Last night Stephen King was in Toronto, receiving a booksellers' award for lifetime achievement. There was an honorary ceremony, and an onstage interview by
Chuck Klosterman. I was in the audience.
I've always wanted to see Stephen King in person. I don't know why. Maybe it's because he's such a fascinating writer, or maybe it's because I've been reading him for over twenty of the thirty years he's been writing. But deep down I've always just sort of wanted to know with my own eyes that he exists.
That sounds weird, but there you go. I've read so much Stephen King, in so many stages of my life, that he's hard to imagine as a human being.
The Dead Zone was the first novel I read that made me want to be a writer; I literally read my copy of both it and
The Stand to pieces, and have had to buy new ones over the years. (My copy of
Firestarter has Drew Barrymore on it and is barely holding together.) I've read him through bad books and good, through serious moods and frivolous ones, through experiments both failed and successful.
King's appeal is no mystery: He simply appears to let you straight into his head, to wander the landscape, to pick objects up and turn them over and put them back down again. After several decades of loyal reading, many of us feel as if we've lived there, at least for a while, even if we never learned all of the place's secrets.
On Writing let us even further through the door and showed us that the landscape was more fascinating then we'd even imagined. The first time I read
it, I tried to imagine what kind of balls it takes to admit you can barely remember writing
Cujo because you were on so much coke. Most writers would shroud something like that, keep the illusion, pretend that they were in control of things all along. Not King.
In person, King is relaxed, confident, funny, and low-key, though he has a lot of charisma. Though he's obviously brilliant, he's not a writer with a capital W, thinking himself above the lowly masses; he can answer a convoluted question about the contraditory nature of both the normal and the fantastical in his work with: "I just like to make shit up." "I see writing as an essentially aggressive act," he said. "I
want you to burn dinner. I want you to stop talking to your husband. I want you to put down everything you're doing and
listen to what I'm doing here."
Maybe it's odd that a writer of romance is such a fan of a writer of horror? But those are just labels, really. "They call my books horror because they have to know what shelf to put them on in the bookstore," he said. "To me, they're just books."
"There's no need for writing classes as long as
Robertson Davies' books are in print," he said near the end of the night. And that struck me. Because Stephen King was my writing school. He taught me pace, story, structure, voice, dialogue, and characterization.
Without ever being in the room.
