A true and practical statement from Stephen King in his secret-revealing little book, On Writing, which I added to my Amazon shopping cart the other day to bring my order up to the $25 minimum to qualify for free shipping. 

Until now as a reader I haven't been much of a Stephen King fan.  I believe I've read only one of his novels, The Dead Zone.  I might have read The Shining, but it would have been after seeing the movie, which was so memorable I've forgotten.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm no Stephen King scoffer or sniffer-at because of his prodigious productivity and popularity. I'm in awe of his output and have loved every one of the movies I've seen that were made from his books.  He's a marvelous teller of tales.  I don't really know why I haven't read more of his books.

The only writers I'll admit publicly to scoffing or sniffing at are those who are highly acclaimed and promoted by those literati who sniff at and otherwise ignore writers who appeal to readers they consider beneath their standards of sophistication.  One of the writers I sniff at and have not read nor have any intention of reading, Don DeLillo, is said to have given advice similar to King's true and practical advice when asked by writer Mary Karr for help when she had hit a roadblock writing Lit.

"Write or die," she says DeLillo advised her in a postcard after she called him for encouragement.  

"I think I sent him one back that said, 'write and die'," she said in an interview on NPR.

Karr's response is of course the cleverer and is equally true, yet it's DeLillo's cliché that's closer to the truth King reveals, as it is for most of us who feel an inner compulsion to string words together in print for others to read. 

King shares this observation with us at the conclusion of the first part of his book, the first 100 pages, which he calls "C.V." for curriculum vitae. It's the part where he brings us through his childhood and his early efforts to write and his initial successes, first in newspapers and then in the pulp magazines and through his breakout novel, Carrie, and his decades long stretch of alcoholism and drug addiction to the point where he cleaned up and saved his marriage and his life.

It's a confessional by a shamefaced but grateful survivor, who in one flash of insight links his depths of self-destruction with a boyhood incident when he took a dump in the woods and wiped himself with leaves that turned out to be poison ivy: "I was wiping my ass with poison ivy again, this time on a daily basis, but I couldn't ask for help.

"That's not the way you did things in my family. In my family what you did was smoke your cigarettes and dance in the Jell-O and keep yourself to yourself."

"Yet the part of me that writes the stories, the deep part that knew I was an alcoholic as early as 1975, when I wrote The Shining, wouldn't accept that. Silence isn't what that part is about. It began to scream for help in the only way it knew how, through my fiction and through my monsters. In late 1985 and 1986 I wrote Misery (the title quite aptly described my state of mind)...In the spring and summer of 1986 I wrote The Tommyknockers, often working until midnight with my heart running at a hundred and thirty beats a minute and cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stem the coke-induced bleeding."

King said when he wrote Cujo "I was drinking a case of sixteen-ounce tallboys a night." He barely remembered writing the novel. "I don't say that with pride or shame, only with a vague sense of loss. I like that book. I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page.

"At the worst of it I no longer wanted to drink and no longer wanted to be sober, either. I felt evicted from life. At the start of the road back I just tried to believe the people who said that things would get better if I gave them time to do so. And I never stopped writing. Some of the stuff that came out was tentative and flat, but at least it was there. I buried those unhappy, lackluster pages in the bottom of the drawer of my desk and got on to the next project. Little by little I found the beat again, and after that I found the joy again."

The tangible symbol of King's shift in outlook is the desk he bought in 1981. It was "the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room" he'd dreamed about for years. "No more child's desk in a trailer laundry closet, no more cramped kneehole in a rented house." He put his enormous new dream desk in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study that was converted from a stable loft.

"For six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship's captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere." He replaced the desk, which he called "the T. Rex desk," with one half its size a year or two after he sobered up. He put the smaller desk in a corner of his office, under the eave.

"I'm sitting under it now," he writes, "a fifty-three-year-old man with bad eyes, a gimp leg and no hangover. I'm doing what I know how to do and as well as I know how to do it. I came through all the stuff I told you about (and plenty more I didn't) and now I'm going to tell you as much as I can about the job. As promised, it won't take long.

"It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."

I finished this part of the book last nite. Tonite I begin, "What Writing Is."