Extravagent Output

[dr_mabeuse]

George Murray, a poet and co-editor of the literary blog Bookninja.com, sees the near-annual release of a new Stephen King novel as “the literary equivalent of watching a skinny Japanese dude scarf down 100 hot dogs in an eating contest; you are kind of grossed out, but gotta hand it to him.” Murray harbors a unique theory about what distinguishes a genre writer like King from a so-called serious artist like Joyce Carol Oates. “It seems with Oates the hotdog eater is a performance artist commenting on the nature of consumption and American hegemony,” Murray avers. “With King it’s just a guy eating 100 hot dogs, then looking like he’s going to die of nitrate poisoning.”

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/automated.html

 

[shereads]

“It seems with Oates the hotdog eater is a performance artist commenting on the nature of consumption and American hegemony,” Murray avers. “With King it’s just a guy eating 100 hot dogs, then looking like he’s going to die of nitrate poisoning.”

That makes me like King better than I did before I read it. I'm easy.

 

[English Lady]

Terry Pratchettis begining to suffer from a similar thing too. You've got to admire the sheer effort and skill in putting forth so many books...but there is something essential missing from some of his latest works...

 

[hmmnmm]

I live near a small town where the library is also necessarily small, but for a small town library one can't complain.
I look at the rows of books with the same name plastered on their spines. Thick books, many words. Big sellers in the bookstores. But then I go to the K section and there's this beat up paperback of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Crunched in between all the others (not far from King). Kesey may have done other work, but in my opinion and for my pleasure, if he'd produced no other, that One was plenty.

 

[Seattle Zack]

Isn't it interesting, watching authors you like degenerate ... or sell out, or whatever you want to call it ... once they're no longer hungry (500 G advance for their next novel) then their stuff no longer has the bite that made you like them in the first place.

I used to love Stephen King, Salems' Lot and Carrie and all. But anymore, I'm just bored by his fiction (excepting his nonfiction book On Writing, which is awesome). Is that hunger -- that desperation, that need to sell your work -- a component of good fiction? I don't know.

--Zack

P.S. And Kesey, he's got my vote, an old beatnik like me. If I could ever write a novel like Cuckoo's Nest, I would die a happy man.

 

[shereads]

I live near a small town where the library is also necessarily small, but for a small town library one can't complain.
I look at the rows of books with the same name plastered on their spines. Thick books, many words. Big sellers in the bookstores. But then I go to the K section and there's this beat up paperback of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Crunched in between all the others (not far from King). Kesey may have done other work, but in my opinion and for my pleasure, if he'd produced no other, that One was plenty.

After a successful first novel, The Secret History, Donna Tartt disappeared for seven or eight years. The book built a cult following and had critical success too. So when word finally got out that Tartt was writing another novel, there was so much hype and speculation that you just knew the book had to fall flat on its face. What literary critic could resist picking apart the overhyped second novel of a woman whose first one had been written as her masters' thesis? The upstart!

It didn't receive scathing reviews; somehow the lukewarm ones seemed deadlier. She was praised with faint damns. The title didn't help, either. I can say that because I forgot it immediately after deciding to wait for the paperback edition, which I also didn't buy.



If I ever write a first novel, that's it. I'm done.

 

[shereads]

I used to love Stephen King, Salems' Lot and Carrie and all. But anymore, I'm just bored by his fiction (excepting his nonfiction book On Writing, which is awesome). Is that hunger

When I read The Shining, I was struck by the patience with which he turned an ordinary dad into a lauging lunatic chasing his son with an axe. It was like watching meat go bad. King sat Jack out in the sun, still in the foam dish with the plastic overwrap, and from then on everything that happened seemed inevitable.

It wasn't just terrifying. It was terribly sad. He made it possible to believe that a man who loved his child could reach a point where he loathed him.

One of the creepist things I've ever read was the scene where Jack's wife becomes curious about the play he's been working on all winter. She picks up the thick stack of pages next to the manual typewriter and finds this:

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," typed thousands of times.

Yikes. That can't be good...



And he's standing behind her with the baseball bat.

I jumped like I was watching a movie.



After Salem's Lot, he seemed to degress into writing brutality and torture into stories just for the shock value, as if he had discovered the teenaged slasher-movie market. I was disgusted by an animal-torture scene in "It," stopped reading when I saw where he was going with it, and didn't go back.

 

[Seattle Zack]

I jumped like I was watching a movie.

.

I know just what you mean. When I was reading The Stand, and there's that one scene where the crow's pecking at the window ... and I know that it's King's inept homage to Poe and The Raven, but still I jumped. And hated myself for it afterwards.

 

[NoJo]

I've never read anything by Steven King. Unlike pop music, you can ignore pop literature if you want. So I have no idea whether I'd like his stuff, and not much curiosity to find out.

I've been unable to read any fiction for a while now. I read history and biography sometimes. Like quite a few people here, I really enjoy researching stuff for my own stories, and that takes up all my available reading time.

 

[impressive]

I've never read anything by Steven King. Unlike pop music, you can ignore pop literature if you want. So I have no idea whether I'd like his stuff, and not much curiosity to find out.

Ah, but he WASN'T "pop" when the good stuff came out. He was just another struggling author.

I stopped reading him with It -- but even that book has a few passages that capture the old passions. Parts like those that make "Stand By Me" -- and its character study -- stand out.

 

[davidwatts]

That makes me like King better than I did before I read it. I'm easy.

For some reason I ended up with The Shining when it first came out, and I remember starting to read it late at night, and when I finished it and looked up at the clock it was 5:30 and I had to hustle to get to work. I thought it was a great read, as were most of the early things of his I read. I remember writing him a letter telling him of my reading of The Shining, and he was nice enough to send me back a hand written thank you. I did the same after The Stand and he replied again. I kinda doubt whether he still does that, but when you're young and hungry.... , sort of the equivalent of answering feedback here.

I guess that the way writing is. When you're new and full of ideas the quality is a lot higher than when you start cranking them out. How many authors (or musicians) keep getting better over an extended length of time and keep at a high level? Very few. Also, you get used to a writer's style and you lose the freshness and you're less likely to be surprised by twists and turns in a story.

For some reason, he's become a lightning rod for people who equate success with selling out and with crap writing. I don't apologise for reading him or enjoying him, although I haven't bought or read one of his in years.

Joyce Carol Oates... now there's someone else altogether. I went to hear her speak at a local college and wanted to scream after fifteen minutes. Rather full of herself, I felt.

 

[NoJo]

I was tempted to read King when I started writing screenplays, because the brilliant screenwriting guru William Goldman (who adapted 'Misery') had a lot of praise for him as a writer and as a person.

So I've no doubt he's a great writer. But I wasn't taken much by the movie "Misery", or "The Shining", and so I have a feeling he's not someone I'll end up reading, for a while anyway.

 

[shereads]

I've never read anything by Steven King. Unlike pop music, you can ignore pop literature if you want. So I have no idea whether I'd like his stuff, and not much curiosity to find out.

I've been unable to read any fiction for a while now. I read history and biography sometimes. Like quite a few people here, I really enjoy researching stuff for my own stories, and that takes up all my available reading time.

Do you do all of your own stunts or use a body double?

 

[rgraham666]

My favourite King books were the ones he wrote as 'Richard Bachman'. Loved The Running Man and The Long Walk. There were a couple of others, whose titles I can't remember, that I liked as well. One about a kid who goes postal, and one about a guy who commits suicide. Hard to make such people sympathetic, but he did it.

But generally writers are like pop musicians. At the start, they're great. As they get popular and old, they lose something. Edge I guess is the best word.

U2 and Springsteen fall into this category in music, King in literature.

 

[Softouch911]

Object lessons for us all ... role models ....

Salinger, Heller, Grass, Tim O'Brien ....

All of them made or make mistakes but seem to know it and then shut up.



Softouch

 

[NoJo]

Personally I like writers with impressive ouvres.

 

[impressive]

One about a kid who goes postal ...

The one where the kid is fascinated with an old man who he believes is a Nazi? The overpass with a rifle one? I believe that was in a short story anthology called Different Seasons.

 

[carsonshepherd]

Personally I like writers with impressive ouvres.

I'll show you my ouvres, Joe.

No, like most everyone else, I liked Stephen King for awhile (I was a teenager at the time.) IT was so dreadful, I haven't read him since. The s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-stuttering! Okay! We get, he stutters, now shut the hell up about it every single time the character speaks. Ugh.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Joyce Carol Oates... now there's someone else altogether. I went to hear her speak at a local college and wanted to scream after fifteen minutes. Rather full of herself, I felt.

Yeah. I think 24-25 Joyce Carol Oates novels are about enough. I don't think we need the other 578 or whatever it is: a little 20th century angst goes a long way. She should make the career move to alcoholic-novelist or whatever. Her output is downright oppressive.

On the other hand, some authors tumble into a genre that people just can't get enough of. You think about Edgar Rice Burroughs, who used to churn out his Tarzan and fantasy novels by the board foot and always sold. Or the still-insatiable hunger for Sherlock Holmes stories. Patrick O'Brian was still going strong on his Aubry-Maturin novels when he died after publishing 20, and his later works are as good or maybe even better than his first.

To make a living as an author of Pulp stories in the '40's, a writer was expected to put out about something like 5000 words a day. Of course, those were pulp stories, with no pretense to being anything but action and adventure. It's kind of fun to see how these guys would write themselves into a corner and then try to pull the story out with Radio Death Rays or something. You can tell they were just making it up as they wrote.

It's an interesting article, all about overly prolific authors and what we're to make of them. What does their profligacy say about the rest of us?

One guy says of the prolific John Updike that he never had a single thought that went unpublished.

 

[rgraham666]

The one where the kid is fascinated with an old man who he believes is a Nazi? The overpass with a rifle one? I believe that was in a short story anthology called Different Seasons.

The one I was speaking of wasn't Apt Pupil. In this one, a kid takes a class of his fellow students and a teacher hostage.

At the end, all the kids ended up murdering the teacher, as all suffered from the kid's alienation.

It resonated for me, as I recall what a study in horror my years in high school were.

 

[Sabledrake]

The one where the kid is fascinated with an old man who he believes is a Nazi? The overpass with a rifle one? I believe that was in a short story anthology called Different Seasons.

There were a couple of "kid goes postal" ones. Apt Pupil was the one in which a boy discoveres an old Nazi living in town. Rage was about a kid who takes his classroom hostage; it's a little harder to find these days in the wake of all those school shootings.

Personally, I have no problem with authors turning out books on an annual basis. I write fast myself; I could do three novels a year if I didn't keep getting sidetracked by fanfic and smut And I read very fast, so having a regular influx of new books from authors I like is always a good thing.

With a very few exceptions (I'm looking at you, Gerald's Game and The Gunslinger), I've loved everything King has done. I read The Shining when I was ten. Sometimes his endings aren't that great, as if he builds up a tremendous head of steam as the story goes along and then it all just fizzles out at the finale (now I'm looking at you, The Stand). But I find him an extraordinary storyteller, and what impreses me most is that after all these years, he's still very clearly enjoying what he does.

-- Sabledrake

 

[The_Fool]

Funny. King does touch on the subject of volume in his book "On Writing." I don't think he makes any judgement one way or another.

I too enjoyed King up to a certain point. Cujo was my final straw. Not sure, but I think that is about the time his drug addiction was kicking into high gear.

I don't think quantity of writing says anything more than how much a person has to say. I think that most of the "quality" writers tend to write less, because quite often they write only about what they feel strongly about. But then there are writers that write one and stop there. They've said all they want to say. In some cases, that is a very good thing. In others, readers feel cheated.

That's what it should be about, right? You write because you feel you have something to say?

 

[carsonshepherd]

. You can tell they were just making it up as they wrote.

Ummmm.... is that bad?

 

[NoJo]

It's not bad, but it's not likely to come out as good as if you spend a little time planning it. It's like sex.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Ummmm.... is that bad?

If you're writing a mystery or suspense novellas, which is what most pulps features, it's probably not the best way to go about it.

I love the old Doc Savage stories that were serialized in his pulp mag.(Dan Tanner, Hollywood Detective are even better. They're just unbelievably funny and they were released in hard-cover a couple years ago. They're like watching Roadrunner cartoons.) Anyhow, Doc Savage was written by "Kenneth Robeson", who was actually any one of a stable of about 20 different authors, any one of whom might be writing the next installment of Purple Death From Space or The Men Who Smiled Too Much. You can just see these guys sweating to explain clues that were left in the previous chapter. Apparently these guys didn't use outlines.

What they did was bury the story in so much action that you never had time to stop and realize that the story made no sense. The villain killed the professor who was the only one who knew how to make the part for his Death Ray back in chapter one? Doc's men just happen to stumble onto the farmhouse where the Professor's daughter is being held hostage? Why? How'd they know? It doesn't matter. Doc crashes through the skylight with his shirt all torn and his machine pistol blazing away and who cares?

Same is true for Raymond Chandler, who wrote so well that you don't even notice that his stories don't add up. They made a movie of The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart, and I defy anyone to explain that plot to me. Still, it's a great flcik. Chandler wrote the screenplay.