I'm just reading Steven King's On Writing, a combination autobiography and writing manual. I have always disliked King's novels, but this is one excellent book. He's a dang good writer. (I just agree with his high school English teacher who said, "Why do you waste your talent, writing that trash?") What I'm most interested in this book is how he describes the process of writing.

He says that plotting is not particularly useful to a writer, because stories have a mind of their own. "Stories are relics," he writes on page 163, "part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. . . . No matter how good you are, no matter how much experience you have, it's probably impossible to get the entire fossil out of the ground without a few breaks and losses.&nbps;. ." He calls plotting a "jackhammer" among these tools because it messes up the emergence of the story. "Plot is,I think, the good writer's last resort and the dullard's first choice. The story which reuslts from it is apt to feel artificial and labored."

When a book emerges this way, he says, that's what sells it. The best-selling novelists write from the absolute inner truth that emerges from them and that's what readers respond to. And that's why copycat novels rarely work; it's not the copycat's truth we're reading.

This is particularly interesting to me because I have been thinking about with we LDS writers who seem to be so self-conscious. We often feel we have to explain everything, to keep our readers all on the same page, to make a lame pun. We are often somehow apologetic about who we are. If we "emerged" our work in the way King describes, true, we might come up with some scary stuff, and perhaps that drives us back into self-consciousness. However, I think that The Giant Joshua feels like it has this quality of truth-emerged; that's why we love it. The Backslider works the same for me. And Scott Card's novels seem like they're almost totally this way; he jumps into the story and it tumbles over itself being told.

On a totally, totally other hand, I am also reading Marc McCutcheon's Damn, Why Didn't I Write That?, a book about earning big money writing nonfiction. The author points out that in today's market, nonfiction outsells fiction by a gigantic margin. (Covey's Seven Habits sold -- what? -- 7 million copies). McCutcheon details his own delicious royalties and points out that you don't have to be a college (or even high school) graduate to write a book that sells. You don't even have to be an expert: How To Make Love To a Woman, a huge seller, was written by two gay men.

The point of mentioning this here? Seems to me that if a good writer can pop out a couple-three great-selling nonfiction books, the royalties can ease the financial pressure that plagues most of us part-time writers. King pointed out that before his big break, Carrie, which brought a $400,000 advance (he ended up with half of that), he was a high school teacher having a hard time getting his writing done. "The problem was the teaching. I liked my coworkers and loved the kids -- even the Beavis and Butthead types in Living with English could be interesting -- but by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain. If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then. I could see myself thirty years on, wearing the same shabby tweed coats with patches on the elbows, potbelly rolling over my Gap khakis from too much beer. I'd have a cigarette cough from too many packs of Pall Malls, thicker glasses, more dandruff, and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk....And of course I'd lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn't too late, there were novelists who didn't get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty. Probably plenty of them" (King, p. 73).

Sounds too close to home to me :).

So far, I have a handful of published books on the market, all nonfiction (though not big sellers -- very niche). I'm playing with the idea of writing some more nonfiction to see if royalties can smooth the way to try to emerge some fiction.

Back to Steven King -- he says you should at least write 1000 words a day, every day (I guess we Mormons would skip Sundays). That's only four pages at 250 words a page. Hey that's doable, no?

Cathy Wilson