The Evolution of an Insatiable Bookslut: Tony’s Tale

Posted by tonbird — May 6, 2013

Unlike many booksluts, I was not a natural born reader. I have no stories about teaching myself to read or learning to read before I started school. But I had a lot of people in my life who read to me at a young age. My mom read Little Golden Books to me all the time, and so did my Aunt Jill and Aunt Stephanie. I could recite my favorite books from memory, even if I couldn’t understand the letters and words.

One of my childhood favorites

Once I started school, it wasn’t until near the end of kindergarten that I learned to read very simple words, and throughout first and second grade, I struggled with reading and usually got placed in the slower reading groups.

But my love for information and a good story overcame my difficulties. Despite my challenges with school-related readings, I started reading books on my own. I always loved library day, and I would check out books from the A New True Book series to learn about different kinds of animals and dinosaurs and whatever else I was interested in at the moment. They fed my information addiction like a 1980s children’s version of Wikipedia. At night I read stories by my nightlight when my parents though thought I was asleep. I had a variety of storybooks and an illustrated book of surprisingly graphic Bible stories that my dad used to read from. This one quickly became my favorite, and when Dad’s job got too busy for him to keep up with family readings, I started reading it on my own.

All I see now is a bunch of white people posing as Hebrews.

Before long, I was moving on to bigger and better books, and my school librarian guided me to the mythology section. I read everything in it. Then I spent a while devouring Choose Your Own Adventure books.

For summer vacations, I would ride my bike down to the park, and then to the pool, and then I’d go to the public library in damp swim trunks with the moisture soaking through the bottom of my T-shirt. I checked out how-to books, and I read about all kinds of different crafts and artwork, drawing, origami, and making neat toys out of junk. I also read even more about animals and some of my favorite books were the ones about where to catch critters and how to keep them alive in homemade habitats.

I apologize to all the creatures who suffered this fate at my hands. Animals once considered me a super villain.

Those first years of reading were great, and I enjoyed them very much, but as I got older I moved on to different kinds of books. At the age of twelve, I spent a day at my Aunt Tina’s house and I told her how I planned to read The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings because one of my friends had suggested it. She put the conversation on hold as she ran into a different room to dig in her closet, and she came back with a bare green hardback copy of The Silmarillion. I’ll never know what the dust jacket looked like. “This is what came before The Hobbit,” she told me. She let me borrow it, and I read the whole thing before I read any of the other books. How, as a twelve-year-old, I had the patience for dry reading like The Silmarillion, I can only attribute to my previous readings of mythology and the Bible. I quickly moved on to Tolkien’s other works, and finished off the entire Tolkien section of my middle school’s library, including Farmer Giles of Ham and his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Following Tolkien, I made a deal with one of my friends that if he read The Hobbit, I would read Mossflower by Brian Jacques. I loved it for the anthropomorphic rodent heroes, and I read every other book that was available from the Redwall series. Even better was Watership Down. After that, I became an indiscriminate sci-fi/fantasy junkie, which continued throughout my high school years.

Strangely enough, I very seldom enjoyed the “literature” I was assigned to read for school. I won’t hate on A Separate Peace or The Great Gatsby too much, but I never got myself interested in them enough to match the enthusiasm that my English teachers had. I was never assigned to read Hemingway, so naturally, he became my favorite literary author. Of all the things I was assigned to read in high school, the only two I really appreciated were Grendel and To Kill a Mockingbird. I obsessed over the dragon’s lecture to Grendel, trying to puzzle out all the big words and make sense of what my teacher had summed up as “a bunch of gobbledegook”.

Like Susie, I joined in academic competition and got to read and analyze a few literary works. The one I remember best was Antigone. I don’t know if it was the work itself or just that particular translation, but I found it moving. Other than these few exceptions, though, I spent most of my time in high school reading pulp sci-fi and fantasy novels. If I could have unread all the Terry Brooks books and been given the time back to socialize, perhaps the Virginity Fairy would have relieved me of my V-card much sooner.

The Virginity Fairy visited me a little later than she did most people I know.

Near the end of my high school days, my friend Eric introduced me to Stephen King by getting me The Shining as a Christmas gift. I got a few chapters into it before my dad confiscated it for religious reasons. Undaunted, I read ‘Salem’s Lot, keeping it discreetly hidden.

Given my unwillingness to read most assigned books, I really wonder what possessed me to major in English when I started college. Nevertheless, I did. During my years at Indiana State, I hardly had time to read anything that wasn’t part of the curriculum. It turned out that this was my time to finally gain an appreciation for some of the classics. I tore up Things Fall Apart by recently departed Chinua Achebe. I also loved me some Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bram Stoker, and Mark Twain. Over the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, I decided to embrace my heritage and read the Bible from cover to cover. I liked Ecclesiastes the most. At that time in my life, it was comforting to know that everything is meaningless.

I kept reading and working my way toward a degree in English literature. I was required to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for a pop culture class. I followed the morbid misadventures of Bigger Thomas in Native Son, and I finally got a lesson in Chaucer where the professor assigned the Miller’s Tale.

Not all of my reading was in English. For my classical studies courses, I translated Ovid, Vergil, and Catullus into English. I especially liked Catullus. His love affair with Lesbia mirrored my own heartbreaking college romance, so I really related to the euphoric poems at first, and the miserable ones later.

I graduated and took a break from reading literature for a while. Instead I read self-help books about business as I tried to find my way in the world. Thinking journalism to be a viable option for making a living, I started reading magazines and newspapers more than books.

In the decade since college, my appreciation for books has continued to develop. For whatever reason, I did Cliff’s Notes on A Tale of Two Cities. (I had blown it off to read Fight Club and Choke.) I remembered that the lecture made it sound interesting, so I went back and read it years after I graduated. I read the remainder of the Harry Potter series after the last book finally came out. I also discovered Gregory McGuire, Christopher Moore, and George R.R. Martin. Finally, my best friend Eric–the same one who got me The Shining–talked me into reading The Gunslinger. I shirked a lot of my personal responsibilities as I got sucked into that world. Not long after, I began my love affair with audiobooks. I usually listen to books I’ve already read, but occasionally I listen to something completely new, especially if it’s non-fiction. I’ve done On Becoming a Leader, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Pimsleur courses for Cantonese and Japanese.

My most recent discovery is Haruki Murakami. I just finished Norwegian Wood, and I have The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in my to-read queue.

So there it is: Tony’s dirty, dirty past as a bookslut. What about you, fellow booksluttians? Did we read any of the same books? How did you come to be a bookslut?

Review: The Light of Amsterdam by David Park

Posted by tonbird — January 17, 2013

Book: The Light of Amsterdam

Author: David Park

Published: November 13, 2012 by Bloomsbury

First lines: “The ink was black, the paper the same shade of blue as a bird’s egg he had found a week before. In their balanced elegance the capital G and B mirrored each other. Unlike most of the soccer signatures he collected which were largely indecipherable hieroglyphics–the bored scribbles of fleeing stars–this name was readable and perfectly formed.”

Rating: Not bad.

(Electronic galley provided by Bloomsbury)

Reading The Light of Amsterdam was like reading a good painting. It was really beautiful if not very exciting.

The story follows three different characters from Northern Ireland who all travel to Amsterdam for their own reasons: Alan, a divorced college professor who gets stuck taking his skulking teenage son with him to a Bob Dylan concert; Karen, a working-class single mother who is attending her daughter’s hen party (for the American readers, that’s the UK equivalent of a bachelorette party); and Marion, an older woman who goes on holiday with her husband. The characters all have their own past events, regrets, and scars, and each of their traveling companions is someone with whom they have lost touch. The characters are all interesting in that they are realistic, and it’s easy to find yourself in them. None of them are particularly heroic, but they do all grow and change.

One of my favorite things about this book was the descriptive writing style and the use of imagery. The motif of lights popped up constantly, but the descriptions were effective and they never got old or repetitive for me; it always seemed appropriate. Here’s a passage that I particularly liked:

She passed lots of groups, mostly of young women with their cigarettes held aloft like fire-flies in the night and shiny mobile phones pressed to their ears. There was the chattering clatter of their heels and despite the cold their primped bodies on show with their excited voices breaking against each other before shattering into laughter again and again.

There’s a rhythm and a poetry to the words, and the images are gorgeous.

That being said, there was one thing about the writing style that annoyed me. The point of view jumped between the three characters with little or no transition, and I found it disorienting. Galleys often lose some of the formatting that appears in commercial e-books, so perhaps some of the space breaks were omitted. Still, even if there had been space breaks, the author seldom used the characters’ names, instead just referring to them as “he” or “she” from the time they entered the scene, and the only way I even knew the characters’ names was from the rare instances when other characters used them.

I think some readers would complain about the lack of action or happy endings that our culture prefers, but I liked it for what it was. There were no life-and-death struggles or thrilling high notes, but those wouldn’t have suited the kind of story that was being told. As I mentioned above, the characters were normal people undergoing their own melancholy self-discoveries and learning how to communicate with the people in their lives in an unfamiliar setting. If there was a theme, it’s that life never quite works out the way you expect it to.

With the name of the setting in the title, I would have expected it to almost be like another character, but it mainly served as an opportunity for the characters to escape from their normal lives and take a look at themselves from a different perspective. They went to bars, restaurants, and coffee shops, and they found their way into the Rijksmuseum and the red light district, too. But the main focus was on the characters rather than the setting.

Overall, The Light of Amsterdam was not a bad read. If you’re looking for something fast-paced that will keep you on the edge of your seat, this probably isn’t for you. However, if you enjoy good poetic writing that reflects the bittersweet beauty of real life, then you’ll probably want to check this out.

Buy the book: (Powell’s or Amazon)

Why Most Writing Advice is Garbage

Posted by tonbird — December 20, 2012

[In hindsight, that I asked Tony to write this either makes me very wise or kind of a dick. Or both. Yeah, probably both.. nah, really, I\'m still leaning toward dick. -- Susie]

A little while back, Susie asked me if I would be interested in writing a post about “why most writing advice is garbage.” At first I thought, “But I write a lot of writing advice.” Then I thought that I read a lot of writing advice. And then I realized that most of it doesn’t really do anything for me.

Here are a few reasons to ignore most of the writing advice you find:

Some writers are better at writing writing advice than they are at writing fiction. When I first began taking my writing seriously, I got on the internet (this was in 1998, mind you) and found a site with tons of great writing advice. (I found it by searching Yahoo.) The author had so much to say, and I found her advice inspiring. I thought that she must certainly be one of the best authors ever, so I picked up one of her books. It was really awful, and I vowed never to read her books or writing advice after that.

Different sources can contradict each other. Stephen King says to write a book from the beginning to the end. James V. Smith says skip around. Chris Baty says get to the end within thirty days. Chuck Wendig says spend as much time as you need to. Who is right? All of them? None of them?

Nobody really follows advice anyway. Have you ever given someone advice before? Most people who ask me for advice end up doing the exact opposite of what I tell them. Maybe it’s because I give them bad advice, or maybe it’s because they know that my advice is not going to work for them. Whatever the reason, they generally just do what they’re going to do. Come to think of it, I generally do the same thing when I ask for advice. Why would writing advice be any different?

Many writers who give writing advice are not any more successful than you are. I’m a great example of this. I have written several articles with recommendations on how to improve your writing, but I have yet to have any fiction published. How do I know what’s good?

If writing advice is so awful, should you just ignore it? Maybe. But maybe not. Here’s my advice on taking writing advice.

You can’t go wrong with timeless writing cliches like, “Write what you know.”

Pay attention to what the writers you admire have to say. As a matter of common sense, the authors whose books you like will probably have the best advice on writing books that you can be proud of.

Take writing advice with a grain of salt. (Or a shot of whiskey.) Think about it before you try something. Is it honestly something you will be able to do? Will you actually benefit from it? Or is it just an idea that sounds cool but will waste your time? Ask yourself these questions.

Use what works for you. Ultimately, if you’re in a good groove and like what you’re doing, maybe you don’t need any advice. On the other hand, if you feel like your writing is stagnating, perhaps it will help to seek the mentorship or support of a fellow writer.

Bad advice may not be all that bad, either. if it inspires you or makes you want to write, whether to try it or to prove it wrong, it’s probably worth a try.

Do any readers have advice on taking advice? Please share with the rest of us in the comments. In the mean time, stay motivated and keep writing!

Why Aspiring Authors Shouldn’t Major in English

Posted by tonbird — October 29, 2012

Do you want to be a writer when you grow up? I know I do. When I was in high school trying to decide on a college and a major, English seemed like the perfect subject to study. After all, English is the language I would be writing in, right? Looking back, I think I made a huge mistake.

This is exactly how my life went . . . oh, wait . . .

The major problem with majoring in English was that, although I gained some marketable skills from it, it did very little to prepare me for being a writer. Here are some of the reasons why I don’t think it’s a good idea for writers to major in English:

You already know English. If you can read this, chances are you already have native or near-native proficiency in English. Why would you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a program where you’re just going to learn more about a language you already know? Most programs don’t even spend much time on grammar or linguistics, so you’re not really gaining any arcane English knowledge that you couldn’t have picked up while you were in high school.
Writing classes are required for every major. For most four-year degrees, regardless of what you major in, you will be required to take a course in English composition. My upper-level English composition class had students from every major in it. Even at the most basic level of English 101, you will learn how to write an essay and you will learn correct grammar. Best of all, one of your required textbooks will be a grammar reference. Make sure you hold onto it; I still have mine.
You’re just going to read a lot of literature. If you want to be a writer, but you don’t already read as much as you possibly can, I want you to hit yourself. No, really. Go ahead. I’ll wait . . . Okay, as I was saying, if you want to be a writer, you probably already read all the time. Something has to inspire your desire to create worlds, right? The things you read will have a major impact on your writing style and the kinds of stories you will create. For me, I enjoyed reading great English literature from a variety of time periods, but as a writer, I find that those were not the kinds of stories that inspired me. I drew most of my inspiration from my leisure reading of speculative fiction–not from reading the classics.
Fortunately, there’s a whole book on the subject.
Studying other subjects gives you a different perspective to write from. I really enjoy reading a book with realistic details about careers, hobbies, and interests outside of my own scope. It provides a kind of escape from my own mundane life. I don’t know much about business, law, or science, but I think books that revolve around these topics are fascinating. Michael Crichton is a good example of a writer whose expertise in scientific fields translated into fascinating science fiction stories involving everything from biotech to mutant gorillas. All I’m saying is you don’t want to be the kid who writes about writers writing. Only Stephen King can get away with that; he breaks all the rules.
English programs don’t teach job skills or business sense. Let’s be honest: most writers are going to need a second job while they’re writing that bestseller. On a resume, you look about as smart as the French exchange student who got good grades in French. What’s more, in order to succeed as a writer, you’ll need to know how to be an effective communicator and an effective promoter. You would think that writing letters or e-mails and writing fiction go hand-in-hand, but they don’t.

I don’t necessarily want to discourage aspiring writers from majoring in English. Plenty of successful writers have been English majors. However, it’s important to realize that an English degree will leave gaps in your education and skill set. If I had to do it over, I would have picked a journalism or business major instead, and I would have also joined up with the school newspaper and a few other clubs that interested me. Get out and try some things that are outside of your comfort zone, because fiction writing is about characters overcoming conflict, and you won’t know about conflict until you’ve faced a challenge.

Maybe you’re planning to major in English anyway, or maybe you’ve already got an English degree. What was your experience with an education in English? Leave a comment!

Review: Accelerated by Bronwen Hruska

Posted by tonbird — October 28, 2012

Book: Accelerated

Author: Bronwen Hruska

Published: October 2, 2012 by Pegasus

First Lines: “Sean Benning had put in his time. He couldn’t risk being caught in another conversation about ERB percentiles and afterschool activities that cost more than he made in a month. Forty-five minutes was his limit.”

Rating: Sorry, but I didn’t like it.

(Electronic galley provided by Open Road Media)

When I first read the synopsis for this book, I thought it was something I could relate to: Sean is raising his son Toby on his own because his wife Ellie unexpectedly runs away, and the private school his in-laws pay for is pressuring him to medicate his kid for ADHD, even though he doesn’t see any of the symptoms. Great! The main character was a man, and I share (or have shared) at least a few of his problems.

My first impression after finishing Accelerated was, “It feels like I just read a Lifetime movie.” After I found the author’s bio, it turns out that she is a screenwriter who has written Lifetime movies. This was her first novel, and–all things considered–it was alright. That being said, it wasn’t really for me, and just in case the author (or any other author) is reading this, I’d like to provide some constructive feedback.

First, not everything about this story was bad. A few aspects were rather brilliant. I was impressed with the way the story wrapped up, and upon finishing, I felt like there were no loose ends or any parts left unresolved. More than once, I found myself in awe of how subtle details from earlier in the story came to have a big impact later on. All the plots and subplots wove together into a perfectly resolved ending.

I was also very interested in the topic: over-diagnosis and over-medication of students with “ADHD” who are just normal active children. <rant>One of my son’s teachers tried to get us to have him tested so she could get him on Ritalin, but I see the kid concentrate for hours at a time on his Lego creations, books, or movies. I felt like she was taking a lazy way out because she was too bad at her job to get my kid interested in what she was trying to teach him, and she didn’t have the basic sense of authority to make him sit down and do his work. I never had trouble getting him to do his homework.</rant> I identified with this topic, and it stirred up some strong feelings for me.

Of course, despite the good qualities, the story also had a few points where it could have been better.

My biggest problem with Accelerated was the characters. I never really liked Sean. He was a passive hero, with no special qualities or admirable traits. He loved his kid. Everybody loves their kids; that’s not really anything special. I felt like more of the problems in the story got solved by luck or outside help than by Sean’s actions. The only sacrifice he made was to risk getting fired from his crappy job that he hated. I would have liked to see him knowingly risk losing his art exhibition rather than have that happen to him unexpectedly as “bad shit happening to good people”. Likewise, I was annoyed by the fact that he slept with a married woman in the opening scene, and then later he slept with his girlfriend and his wife in the same day, but faced no consequences. That was a prime opportunity to introduce strong conflict.

A few of the other characters were weak as well. I would have liked to understand Ellie, the estranged wife, a little better. Why did she run away? Because she’s a psycho? That’s lame. She should have had a stronger motivation that actually made sense. It’s the same with Cheryl, the rich doctor’s wife whom Sean bangs in the bathroom at the PTA meeting. I can’t imagine why she would want to sleep with Sean in the first place, much less in a public setting. I would really have liked to see these characters’ motivations.

My next complaint is a bit nitpicky, but it’s a style issue. Several times the narrative spelled out what characters were thinking by their facial expressions and body language. The story is told in third-person limited point of view through Sean’s eyes, so I guess you can justify it, but that’s one of my pet peeves as a reader and writer. Here’s an example: “She tried reassuring him with a smile.” Instead of telling what she was trying to do with the smile, it would have been better to just describe the smile and let the reader interpret: “Her mouth smiled, but her eyes did not.” To use the writer’s advice cliche: Show rather than tell.

The last thing I’m going to address is the romance between Sean and Toby’s teacher Jess. In order for it to be appealing, I would have liked for the “forbidden” factor to be played up. It would have made that subplot much more interesting. But considering she was a teacher and he was a parent, their relationship was risky and entirely inappropriate. I never felt any of that danger. In order for it to be believable, it should have ended in flaming disaster. He was not even divorced yet, and their relationship was completely unprofessional, so there were all kinds of external forces that could have interfered, and it might have been even more interesting if one of them had been jealous or if they’d had something to fight over. If they had managed to overcome some of these problems in a believable way, then it would have meant more to the reader that they ended up staying together at the end.

So that is my critique of Accelerated. If you like sentimental stories about family and a bit of romance, or if you are interested in the ADHD issue, you may actually enjoy this book. If you’re a writer, I think there are some good lessons to be learned in plot construction, and some examples of what not to do with character and conflict.

Buy the book: (Powell’s or Amazon)

Review: Serpent’s Bite by Warren Adler

Posted by tonbird — October 4, 2012

Book: Serpent’s Bite

Author: Warren Adler

Published: September 2012 by Stonehouse Press, 320 pages

First Line: “They crossed the asphalt road into the trailhead, slipping seamlessly into the alien world of the wilderness.”

Genre/Rating: Literary Fiction; Really good

(PDF Galley provided by Greenleaf Book Group LLC)

When I started this book, I had no realization of what I was getting myself into. I was expecting rustic adventure peppered with family secrets culminating in a bittersweet ending. Boy was I wrong.

Serpent’s Bite had all the elements of a Greek tragedy: deadly treachery, noble characters, destructive hubris. Oh! and incest. Lots and lots of incest!

It begins with a wealthy elderly father who wants to reconcile with his estranged son and daughter. He tries to recreate a past wilderness getaway in Yellowstone that he and the children had taken with their late mother decades before. The past trip is a source of fond memories, and he thinks everything is going to be wonderful once the children agree to go. It only gets better when he finds that the guide they used on the first trip is still operating. What luck!

Their luck sours quickly, however. Once the background is established, every word of this story points to impending doom, and from the beginning I could tell that someone was going to die, even if I couldn’t figure out who. Consistent foreshadowing hinted at the ending, but did not give it away, and by the time I read the epilogue, I was completely satisfied.

There were only five characters: the aforementioned wealthy father; the son, a failed entrepreneur; the daughter, a failed actress; their guide, a washed-up alcoholic; and the guide’s quiet Mexican trail hand. Every one of these dramatis personae were fascinating and strongly developed. The point of view shifted to put you in their heads one at a time so you could know their secret thoughts, motivations, and back stories. I felt loathing for some and sympathy for others, but I never really liked any of them nor thought that any of them didn’t get what they deserved.

One of the characters I particularly hated, who bears special mention, was the daughter, Courtney. She was ruthless, hardened by her determination to find success in Hollywood despite years of failure. She was manipulative and calculating, and yet very foolish. The story starts off from her point of view, and I was relieved when the chapter ended and I got to be in someone else’s head.

I’m usually a sucker for outdoor settings, survival in the wilderness, and man vs. nature, which is what made me pick this book in the first place. I was expecting outdoor adventure, but what I got was a camping trip with horses. Still, the setting’s contribution to the plot is undeniable, and the dangers of the outdoors were fuel for the tragedy.

All things considered, the story was somewhat moving, and my favorite thing about it was my response to the characters. It was really good, but it didn’t exactly change my life. If you want a well written classical styled tragedy (with a few typos) about interesting characters that you love to hate, this may be just the book for you.

Get the book: (Powell’s) (Amazon)

Stephen King Week: Tony’s Man Crush on Stephen King

Posted by tonbird — September 22, 2012

My mom used to read Stephen King’s horror stories, and I already knew who he was by the time I was learning to read sentences like, “The boys run. The girls see the boys.” I remember one evening when my dad was working second shift and my mom called me into the living room to watch The Creep Show with her on HBO. When “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” came on, she told me, “Look, Tony. That’s Stephen King.” I thought that he looked kinda funny.

A few years later, I had not only learned how to read, but I loved reading. What’s more, my third grade teacher was giving our class regular creative writing assignments. I enjoyed these assignments so much that I started writing my own stories.

On one particular evening, my dad called me into the dining room and had me sit at the table, my mom seated at his left. He held up several pages of sloppy third-grader handwriting torn from a yellow legal pad. “What is this all about?” he asked. I had left the story on the table, and he and Mom had read it. This particular masterpiece was my first attempt at writing horror. It was about a deformed monster who lived in the woods and killed people with a knife that some hunter had forgotten. I was picturing my dad’s military issue bolt knife when I wrote it.

My dad’s knife is unavailable for photography, but this is pretty much what it looks like.

I endured Dad’s lecture about how sick and wrong it was to write stories about violence and murder, and then after he left me ashamed and crying, my mom said to me, “You write like Stephen King.” I didn’t realize it until much later, but she had said it with pride and meant it as a compliment.

Years later, that I actually began reading my first Stephen King book. It was The Shining, a birthday gift from my best friend Eric. From the beginning of the book I was fascinated by the way small details made the characters so believable. It felt like King understood the things about people that we prefer to keep hidden. I never got to finish the book, though. My dad came into my room and confiscated it, handing me a Bible in its place.

My next attempt was ‘Salem’s Lot, which I had the good sense to read in secret. It is, to this day, the only story I’ve ever read about vampires that actually scared me. As with just about every Stephen King story I’ve ever read, I was drawn in by the characters and the way he wrote. Everything seemed real and believable, even though I know vampires aren’t real. (They’re not, are they?)

After that, I read as much King as I could. I got his short story collections, The Stand, The Eyes of the Dragon, and several others. I regret that it took me a while to start The Dark Tower books. Friends had been telling me for years, “You’ve got to read this. You’ve got to read this.” Dusty Old West stories had never interested me, so I was surprised when the series changed my life forever, ruining all other books for me.

But it’s more than just Stephen King’s books that I admire. I just finished rereading On Writing. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you may remember me telling my story of how I stopped writing (and started again). One of the things that got me writing again was reading On Writing.

The book is as much an autobiography (though he denies it in one of the forewords) as it is a manual for writing. The first part talks about how King began, going from his first stories as a child all the way up to establishing his career as a writer, and then he ends shortly after he talks about breaking his ties with substance abuse. The part about him quitting drinking was a bit of a surprise to me. I had just figured that all artists (writers included) were tortured addicts who needed the sauce to fuel their creativity. It turns out that Stephen King quit all of it, and it doesn’t seem to have affected his creativity.

There are plenty of fascinating anecdotes and useful tips that can guide an aspiring writer throughout the later chapters of On Writing. Up until this most recent read of it, I had forgotten how many lessons I had taken from the book before. King covers everything from when and where to write, how story ideas come to him, editing, and even how to break into the business. (This latter part predates the rise of social media, but the principles are still the same.) One of the best bits of advice (in my opinion) is on editing: get rid of unnecessary words, and try to cut your first draft down by 10%. Also, another great bit of advice is read a lot and write a lot. I repeat that advice to any poor sucker who thinks I know anything about writing, and now I remember where I got it.

In the last part of On Writing, King talks about his brush with death when he was struck by a van. He also wrote the van incident into a scene in the last book of The Dark Tower.

“I’d hit that.” – Blue Dodge Caravan

Oh, right. Did I mention, he made himself a character in one of his own books . . . and it wasn’t terrible. Actually, it was genius! When I saw that he put himself into Song of Susannah, and again in The Dark Tower, I thought, “This is going to be ridiculous. Authors shouldn’t write about themselves as characters!” But when I saw how he pulled it off, I was impressed. In both books, King makes fun of himself, depicting himself as a bumbling, cowardly fool. As the author, he shows no ego about being the creator of his fictional universe; he is merely the one who discovered a story that was already there. In On Writing he makes it clear that that’s how he feels about all of his stories.

There’s a lot about Stephen King for a person–especially a writer–to look up to. Whether it’s his talent and success as an author, or his strength to take back his life from booze and drugs, or simply that he survived getting hit by a van and then came back to write more amazing stories–Stephen King is pretty much my writer hero, and I want to be him when I grow up.