Storytellersunplugged

Pressing issues have prevented a post by our usual 20th personality, Justine Musk, so I’m expanding something I’ve written previously in my own on-line journal and hope that it will suffice.  Next month, Justine will be back in her regularly scheduled slot …

I’ve been involved in some discussions lately that caused a particular passage in “The Haunting of Hill House” to stick in my mind, and I thought I’d share.  There are actually two issues involved, so bear with me.  The initial conversation was about the works of Stephen King.  One of those involved said that anything by King over 450 pages was crap because he diverges too far into the lives and back stories of the characters and loses the thread of the plot.  There were, of course, a number of different opinions, as there always are when opinions on subjects like literature are brought to the table.

For myself, I disagree with what this person said on a pretty fundamental level.   As a reader, I don’t understand the idea of being in a hurry.  If a book is good, the last thing I want is for the author to “get to the point” - half the entertainment and magic is the build-up and the journey.  Quick and flashy is what TV and movies are for.  In that same discussion, I said that I believe King’s later works are more complex and challenging.  Another reader said he’d never found them challenging, but that the very accessibility of his characters and stories was the key.

Both of us, of course, are right.  Anyone who believes a “real” and accessible character is simpler to create than a cardboard cut-out on the action fast-track has never spent any time working on it.  It’s the very complexity of the lives and back stories of the men and women in King’s novels that makes it so easy to know and care about them.  What does this have to do with Shirley Jackson, or The Haunting of Hill House?

Well, I’m re-reading that timeless classic, and near the beginning, when Eleanor is driving to Hill House for the first time, escaping her domineering sister and her irritating as hell brother-in-law, she stops in a cafe to eat.  In the cafe, we learn quite a bit of her back story.  We also encounter a young girl who refuses to drink her milk - because she always drinks from her “cup of stars,” a cup that has stars in the bottom she can watch as empties it.  The parents try to force her to - just this once - use a regular cup.  Eleanor silently roots for the girl to resist - which she does.

Does this move the story forward?  Not really.  And yet, it’s a magical passage - the sort of writing that makes me glad I have chosen the path I’ve chosen and inspires me to do a better job of it.  It’s the sort of scene that sticks with you from year to year and never really goes away.  Later in the book, Jackson returns over and over to that image of the cup of stars - Eleanor even steals it as a memory of her own when creating a fictional history for herself she can present to Theodora.

King can be like that too.  In Tommyknockers, a book I freely admit I believe is bloated and far too full of backstory, there is a young boy who is doing a magic trick for his family.  He makes his brother disappear - only the brother REALLY disappears.  I remember that as if it was a short story, a separate work altogether.  While the book is not my favorite, I recall scenes from it so vividly I might have walked through them and lived them myself.  King’s work is often like that, the story stops to tell you a story.  I have no problem with that, I’m not in a hurry to be done.

And the real epiphany is in the cup of stars itself - what it symbolizes.  Don’t let them pack and stuff you into a mold - whoever they may be.  Remain true to the one vision that matters - your own.  You can’t present a perfect vision to the world if you let them cover your eyes with filters and lenses.  You can’t write a perfect story or novel if you use a favorite author’s style or plot to hang it on.  You will never be great if you spend your time studying those who are and trying to do what they did…you might never BE great, but your only chance of doing so is to follow what matters most to you and see it through.

I’m not exactly sure what this second point of the essay has to do with the first, except that it came up in that aforementioned conversation.  The second point is that too many times writers and artists struggle to emulate those who have achieved a level higher than they themselves have reached.  I think this is more a weight around your neck than a step up.  There might be a level of success attainable by aspiring to “in the tradition of” blurbs on your novels, but it can’t possibly have the same impact, or satisfaction behind it as it would if others had blurbs saying they wrote in YOUR tradition.

So find your cup of stars, and when they try to serve you milk in some inferior cup, smash it on the floor and throw a tantrum.  Of course - it’s probably prudent to mention that Eleanor was drawn into a haunted house, an insane family past, and ended badly…

For all that, I’m holding out for my cup of stars.  When I find it I’ll fill it with strong coffee, sit down, and write.

-DNW