King & Structure

King is one of my favorite writers, and his story structure is a very big reason why. Ironically I haven't read IT, but I can tell you that your friend is right about the "mundane anchor" preceding a huge, detailed background. One of the best examples of this is Needful Things--you meet each character briefly at first, and then as time goes on you learn more and more about their history and why they make the choices they do, and how they got into whatever situation they're in now. He does this a lot, also in 'Salem's Lot and "The Langoliers" if I'm remembering it right.

What it amounts to is a lot of background and zero peripheral characters. That's one of the things I really admire about King--his ability to flesh out all the characters to the point where you know exactly who they are, no matter how big the cast gets.

May I ask what "non-pleasure buttons" specifically he's hitting for you? I'm trying to think of something else to rec you that won't squick you out as much.

King's story structure often leaves me cold. In Tommyknockers, for example, I felt I could have ripped out the first half of the book and still gotten the gist of the story and enjoyed it more. His buildup is often overplayed and heavy-handed, in my not so humble opinion.

However, with that said, I read King avidly because he is a master story teller (I'll admit though that I stopped reading him for years before going back Nd restarting again with From A Buick 8 which I thought was just a mAsterful story in and of itself.

He's a bit of an acquired taste though, and not everything he does is my cup of tea, but when he's on, he's the undisputed master.

I like King a lot, but the way he structures his novels is a negative for me. I've read several of his big doorstoppers (It, The Stand, Tommyknockers), and all of them could have been cut in half. That "anchoring" a chapter in a mundane event, and then spending the next fifty pages with a flashback to something that happened to the character when he was a child? Not a fan. Yes, it means all of his characters are fully fleshed out by the end, but we've had to wade through a lot of extraneous, non-plot-related details to get there.

So if your friend is suggesting starting with the present moment in the story and then doing a flashback to explain how you got there, it's a technique that works, but personally, I wouldn't try to emulate King. (And I definitely wouldn't try to emulate his word count.)

I haven't read (nor bought) Duma Key, but the last King tome I couldn't read was Insomnia which is not what it induced in me (quite the opposite, in fact). I most recently read Under The Dome which I found 1) atypical for King as you could not tear out the first half of the book, and 2) disappointing in it's ending as I thought he completely missed out on a major plot element that could have been much more satisfying as an ending.

Ah-ha! Well as for non-linear structure, Robin McKinley is another master at that. And you can trust her to let the characters live through to the end, too. What she does is mention one detail in the ongoing story--like a charm hanging on a door that the narrator's preparing to pass through--and goes off on a huge tangent on charms and what they mean to this universe and how many the MC's collected over the years and why she thinks they're actually pretty useless and how many more of these things is her mother planning to leave on her door anyway?--before coming back to the present action.

Read Sunshine. She also takes some getting used to, because her narrative voice is bizarre and idiosyncratic, but that's another good one for non-linear story structure. Assuming you're looking for someone besides King to learn this from, since you're not a fan.

ETA: What that tangent does for the story is gives you a whole lot of world-building, character development, and detail all at once. It derails the narrative a little, but all the information you get is essential and relevant to the plot. That one charm hanging on a door tells you that this is a universe in which using charms and wards in one's home is the norm; the narrator doesn't subscribe to the general opinion on charms, which makes her a bit of a rebel; we find out about her relationship with her mother, loving but a little suffocating and strained. It gives you a lot from a fairly mundane starting point. And yes, I'm thinking of a specific example from a specific book. Does that help more?

FOTSGreg said:

2) disappointing in it's ending as I thought he completely missed out on a major plot element that could have been much more satisfying as an ending.

Click to expand...

OK, I'll bite. Which plot element do you have in mind? UTD was the first King book I ever read. I liked how he tried to fully flesh out so many characters, but I hated the ending.

Spoiler alert!





Spoiler alert!






Spoiler alert!






Spoilers lurk below! You have been warned...






In Under The Dome King sets up a situation which is rife with tension and seems ultimately headed toward a civil war between the town's leadership and his private army and the hero and his allies. There's also a third party lurking in the background. However, King destroys this impending, and potentially exciting conflict, when the leader's henchmen get into action with the third party and get a large portion of their numbers killed in a firefight and resulting explosion. King overdoes the explosion, making it much more destructive (and slower) than any similar explosion has any right to be (it's called a BLEVE (boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion) and the heroes and villains alike suffer massively in the aftereffects completely eliminating any possibility of any conflict between them (they end up either too dead or too busy trying to survive in a poisonous atmosphere to fight).

An ending which placed the hero and his allies and the leadership and his henchmen in a full-scale civil war through the streets of the town with the remaining townspeople forced to choose sides or hunker down and just try to survive the crossfire would have been far more satisfying of an ending IMNSHO.

In addition, the actual ending wherein the hero's allies basically plead for their lives against inscrutable and all powerful aliens (alien children actually) is unsatisfying. It offers no hope that humans could actually prevail against such creatures, figure out how to, if not outright defeat them then outsmart them, and offers no insight into the personality or perseverance of the human soul when a person is faced with inevitable death. There is no courage shown, no redemption delivered, no value placed on resisting inevitable death stoically.

King portrays several of his villains as true villains (there's a rape of one of the hero's allies and a series of truly vicious murders) but then they get off easily and the hero and his allies have little, if anything, to do with their endings. The hero and his allies receive little in the way of vengeance for the horror inflicted upon them and their community and neighbors. They, in the end, can only face their oncoming deaths with progressively increasing weakness and despair brought on by an increasingly poisonous atmosphere inflicted upon them by aliens who are not only untouchable, but also uncaring.

I hated and despised the ending to UTD. Can you tell? I think King screwed the pooch with this one. He set up a great conflict and then completely threw it away.

FOTSGreg said:

I hated and despised the ending to UTD. Can you tell? I think King screwed the pooch with this one. He set up a great conflict and then completely threw it away.

Click to expand...

Oh, dear. Sounds like the problems I had with The Stand, only worse. King does seem to like deux ex machina endings. At least in The Stand, there was a sense that the good guys' stand had been worth it, and the ending was somewhat hopeful.

I read something somewhere, danged if I can remember where and all I remember is this one bit about Stephen King's writing style - he's been quoted to have said something along the lines of 'telling a story to get you to care about his characters and then turning the monsters loose on them.'

I read King and Koontz often. Koontz when I want a good story and, as you said Del, I'm safe knowing the dog doesn't die at the end. I read King when my writing is stuck, when I don't have a lot of time to write, or when I've gotten bogged down in edits and feel my voice is lost. Reading King - especially, especially IT - brings my voice back to my work and/or the words seem to hit the paper with a lot less thought/effort and usually require less editing. For whatever reason.

Never liked King but I respect his skill and talent. That being said, I love the movie adaptions of his stories (except for that wretched The Mist) but I could barely get through Insomnia. I started The Stand and a couple of others but spent so much time wishing he'd just get to the point that I quit. Not my cup of tea, but he has so many fans that emulating his style, pacing and tone may just work for you.

Deleyan,
IMHO, think you should just write your story, regardless of what is already out there. It's very possible, once you get started, it will be completely different from King's IT.

And you're reading IT right now? Do you like it?

Sorry to hear that.
Read IT and The Talisman when I was 16/17yo, w/out permission bc King was 'too scary' (heehee). Put the fun in trouble.

I really like King's style. Love it, in fact. I totally understand why it might turn some people off, however. I believe the reason he structures the stories the way he does is because he writes so long (if you're reading IT you obviously already know that). So he hooks you with that one small event. It's supposed to be just enough to get you interested in the plot itself. Then we go back in time to find out why it's so important and it makes us care about the characters. Now we feel like we are part of the story as we make our way back up to the event that started the story off. If he didn't give us that event at the beginning to interest us, we may not have had any interest in finding out about the characters and events leading up to it.

I understand that a lot of his books seem to go on and on with information that doesn't seem to forward the plot very much, but it helps to create the overall picture. I recently read Duma Key (which I LOVED) and I will admit that you could probably cut it in half and still be able to enjoy and understand the story. But that other half lets you understand the story so much more. It make it seem like you are in the story, almost like you are the main character. This lets every event have such a greater impact.

I know this causes a lot of people not to like him, but it helps people to understand and relate to everything and want to go along for the ride. That is the most important thing for a lot of readers; to relate and understand and be a part of the story. I don't know of any other author who does this quite as well as Stephen King.

One of the interesting things I found out about King's approach to writing ('On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft') is that he doesn't plot his novels - he just writes. And, for me, it shows. I would consider myself a King fan (The Mist is by far my favourite King story, and I tend to prefer his short stories to his longer novels - it's like he has to be tighter and more concise), but his prose tends to meander (if, for example, any of us tried to get something like that published nowadays, we would be told to cut out the crap and get to the meat of the story) and his endings tend to be weak - and I know I am not the only King fan out there that thinks this. He builds up and builds up and builds up (for example, IT) to a point where you are waiting for a totally mind blowing, almost Lovecraftian resolution in its devastating weirdness... and you get (SPOILERS)




a spider. Okay, so it's (MORE SPOILERS!)




a giant transdimentional spider, but sheesh, c'mon! I was waiting for a Cthulhu-oid horror from the depths of a depraved imagination, not a dire spider in disguise. Everything else about IT (the creature) was terrifying, but the spider let me down massively. It was almost as if King went 'okay, uh, what can it be... I know! A spider! Everyone is frightened of them!!!' and left it at that...

For this reason, I am much more of a Barker fan. He really does try to describe the indescribable.

King's use of structure is classic, and teh best novelists have used it for at least a couple of centuries. It simply works for the great majority of readers.

King's strongest suit is characterization. That also happens to be my personal strong suit in writing... and I admittedly learned it from him. By reading King's works, I learned how important character nuance is. And all these writers who have their cardboard cookie-cutter characters can kiss my ass. I don't want to get right down to it. I want foreplay, not just fu*#in'.

This is why I can barely tolerate reading many of Nora Roberts' works. Her characters are flat, uninteresting and are all basically the same people with different names. Especially in her trilogies. I bet I've read the same book by her, with a new title, about fifty times. She makes it interesting enough, but interest is NOT the winning factor for this reader. I need depth. I need connection. Enjoyment of the story is not as important to me as being sucked in by my non-existent balls and being made to stay there.

With every S. King book I have read, I have had a relationship with the characters. I've invested my time in getting to know them, growing to love them. This is what makes him one of the masters. Because I CAN cry when he kills someone. Because I can giggle when someone I thought was surely a goner gets to live. Because I can remember them, each and every one from Johanna Noonan to Rosie McClendon to Ralph Roberts to John Coffey to Mr. Gray to Jack, Wendy and Danny Torrence, and not only do I remember them, but I remember them well. I remember them well enough that I was incensed when I saw the film for The Shining and noted that they'd changed Wendy from a blond to a brunette and that Danny was no longer the main character, as in the novel, but the MC's child only.

The thing with King is.... he makes me care. A writer cannot affect their reader if the reader doesn't give shit one. I can read all day long and enjoy the story of any writer, even those who use those dolls in place of characters. But King... his characters are real.

So are mine.

I care about them. If I want to read just for the fuck of it, I do so. If I want to be affected? I go for King and those like him. (I don't mean like him in how he writes... but structurally similar in how they present their stories.) It takes a longer time, and amount of words, to get to know a character enough to really care. I personally think it is time well spent.

Mistress Elysia said:

One of the interesting things I found out about King's approach to writing ('On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft') is that he doesn't plot his novels - he just writes. And, for me, it shows. I would consider myself a King fan (The Mist is by far my favourite King story, and I tend to prefer his short stories to his longer novels - it's like he has to be tighter and more concise), but his prose tends to meander (if, for example, any of us tried to get something like that published nowadays, we would be told to cut out the crap and get to the meat of the story) and his endings tend to be weak - and I know I am not the only King fan out there that thinks this. He builds up and builds up and builds up (for example, IT) to a point where you are waiting for a totally mind blowing, almost Lovecraftian resolution in its devastating weirdness... and you get (SPOILERS)




a spider. Okay, so it's (MORE SPOILERS!)




a giant transdimentional spider, but sheesh, c'mon! I was waiting for a Cthulhu-oid horror from the depths of a depraved imagination, not a dire spider in disguise. Everything else about IT (the creature) was terrifying, but the spider let me down massively. It was almost as if King went 'okay, uh, what can it be... I know! A spider! Everyone is frightened of them!!!' and left it at that...

For this reason, I am much more of a Barker fan. He really does try to describe the indescribable.

Click to expand...

Uh, no on almost every point. King doesn't plot before he writes, but neither do most of the bestselling writers out there. What king does is tell a story, and it works. His prose doesn.t meander at all, but goes where it should for the kind of novel he's writing. I'm guessing you don't read a lot of classic writers such as Dickens?

And, no, pubishers today would not tell him to cut out teh crap and get to the meat. I know some fans, and many non-fans feel this way, but they have a completely mistaken notion of why King writes as he does.

Many do write a sKing does, and publishers love it.