On Writing

I was searching for something online last week and came across this Atlantic interview with author Stephen King.  It's been nagging at my subconscious ever since.

I've been frustrated lately because I can't find the time I need to write.  You see, I have a real job -- one that pays the bills and one that requires lots of time and energy.

And Stephen King cuts to the root of my dilemma:

Lahey: You paint a pretty bleak picture of teachers as professional writers. Teaching is, after all, a “consumptive profession,” as a friend of mine puts it, and it can be a real challenge to find the juice for our own creative endeavors after a day at school. Do you still feel that teaching full time while pursuing the writing life is a doomed proposition? 

King: Many writers have to teach in order to put bread on the table. But I have no doubt teaching sucks away the creative juices and slows production. “Doomed proposition” is too strong, but it’s hard, Jessica. Even when you have the time, it’s hard to find the old N-R-G.

I am reminded of Harper Lee and her wonderful friends who gave her a year's salary so she could take a break from her job and concentrate on her novel.  And she wasn't even a teacher; she was a clerk at an airline counter at the time.

But he is correct.

I love teaching; I truly do.  But in all honesty, to be a good teacher you have to re-dedicate yourself to it every single year.  I've never been one of those teachers that can use the same lesson plans every single year.  Yes, I teach the same short stories, usually.  I may add or subtract from the repertoire but basically I'm covering the same stories.  But I can never do them the same way.  It changes with the group.  It also changes with your own experience and training; I went to Pre-AP training this summer which was absolutely great, but it totally changed how I teach my classes.  I'm re-writing every single lesson plan once again.  (It seems to be working, by the way -- my students have much, much higher grades and are much more engaged than in the previous sixteen years which makes me wonder why such training isn't part of the teacher education curriculum in the first place, but that's another blog for another day.)

At any rate, my writing project isn't moving at the brisk clip that I might wish.  I wake up on Saturday or Sunday and for a brief moment am full of inspiration; I'm composing sentences, paragraphs, chapters in my head!  It's rolling fluidly and beautifully just the way I want to tell it!

But then I have to do the laundry and vacuum the carpet, run to the store, dust the furniture and pick up the dry cleaning.  Then it's time to plan supper, and well, heck, it's already 2 or 3 o'clock and the inspiration is gone.

How do real writers do this?

Must I wait until I retire to write this book?  I can certainly do research for the next seven years -- there's plenty of research to be done.  That doesn't really take any creativity or inspiration, so I'm really good at the research part.

I want to be able to drop everything and run down to NOLA and sit in the Tulane archives for a couple of weeks.  (A hotel for two weeks?!  Ha!  Yeah, that's not happening.)

I want to sit in the archives in Natchitoches at NSU for days on end until I've read every single thing that could possibly pertain to my book.  Will they let me pitch a tent and a sleeping bag in the back room?  Doubtful.

But, oh, I really want days of uninterrupted silence where I can put it all my research together and tell the story.

It will come.  I know I have to be patient.  I need to learn to enjoy the journey and to take my time so that I get it right.

But I do wish I knew how to burn the candle at both ends, teaching all day and writing all night.  What's the secret?

Stephen King's Juvenile, Profanity Laced Op Ed Misses the Point

Stephen King has stepped off the rails and is now an economist.  In a juvenile, profanity laden, editorial for The Daily Beast, King demands that the rich, himself included, be compelled to pay more taxes.  Mr. King spends as much time insulting Chris Christie in the piece (fat jokes are pretty juvenile if you ask me) as he does advocating higher taxes for the rich.

Blasting Mitt Romney for refusing to apologize for being rich, King writes:

 I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that—sorry, kiddies—you’re on your own. That those who have received much must be obligated to pay—not to give, not to “cut a check and shut up,” in Governor Christie’s words, but to pay—in the same proportion. That’s called stepping up and not whining about it. That’s called patriotism, a word the Tea Partiers love to throw around as long as it doesn’t cost their beloved rich folks any money.

King, and other liberals like him, fail to ever recognize or acknowledge that what we have is a spending problem.  Let's address that little problem before we start hammering the top ten percent for more dough.  


Revisit this article from the Wall Street Journal a year ago which points out that the top one percent pay 38% of the taxes in this country.  Nearly half of the American population pay no income taxes whatsoever.  You want to talk about paying your "fair share"?  What's "fair" about that?


King points out that the uber-wealthy voluntarily donate millions each year (himself included) but fails to address the issue of Apple shaving billions off their tax bill by taking advantage of legal loopholes and funneling their dough overseas.  Their tax bill is about 9.8%.  Not bad.  Paying their "fair share," are they, Mr. King?  


In truth, if the rich were taxed at 100% they wouldn't be able to cover the grand entitlements expansion that Obama has saddled us and the next generation with, and that is, as the Wall Street Journal points out, BEFORE Obamacare kicks. in. 


It seems to me that King's (and others like him) criticism is misguided. Instead of taxing the rich even more we should expand the tax base - create more tax payers. Get more people paying into the system. Creating jobs would create more tax payers. 


 One of the biggest problems with the Obama administration is that it kills jobs. Do we need a list? Start with the Keystone pipeline. Energy crushing EPA regulations have shut down coal fired power plants and cost jobs. The Gulf moratorium cost countless jobs and not just in the drilling sector but on land too in all those businesses that cater to and support the drilling industry. Need I go on? 


 It doesn't take a rocket scientist (oh and we killed those jobs too at NASA) to figure out that businesses aren't hiring because of the crushing Obamacare mandates coming down the pike. If you keep an employee at part-time you won't have to pay for his hip replacement later. 


 When did it become a crime to be rich in America, anyway? Instead of falling into Obama's class warfare rhetoric,  Mr. King should stick to his writing career. Then he can make more money and pay more taxes. 


 (Graphic from Heritage) 


 (H/T: Memeorandum)

Under the Dome

In my convalescence I have now finished Stephen King's Under The Dome. Dumbest.Book.Ever. I stuck it out through all 1074 pages. That includes the author's note at the end in which he explains he started the book in 1976 but put it aside until 2007 when he picked it back up. I'm thinking he should have left it in the drawer.

I don't know. Stephen King is one of those authors that I still read because he has moments where I like what he does, or something he's doing. I've been reading his stuff for thirty years, off an on. Some of it, though, got so far off the wall...I never read Cell, for example, or a couple of the other later ones. I never read the Dark Tower series.

All in all, I prefer the earlier stuff like The Shining, The Stand, or even Salem's Lot. By the time he got to Cujo, though, he started to lose me. I remember being riveted to the story but thinking, "Boy is this dumb."

I don't know why I keep buying his books and reading them. Boredom, maybe. I needed something to read that I didn't have to think about too hard. But, Under the Dome just left me pissed off at the end.

Wednesday Thoughts

Light blogging today: my classes are working in the library on research papers.

Imagine my shock when I discovered (yesterday!) that the new MLA guidelines have changed almost everything about documentation for research papers! No more underlining! No more URLs! And now you must indicate the medium of your reference - print, electronic, etc.

This will send my set-in-his-ways Senior English teacher into apoplexy.

Ah well. That aside, I'm also kind of tied up on a new project and learning a new medium. More on that later.

I do have a couple of quick read links for you this morning. Over at Commentary Magazine Sam Sacks has reviewed Stephen King's Under the Dome, and well, Stephen King's writing in general. I haven't read the latest novel yet but it's holding my desk down (it's a huge book) waiting on me to get to it.

I'm of mixed feelings about Stephen King. I've been reading him for over thirty years and I've seen his work evolve and go up and down. I use some passages from his On Writing in my creative writing class. Say what you will about his ability, the man has been successful.

As long as you're over at Commentary, check out Jennifer Rubin's response to the newest Obama envoy to the Muslim world here. The original Fox Story to which she refers is here. I suspect this fellow will be the next man in Glenn Beck's radar. But Rubin raises a valid point: why do we need an envoy to the Muslim world, anyway? Do we have one for the Jewish world? The Hindu world? The Christian world?

There's a developing thread on the story at Memeorandum you can keep an eye on and see who else weighs in.

With that, I'm off to teach tenth graders how to do research and to properly document sources in the ever changing world of the Modern Language Association.

I'll check back in on you good folks later.

Stephen King Brings Troops Home for Christmas

Via Greta Perry, Stephen King and his wife have donated $12,999 (he doesn't like the number 13) to ensure that "the 150 members of Bravo Company of the 3rd Battalion, 172nd Infantry Unit could come home for the holidays."

The Bangor Daily News reports:

That money will help pay for two bus trips — one from Camp Atterbury, Ind., to Portland, one from Camp Atterbury, Ind., to Bangor — for the soldiers of the Brewer-based 172nd, a division of the Maine Army National Guard.

Earlier this week, the unit departed from Maine for training at Camp Atterbury, Ind. They were scheduled to remain there until their January 2010 departure to Afghanistan, and even though they had a few days off for the holidays, they didn’t have the means to return home.

Thomas “Skip” Chappelle, who runs Operation Community Support — a Bangor-based military assistance nonprofit agency — thought something needed to be done. So he solicited the Kings for money.

Eugley stressed that the donation came from the Kings’ personal accounts and not through the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, which does not donate for travel purposes.

“It was a pretty easy sell. I asked. Steve said yes,” Eugley said.

Awesome!

I've got King's latest, Under the Dome, in my reading stack. It's huge.

Stephen King: Just After Sunset

My new Stephen King book has arrived in the mail and I can't wait to get to it! This one is a collection of short stories, a couple of which I've read already in either Tin House or The New Yorker. I might have to remove the dust jacket though because it hurts my eyes!

I've been reading Stephen King for at least 28 years (crikey - has it been that long!?); I loved The Stand and The Shining. King has a way with words that I find amazing. He is no Hemingway or Fitzgerald, but he never pretends to be. It's just not that kind of writing, and he is the first to point that out. King sort of lost me, though, when we got to Cujo and Christine. That car thing just about irritated me.

I picked him up a couple of years ago when I taught a Creative Writing class; he had published a book called On Writing, about the writing process of course, and I was curious as to what he had to say. He had done another non-fiction book years before called Danse Macabre about the horror genre. That one I didn't like so much. I still have it though, and might take another look at it. On Writing was wonderful though and I used a lot of what he had to say with my class.

I've started picking up his works again and some are good and some not so much. I never bothered with Cell, for example, but totally loved Bag of Bones and Lisey's Story. I thought Lisey's Story was great for its descriptive detail and the fact that the protagonist was a woman. I would think it would be difficult for a man to write from the perspective of a woman.

So now, it's raining outside and I'm dying to crack open my new book, but 65 research papers are beckoning. Maybe I'll grade five, then read a story. Five, story. Five, story. Yeah, that's the ticket!