What got you started in Writing?
Many people ask me what made me want to write, or how did I know I wanted to be a writer. Short answer? Stephen King.
No. It wasn’t because he wrote stories that knocked me out, or haunted my dreams, or made me so scared that I wanted to have the same effect on readers. No. For me, I read King’s easy prose, wound my way through his short stories and novels and when I got to the end, I said “I can do that.”
I was wrong.
Seriously. That was what got me started. For me, King’s plots and dialogue flowed so easily that I mistook it for something anyone could do. It wasn’t arrogance, I don’t think. It was stupidity more than anything. I really hadn’t written much before that, and I certainly hadn’t tried to tackle anything like a horror short story.
With my weird little electric typewriter/word processor hybrid, I sat down to quickly write an awesome story that everyone would love. I did not.
Oh, I wrote stories. Two, maybe three (not all in one sitting) horror/weird stories. I thought they were pretty good. They were not.
See, what I hadn’t yet learned as a writer is that it takes skill to make a story have the desired effect. It takes careful revision and a selection of very precise words to make a work of short fiction seem entirely effortless. A good read is rarely, if ever, an accident. So to look at King’s simple stories and relatively basic language and say it must have been easy is a terrible new writer mistake.
Why did I think these elements of King’s work were a sign that it had to be easy to do? Well, at the time, I was also reading a lot of technothrillers - Tom Clancy, Dale Brown and the like - and I found they were constantly throwing in technical jargon, military terms, and other five-dollar words. To me, the comparison between the language and styles of these writers somehow measured the difficulty of the writing. Not so.
Every writer must find his or her style eventually. They have to look at their genre and decide on the tropes, clichés, and other elements, and that includes the length and feel of the genre. After they get those down, the writer can start striking out on their own and trying new things and bending the rules that they’ve learned. It took me a while, but I figured that out.
Those stories I wrote? Looking back on them I see that they are very much like Stephen King’s work. VERY much. Because I was imitating him. I’d read so much of his work that his was the only voice in my head. After that, I wrote a lot more. Read a lot more. Both of those things gave me a wider understanding of what sort of writer I was, and what everyone else did before me, which hopefully cut out the copycat element eventually.
I learned that if I don’t read widely, I can’t strike out on my own and develop that style I mentioned, and that has made all the difference to my confidence as a writer.
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