King & Structure

Amadan · Jun 30, 2010

Jamesaritchie said:
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?

Dickens' work was full of padding, because he was writing serials and paid by the word. Kings' work is full of padding because he's become too big to edit.

(I like both Dickens and King, by the way.)

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.

No, they know why he writes as he does. They also know he's quite capable of writing tighter, less bloated prose when he's so inclined. The Stand is one of my favorite books (even though it's not even close to being Kings' best), but ye gods it's full of extras that don't need to be there.

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

Actually, only a few can get away with writing as King does. The rest get told to chop out the unnecessary word count.

FOTSGreg · Jun 30, 2010

King's novelization strong points are character and story, of course, but he also has a descriptive way of placing the reader in the story. He loves detailing a place until you can almost smell the mildew as you're reading along. I can tell you what the Marston place looks like in Salem's Lot, what the main street of Derry looks like (from It and Needful Things), what a Pennsylvania Highway Patrol station looks like (From A Buick 8), what the antique shop in Needful Things looks like, what the rundown textile mill looks like (Graveyard Shift), etc. I can almost find the location of the pet cemetary (Pet Semetary) in the old Indian burial grounds is, can describe what Uncle Otto's old pickup looks like (Uncle Otto's Pickup), what a Piper Cherokee looks like if it was owned by a vampire (Night Flyers), etc., etc. I can tell you what a deserted island looks like and what the inside of the house in Misery is like.

King manages to do all that without derailing his story at all which is something I simply cannot do. If I do it it's called an info-dump. When King does it it's an integral and necessary part of the story and setting, placing the reader in the time and place and in the events which are about to occur.

King grounds a reader in the place where his events are about to occur or are occurring. In some cases he takes the entire first half of the book or story to ground the reader in the location, locale, climate, society, and culture of the story. In this fashion he makes the place of his stories much more "real" to the reader. While he may not be a master of the roller-coaster action horror, he has a much better feel for "place" than Dean Koontz does (now, before you yell at me, I am a huge Koontz fan as well, but King and Koontz write different types of stories). King's action is firmly grounded in "place" and you have to get to know the place before the action can begin. Koontz on the other hand occasionally glosses over "place" as his characters have a greater tendency to move about and over a much larger area than King's characters do.

If the story is to take place almost entirely in a single place then a reader must be grounded in that place before they can really begin to identify with the events that are to come. If the action is more "roller-coastery" and the place doesn't really matter that much then the reader needs to identify more with the characters IMNSHO.

King grounds the reader first by burying them in the details of place. Then he lets the action and the horror start to build.

Evice · Jul 27, 2010

I have been a king fan for years, i believe he had a blip during the 80's (with drugs and alcohol) and you can tell in a lot of the books he wrote then ramble on a bit, IT and Tommyknockers being two of them, they are not my favourites either.

What i love about his books for the most part are the fact that he can make you love, hate or empathise with his characters and really care what happens to them. Sometimes i find the beginning of some of his books tough going but i plod on knowing it will benefit me in the end to get to know the character before the shit hits the fan as it were.

Not even the best of the best can get it right all the time

I would recommend Geralds Game, Dolores Claiborne and The girl who loved Tom Gordon as books which get to the point.

gmglenn13 · Jul 27, 2010

OK, not sure I want to jump in here. I am a huge SK fan. If you look at his earlier stuff, it's a little more direct than his later books. I think a lot has to do with it that SK is SK and he can do what he wants because he sells so many books. He is his own editor now. what he says goes. His characterization is still incredible. His pace can be monotonous at some times, and even in IT, one of my all time favorite books, there are some things that he could have cut out if he wanted to an no one would have missed it. If he came out today, the industry would force him to do things their way until he sold enough books to do things his way. In the end he'll go down as one of the greatest horror writers ever. If you look at what he has done, it's mind-blowing. But he isn't for everyone. I have a lot of friends that say he's boring. But again, if you look at the worlds he's created and the stories he's told, it's pretty amazing.

quicklime · Jul 29, 2010

DeleyanLee said:
Not particularly, but that's my personal taste as a reader. IT is a mega-bestseller, so it obviously works, which is why it's worth studying.

is it anywhere near your taste as a writer?

if not, trying to emulate something you dislike seems an excellent recpie for hack-dom, but little else. Fine to examine, but not to try to follow if it's just not you.

The answer many have said here is to invest you in the characters. by King's own admission he writes more about people in situations than situations, often not even having an ending when he starts a book. The drawback is he seems almost incapable of paring his stuff below 500 pages, unless he has a novella that probably should have been a short story....the guy just stuffs a lot of words into a story

I like King, and I'm sick of Koontz because I'm starting to think the dogs are a crutch and nothing more. If you want leaner and meaner, either read something like "Thinner" by King or a book by someone a bit more economical with their words, like Richard Laymon.

(warning, if you're at all prudish Laymon borders on torture porn at times. for some this is a deal-breaker, but his writing is very opposite to King's in many respects despite covering the same sort of ground.)

DeleyanLee · Jul 29, 2010

quicklime said:
if not, trying to emulate something you dislike seems an excellent recpie for hack-dom, but little else. Fine to examine, but not to try to follow if it's just not you.

I'm not attempting to emulate King's style or story--not by a long stretch. He is extremely good at using a particular structure to his stories that I don't see a lot of other writers using. Thus, I'm trying to understand the structure and what benefits it brings to using it in a story, if it's best on only one kind of story, and if there's any negatives to using it.

quicklime · Jul 29, 2010

DeleyanLee said:
I'm not attempting to emulate King's style or story--not by a long stretch. He is extremely good at using a particular structure to his stories that I don't see a lot of other writers using. Thus, I'm trying to understand the structure and what benefits it brings to using it in a story, if it's best on only one kind of story, and if there's any negatives to using it.

good.

You probably have both already:

Pro--personal investment in each and every character and their lives

cons--long and to many readers tedious

I would also add it may not be entirely a matter of choice; different people have different voices and inclinations. I'm not entirely sure King can write something like IT with the directness and brevity he wrote Thinner or The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon even if he sat down to.

orion_mk3 · Jul 29, 2010

In On Writing King talks about a piece that came back from an editor with a scribbled note calling the prose "puffy" and advising him to cut 10% from each of his drafts. Sound advice for people who, like King, have a tendency to ramble a bit.

I feel like, as he's become more successful, King has gotten away from this dictum somewhat and as a result some his writing can be, well, puffy. And--I say this as a confirmed fan of the man--it's sometimes detrimental to the structure he's trying to follow. More than once, particularly in some of the later Dark Tower books, it seems like the first two-thirds of the story are flabby while the final third brims over with plot and narrative action.

It's something I've noticed with several authors; once they become famous and have clout, there are fewer editors, agents, and critics willing to tell them to trim a subplot or rebalance a narrative (I feel that Rowling's later Potter books are another good example; compare the leaner early books with the comparatively puffy later ones).

pangalactic · Aug 19, 2010

I'd imagine it's because of the way he writes. In On Writing - which, like King or not, is indispensible for a writer, even if you go on to completely disregard anything he says - he talks about his writing process. What it boils down to is that he never outlines or plots. He starts with a situation, and a character, and goes from there. I'd imagine this is why he structures things this way - he's literally saying to himself, "This is where we are. How did we get here?". It's something I love about his writing, because the stories are incredibly organic and more believable because of that, even when you're dealing with aliens and Pennywise and the devil running a second-hand store.

Of course, what this also leads to is some of his more notorious endings. Like UTD, for example. Because he writes himself into a corner, and has to deus ex machina his way out of it. And yet I still adore his writing, and I'll still read everything he releases (though I'll never reread Cell. Ever).

Sn00py · Aug 22, 2010

pangalactic said:
I'd imagine it's because of the way he writes. In On Writing - which, like King or not, is indispensible for a writer, even if you go on to completely disregard anything he says - he talks about his writing process. What it boils down to is that he never outlines or plots. He starts with a situation, and a character, and goes from there. I'd imagine this is why he structures things this way - he's literally saying to himself, "This is where we are. How did we get here?". It's something I love about his writing, because the stories are incredibly organic and more believable because of that, even when you're dealing with aliens and Pennywise and the devil running a second-hand store.

Of course, what this also leads to is some of his more notorious endings. Like UTD, for example. Because he writes himself into a corner, and has to deus ex machina his way out of it. And yet I still adore his writing, and I'll still read everything he releases (though I'll never reread Cell. Ever).

But he does dissect and disembowel and amputate in the revision stages. I don't think he has gotten away from the rule to reduce his final draft by 10%. The problem is that 10% is no longer enough

Sn00py · Aug 22, 2010

King follows a classic structure essential to good horror: orient your reader in your world and to your characters before you thrust them into the waiting horror. Making your reader feel comfortable with and care about your characters is a great way to elicit genuine moments of terror.

King's problem is that he takes this too far. He focuses on such mundane circumstances, filling his pages with corn pone settings and corn pone characters, that a feeling of comfort turns to outright boredom. Once the action sets in, it's all the more appreciated, and perhaps unnaturally heightened by the banality that preceded it.

My problem is that hundreds of pages of wandering, banal prose in almost all of his novels have convinced me it's just not worth the effort. I now only read his short stories, where even though he still tends to wander through fields of pointless prose, I can anticipate a not too far off ending if it begins to feel unbearable.

Death Wizard · Aug 22, 2010

FOTSGreg said:
King's novelization strong points are character and story, of course, but he also has a descriptive way of placing the reader in the story. He loves detailing a place until you can almost smell the mildew as you're reading along. I can tell you what the Marston place looks like in Salem's Lot, what the main street of Derry looks like (from It and Needful Things), what a Pennsylvania Highway Patrol station looks like (From A Buick 8), what the antique shop in Needful Things looks like, what the rundown textile mill looks like (Graveyard Shift), etc. I can almost find the location of the pet cemetary (Pet Semetary) in the old Indian burial grounds is, can describe what Uncle Otto's old pickup looks like (Uncle Otto's Pickup), what a Piper Cherokee looks like if it was owned by a vampire (Night Flyers), etc., etc. I can tell you what a deserted island looks like and what the inside of the house in Misery is like.

King manages to do all that without derailing his story at all which is something I simply cannot do. If I do it it's called an info-dump. When King does it it's an integral and necessary part of the story and setting, placing the reader in the time and place and in the events which are about to occur.

King grounds a reader in the place where his events are about to occur or are occurring. In some cases he takes the entire first half of the book or story to ground the reader in the location, locale, climate, society, and culture of the story. In this fashion he makes the place of his stories much more "real" to the reader. While he may not be a master of the roller-coaster action horror, he has a much better feel for "place" than Dean Koontz does (now, before you yell at me, I am a huge Koontz fan as well, but King and Koontz write different types of stories). King's action is firmly grounded in "place" and you have to get to know the place before the action can begin. Koontz on the other hand occasionally glosses over "place" as his characters have a greater tendency to move about and over a much larger area than King's characters do.

If the story is to take place almost entirely in a single place then a reader must be grounded in that place before they can really begin to identify with the events that are to come. If the action is more "roller-coastery" and the place doesn't really matter that much then the reader needs to identify more with the characters IMNSHO.

King grounds the reader first by burying them in the details of place. Then he lets the action and the horror start to build.

This is an excellent post.

OhTheHorror · Aug 22, 2010

LaurieD said:
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.'

And that’s what I LOVE about King. :evil

He likes to make you love his characters, truly care about them in your heart-of-hearts and then throws them into the lion's den unarmed and with little chance of survival. It's a thing of beauty to me, but defiantly not everyone's cup of tea.

OhTheHorror · Aug 22, 2010

Originally Posted by FOTSGreg
King's novelization strong points are character and story, of course, but he also has a descriptive way of placing the reader in the story. He loves detailing a place until you can almost smell the mildew as you're reading along. I can tell you what the Marston place looks like in Salem's Lot, what the main street of Derry looks like (from It and Needful Things), what a Pennsylvania Highway Patrol station looks like (From A Buick 8), what the antique shop in Needful Things looks like, what the rundown textile mill looks like (Graveyard Shift), etc. I can almost find the location of the pet cemetary (Pet Semetary) in the old Indian burial grounds is, can describe what Uncle Otto's old pickup looks like (Uncle Otto's Pickup), what a Piper Cherokee looks like if it was owned by a vampire (Night Flyers), etc., etc. I can tell you what a deserted island looks like and what the inside of the house in Misery is like.

King manages to do all that without derailing his story at all which is something I simply cannot do. If I do it it's called an info-dump. When King does it it's an integral and necessary part of the story and setting, placing the reader in the time and place and in the events which are about to occur.

King grounds a reader in the place where his events are about to occur or are occurring. In some cases he takes the entire first half of the book or story to ground the reader in the location, locale, climate, society, and culture of the story. In this fashion he makes the place of his stories much more "real" to the reader. While he may not be a master of the roller-coaster action horror, he has a much better feel for "place" than Dean Koontz does (now, before you yell at me, I am a huge Koontz fan as well, but King and Koontz write different types of stories). King's action is firmly grounded in "place" and you have to get to know the place before the action can begin. Koontz on the other hand occasionally glosses over "place" as his characters have a greater tendency to move about and over a much larger area than King's characters do.

If the story is to take place almost entirely in a single place then a reader must be grounded in that place before they can really begin to identify with the events that are to come. If the action is more "roller-coastery" and the place doesn't really matter that much then the reader needs to identify more with the characters IMNSHO.

King grounds the reader first by burying them in the details of place. Then he lets the action and the horror start to build.

deathwizard said:
This is an excellent post.

Agreed!

FOTSGreg · Aug 23, 2010

Heh! I have my moments.

King & Structure

Amadan

FOTSGreg

Today is your last day.

Evice

gmglenn13

quicklime

all out of fucks to give

DeleyanLee

Writing Anarchist

quicklime

all out of fucks to give

orion_mk3

Ne Cede Malis

pangalactic

Gargling blasters

Sn00py

Literary Laureate

Sn00py

Literary Laureate

Death Wizard

Tumhe na koci puujetha

OhTheHorror

jlw

OhTheHorror

jlw

FOTSGreg

Today is your last day.