knowledge of the beauty and terrors of the writing world because he has experienced them all firsthand. It made me feel better about my own qualms to know that a writer as successful as King can understand how scary literary criticism can be when he states in On Writing, “In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors” (21).

            On Writing also helped me realize how much about writing I already know. For example, when I write on my own, I usually write poetry. It is poetry that I always thought of as the genre that takes its own course as it is being written. When King says in the book that prose does the same thing, my initial reaction was to disagree and think of poetry. The more I thought about it though, the more I realized that he is right. In class we’ve talked about how the way a story unfolds is dictated by how the character reacts, so in that way the story writes itself.

            Being a writer is like being a coxswain for a rowing team. I coxed for the men’s team last year, had to learn to steer the boat from my seat in the stern without being able to see directly in front of me. As coxswain, I could make calls and steer the shell, but there were limits to it. If I used the rudder too much I would only slow us down in the water and I ran the risk of upsetting the balance of the shell. I could control the course we took but I wasn’t the power behind our movement, the rowers were. My job was to be the brain of the boat as a whole and think for the rowers, to ensure that everyone was working together. Our shell wouldn’t have made much progress if I tried to power it by myself. Writing is the same way. If I try to alter the natural flow of a story or the course of action a character is taking, my efforts will have a negative effect.

            King’s book also proved to be insightful in areas outside of writing. By telling stories of how his love of reading fantasy and science fiction books and then writing them developed throughout his life, King was able to touch on many other subjects. One thing that really stuck with me was when he said, 

   I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who as ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all. I’m not editorializing, just trying to give you the facts as I see them (50).

I know exactly the reaction that King is talking about, the face people make when you tell them that a career in the fine arts is your passion, like you’ve just said your life goal is to be a hobo. Offering personal stories and wisdom he has learned over the years really made King’s book accessible, and he was able to give advice without sounding preachy.

             I came away from On Writing feeling confident about my own abilities, which I think is the highest compliment that can be given to that book; it means King accomplished his goal of advising writers who are serious about writing. If I could share just one thing from On Writing with writers everywhere, it would be this, “…stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position” (78-79).  It is King’s one piece of advice that I found the most encouraging, challenging, and the one that best summarizes what he has to say about writing.  

A Foray into Fiction

The Concert- Second Draft

Joshua knew he was playing the right notes, but they sounded wrong, hollow. Normally, Joshua enjoyed playing piano sonatas by Haydn, but right now there seemed to be too many notes. His fingers felt weak and clumsy, finally tripping over each other and creating dissonance. He refrained from banging his fists on the keys and instead played the third movement of Beethoven’s moonlight sonata. After playing the fast, powerful piece, Joshua’s breathing was more relaxed and his fingers felt stronger again. 

He knew he had only a few minutes left in the practice room before he went onstage to give his last concert for his music school. Next year he would be at Northwestern, hundreds of miles away from Phoenix. Joshua couldn’t wait to get out of his parents’ house, but the concert had to be his main focus right now. He inhaled and closed his eyes, and a flood of thoughts overwhelmed his brain. 

It wasn’t until an ordinary car ride with his father that Joshua thought of making music his life. In the conversational way he had of speaking only to cover the silence, Joshua’s father said, “So… do you think this is something you’ll want to study in college?  Do you think you’ll take it seriously?”

It was a big question to ask a kid, and Joshua hadn’t known how to respond. No, he hadn’t thought about a career in music, he still had his heart set on growing up to be a doctor like the ones on the TV show his mother watched. But as Joshua got older, his father’s question stuck with him.

As his lessons became more demanding,  Joshua began to take them more seriously, devoting more time to perfecting pieces of music. Joshua’s parents were proud of how well he was doing and eagerly came to every performance. After a while though, Joshua’s concerts became routine and even though his family still came to his concerts, they stopped hearing the music.

Joshua had always credited his father with the idea of pursuing music professionally, even if he never said so out loud, so it hurt when his dad stopped coming to concerts altogether. Joshua’s dream of pusuing music was something his dad expected him to grow out of; he wanted Joshua to pursure something more realistic.

Music was not something Joshua could give up,  was a part of his life, a part of him. The notes and emotions on the pages he spent so many hours working on weren’t his own, but he connected with them. Music gave Joshua a voice that he was never able to achieve with words alone. Music wasn’t just sounds produced from squiggles on a page, it was the composer’s way of telling a story or sending a message, and Joshua used the same notes to tell his own story, to say what he wanted to say.

Then there was the fight with his dad. After doing reasearch over the summer and emailing the heads of music departments from schools all over the country, Joshua felt like he had a pretty good idea of where he wanted to go to college. One afternoon, Joshua asked for the car to drive to the music store so that he could pick up sheet music for auditions. Not even glancing away from the Tv screen, Joshua’s dad had sighed and said, “Not now, Josh. The piano doesn’t have to consume every minute of your life, it will still be there tomorrow.”

Even though Joshua asked his dad again and again, he still refused to help. Joshua’s audition dates seemed to loom closer, so he sought the help of his music teacher instead. Joshua only grew more determined every time his dad refused to help or ran off stats about which med schools were ranked at the top, and he spent hours praticing and driving himself to auditions.

Joshua exhaled. He had put in so much work over the past few months, all on his own, that this concert would be a final celebration of  what he had accomplished. Next year he would be at Northwestern, majoring in music and finally doing what he wanted to, even if no one else stood behind him.

Before he knew it, it was time for Joshua to be onstage. He walked out to applause and the introduction from his music teacher, and froze. There, in the first row sat his dad.

With a smile creeping across his face, Joshua sat down and began to play.  

One of Those Moments

I'm bad at keeping up with things, there's no two ways about it. I forget about email correspondences so my responses would be faster by snail mail, I rarely check my voicemail, I never delete text messages until my phone can't hold anymore because going through and deleting them would be too much effort, I don't pay much attention to invitations to groups and such on Facebook so I end up having 20-something requests, and I go months and months without blogging.

I know that part of it is I don't really know what to do with a blog. Not enough happens in my life to interest people to read about it, and I'm not witty enough to make interesting comments about everyday things. I felt the same way with my idea book for my creative writing class for a long time. I wanted to write in it and make it my own, but I didn't know how. 

So just now I had one of those "Oh, duh!" moments and realized I can post what I've written for creative writing. I feel better about some pieces than I do others, and I'm not sure how good the writing is overall, so comments and critiques on pieces I post would be much appreciated.