For those of you who have never read an essay by Stephen King, you may be surprised to learn that he is not all genre, all the time. King is a passionate advocate of storytelling, and his book On Writing is a quick (if sometimes repetitive) read for any aspiring writer.
This weekend, The New York Times printed an excerpt of King's introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2007. His passionate diatribe against mediocre writing is a great reminder that writing is about impact, that point of contact between writer and reader. Everything else--the politics of publishing, the pedagogical trends of graduate writing programs-- is just gum under the shoe.
Talent can't help itself; it roars along in fair weather or foul, not sparing the fireworks. It gets emotional. It struts its stuff. If these stories have anything in common, it's that sense of emotional involvement, of flipped-out amazement. I look for stories that care about my feelings as well as my intellect, and when I find one that is all-out emotionally assaultive - - like "Sans Farine," by Jim Shepard -- I grab that baby and hold on tight. Do I want something that appeals to my critical nose? Maybe later (and, I admit it, maybe never). What I want to start with is something that comes at me full-bore, like a big, hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky. I want the ancient pleasure that probably goes back to the cave: to be blown clean out of myself for a while, as violently as a fighter pilot who pushes the eject button in his F-111. I certainly don't want some fraidy-cat's writing school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream-of-consciousness about what Bob Dylan once called "the true meaning of a pear."
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