I’m reading “On Writing” by Stephen King (the first half is excellent) and was struck by some advice he gave that came from one of his old newspaper editors John Gould: “write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.” In other words your initial attempt is a story told by yourself to yourself, whereas the rewrite is a story told by a writer to a reader.
It’s a nice quote and I thought about it lots until, a few days later, I tripped over a coincidence. I was in my sister-in-law’s bathroom reading a book of quotations called “QI Advanced Banter”. I flicked straight to the section headed “Writing” and came across a quote by Barbara Kingsolver: “Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.”
Kingsolver has a very good point: by appealing to yourself rather than a misinformed, opaque interpretation of a readership group, you might create something as unique as you hope you are.
But here’s the thing: you are not unique. You are the sum of your influences. Write the book that you’d like to read, not one that you’ve already read. That doesn’t mean we should chuck King’s quote out with the bathwater. King is talking about a process: first throwing down the bricks of a story and then straightening them up in order to create a stable and robust structure. If you write like I do you’ll be thinking a paragraph or two ahead of the one you’re writing. You trust that half the nonsense in your head is sticking to the page; that the connections are as obvious and the path is as clear as you imagine them to be.
Tags: Barbara Kingsolver, headline, Stephen King, thumbline
Written by Adrian Robinson
6th September, 2009
