Viva La Book!

I’m currently re-reading one of my favourite series - The Dark Tower, by Stephen King. If it seems I’m a bit of a crazy King fan, I’m actually not. I like some of his books, but TDT are the only ones I really love. There is just something about Roland - the gunslinger - and the world he inhabits. It draws you in and makes you feel that same mad passion that he does for his Tower - and also the love he feels for his companions.

I fell in love with these books as a teenager, and waited eagerly as each new book was released. After King had his accident, I, like many others, was distraught - ‘we’ll never learn if Roland reaches the Tower now!!’

But, thankfully, King survived, and so did Roland. To meet an end, such an end… I do believe I cried when I read the final pages of the final book and the conclusion was reached - the only way it could have ended, as King said himself.

Books like these, where the characters come to live in your head, are the most memorable. When a story spans decades, and is full of growing life experience, as these are, they seem to exude a certain truth. Some people bemoan the fact that King wrote himself into these stories - but I personally enjoyed it. To him, these people are real, and he makes them live for us, his readers, too.

Like many avid readers, I also harbour a on-again, off-again desire to be a writer. So, when I decided to complete my set of The Dark Tower, I also decided to order On Writing. I’m not a huge fan of Stephen King - I absolutely love The Dark Tower books, and I’ve enjoyed most of the other books of his I’ve read, but some, like Gerald’s Game, I didn’t finish (pretty much because I found it too disturbing) - a rare thing for me.

But there is no doubting he is one of the most popular novelists alive today, and he has a distinctive style that attracts many people. So, I was curious to see what he had to say on the subject.

I have to say I really enjoyed it. It starts with a short memoir of his life, followed by the meat of the book - the things to do and not to do. Finally, he recounts how the accident that nearly killed him happened, and how it has affected him and his writing.

The excerpts about his life are fascinating, and the advice he gives is useful and straightforward - in his typical no-nonsense style.

I would highly recommend this to aspiring writers, as it cuts through a lot of the crap that many other ‘how to write’ books are brimming with. It’s nice to climb inside his mind as he shows us how he writes, and why he writes what he does, where some of his ideas come from, and the whole process of writing, editing, and publishing.

And considering his success, he may just be worth listening to!

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