As anyone who has ever had a term paper due on the rising sun can attest, writing don't come easy. You got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues. To this day, I can remember staring at the blank first page of my doctoral dissertation every day for a month. And that was just a summary. (By the time I defended, I had already published the chapters of my dissertation as journal articles. My advisor told me to put a staple through a stack of reprints, add a summary, and turn it in to the grad school. Which, oddly enough, I couldn't do because the journal publisher now owned the copyright to the chapters. But I digress.) The breakthrough came only after nicking a line from Kandel, which is usually the best solution to this sort of problem.
Writer's block. Bête noire of the would-be author. Yet, one is also on occasion gripped with the logorrhea, a word sharing its root with a more visceral kind of spewage. An insatiable urge to write, for better or worse, an affliction no less painful than its noneffluent cousin. If you mouse around in the right margin you can find a 10,000 word primer on variational calculus, among other curiosities, which I mostly wrote in one sitting. Why? Who knows. Some people like to hear themselves talk; others like to read themselves write.
I'm told the pros, too, suffer these extremes. Hot and cold, yin and yang, ecstasy and agony. Writing is easy, Gene Fowler famously quipped. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. At the other end of the balance sheet we find J.K. Rowling writing Harry Potter in cafes and pubs and producing seven stout volumes of Hogwarts Follies in less than a decade. Expecto patronum, indeed. (Rowling then tried to get published anonymously in a different genre with predictable results. Finite incantatem.)
The Muse is a fickle mistress, even by cat standards. Most are taken to her bosom never, some occasionally. And a happy few are grasped in a relentless bear hug for reasons known only to the immortals. The joke back in seminary school was that if anyone told you they had read all of St. Augustine you know they are a liar. Leonardo da Vinci spent 1482 working as a military engineer in Milan, where he produced some 5000 drawings in a single year. The mathematician Paul Erdos published over 1500 papers, or about one every other week for his entire career, and that was in addition to thinking up real actual mathematics. (The bane of nonfiction is you can't just make up stuff, cold fusion and television journalism notwithstanding.)
Such mass production got me wondering. As in all things, there must be a pinnacle of musing. An apex, a zenith. And like all peaks, it beckons us to climb. We seek not a monarch but a monster, an author whose output is so prodigious as to be otherworldly. The Muse less Calliope and more face hugger, its bony phalanges holding fast to noggin, ovipositor feeding you a steady gruel of inspiration, pumping your gut to bursting so you best get a keyboard under your fingertips before the creative juices start spilling out via less socially-acceptable channels.
I refer here of course to Stephen King (St. Augustine is disqualified on the grounds of divine inspiration. Although I suppose Georges Simenon or Louis L'Amour would give King a run for his money).
It's strange to consider many will live and die and never know a year in which a Stephen King novel was not published. In that sense he is like the Simpsons, which started out as subversive social commentary and eventually became a permanent cultural fixture. A zombie cash cow, which now that I think about it sounds like something out of a Stephen King story.
Let's crunch some numbers. Wikipedia sleuthing has produced a page count of Mr. King's oeuvre, which allows us to tally his creative output (this is what passes for Labor Day fun at casa Kitty). Here's the data:
The number after each title is the page count of the work. Summing these, we find Mr. King has written 34,892 pages in the 41 years since Carrie's publication, which works out to 2.3 pages per day assuming my arithmetic is correct. That might not sound superhuman, but that's 2.3 pages a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, for over four decades. And that's not counting revisions and deleted scenes and unpublished works and essays and letters and grocery lists and book tours and having a life. This guy makes Tolkien look like Harper Lee.
Footnote: Truth be told, I'm not really a fan of Mr. King. I don't mean that as a criticism. Many people enjoy his work and that's fine by me. I suppose I simply no longer possess the capacity to be shocked. I've spent most of my adult life doing medical research. I've seen things that would make Stephen King curl into a fetal ball. If you really want to explore a world of the macabre, go have a look at what diseases of the nervous system do to people. It can happen to anyone, at anytime, and there's exactly nothing you can do about it. And the treatments are worse than the disease.
If there is a lesson here, and I guess there needs to be, it's that I'm worried about Stephen King. I don't really believe he writes 2.3 pages per day, the Word paper clip popping up to announce today's quota has been reached, upon which he sets his laptop aside and scampers off. Rather, I suspect he writes in a frenzy, agitated and focused, excising the drama within so to be at peace. Each sentence a torment until it is wrestled onto the page. Writing as an organic necessity, like a goldfish gulping for air at the end of an Alice in Chains video, mention of which will hopefully distract PETA lest they show up at my door with a bad look to them and rope.
Today not 2.3 pages, but 10 or 50 or 500. Desperate for another sting of the whip. Driving the story forward as far as it will go, until the Muse staggers backward blinking and exhausted and a little disgusted with herself. Never waiting for tomorrow, for tomorrow she might pick a new mount to savage.
After 35,000 pages and dozens of published works, he does not relent. After more awards and -- I shall be blunt -- more money than most authors dare dream, he does not relent. Why? Who knows. Perhaps we should not ask why. It is a question best left unanswered, a mystery best left unsolved. The truth might burn the sanity from your eyeholes, and then you would appear in Stephen King novel #55, maybe not as the protagonist but at least as a supporting character who gets killed off in the denouement.
Let us leave Mr. King's prodigious output as a silent exemplar. A monument of the possible. The next time you're whining about having to write a two-page double-spaced whatever or a stupid abstract for your dissertation, just remember: There's a guy who wrote more than that every day for 40 years, and he once got run over by a van. It's time for the rest of us to buck up.
Writer's block. Bête noire of the would-be author. Yet, one is also on occasion gripped with the logorrhea, a word sharing its root with a more visceral kind of spewage. An insatiable urge to write, for better or worse, an affliction no less painful than its noneffluent cousin. If you mouse around in the right margin you can find a 10,000 word primer on variational calculus, among other curiosities, which I mostly wrote in one sitting. Why? Who knows. Some people like to hear themselves talk; others like to read themselves write.
I'm told the pros, too, suffer these extremes. Hot and cold, yin and yang, ecstasy and agony. Writing is easy, Gene Fowler famously quipped. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. At the other end of the balance sheet we find J.K. Rowling writing Harry Potter in cafes and pubs and producing seven stout volumes of Hogwarts Follies in less than a decade. Expecto patronum, indeed. (Rowling then tried to get published anonymously in a different genre with predictable results. Finite incantatem.)
The Muse is a fickle mistress, even by cat standards. Most are taken to her bosom never, some occasionally. And a happy few are grasped in a relentless bear hug for reasons known only to the immortals. The joke back in seminary school was that if anyone told you they had read all of St. Augustine you know they are a liar. Leonardo da Vinci spent 1482 working as a military engineer in Milan, where he produced some 5000 drawings in a single year. The mathematician Paul Erdos published over 1500 papers, or about one every other week for his entire career, and that was in addition to thinking up real actual mathematics. (The bane of nonfiction is you can't just make up stuff, cold fusion and television journalism notwithstanding.)
Such mass production got me wondering. As in all things, there must be a pinnacle of musing. An apex, a zenith. And like all peaks, it beckons us to climb. We seek not a monarch but a monster, an author whose output is so prodigious as to be otherworldly. The Muse less Calliope and more face hugger, its bony phalanges holding fast to noggin, ovipositor feeding you a steady gruel of inspiration, pumping your gut to bursting so you best get a keyboard under your fingertips before the creative juices start spilling out via less socially-acceptable channels.
I refer here of course to Stephen King (St. Augustine is disqualified on the grounds of divine inspiration. Although I suppose Georges Simenon or Louis L'Amour would give King a run for his money).
It's strange to consider many will live and die and never know a year in which a Stephen King novel was not published. In that sense he is like the Simpsons, which started out as subversive social commentary and eventually became a permanent cultural fixture. A zombie cash cow, which now that I think about it sounds like something out of a Stephen King story.
Let's crunch some numbers. Wikipedia sleuthing has produced a page count of Mr. King's oeuvre, which allows us to tally his creative output (this is what passes for Labor Day fun at casa Kitty). Here's the data:
Novels
Carrie, 199
Salem's Lot, 439
The Shining, 447
Rage, 211
The Stand, 823
The Long Walk, 384
The Dead Zone, 428
Firestarter, 426
Roadwork, 274
Cujo, 319
The Running Man, 219
DT: The Gunslinger, 224
Christine, 526
Pet Sematary, 374
Cycle of the Werewolf, 127
The Talisman, 646
Thinner, 309
It, 1138
The Eyes of the Dragon , 326
DT II: The Drawing of the Three, 400
Misery, 310
The Tommyknockers, 558
The Dark Half, 431
DT III: The Waste Lands, 512
Needful Things, 690
Gerald's Game, 352
Dolores Claiborne, 305
Insomnia, 787
Rose Madde, 420
The Green Mile, 400
Desperation, 704
The Regulators, 480
DT IV: Wizard and Glass, 787
Bag of Bones, 529
Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon , 224
Dreamcatcher , 620
Black House, 625
From a Buick 8, 368
DT V: Wolves of the Calla, 714
DT VI: Song of Susannah, 432
DT VII: The Dark Tower, 845
The Colorado Kid, 184
Cell, 351
Lisey's Story, 528
Blaze, 304
Duma Key, 607
Under the Dome, 1074
11/22/63, 849
DT: Wind Through the Keyhole, 336
Joyland, 288
Doctor Sleep, 531
Mr. Mercedes, 436
Revival, 403
Finders Keepers, 434
Collections
Night Shift, 336
Different Seasons, 527
Skeleton Crew, 512
The Bachman Books, 692
Four Past Midnight , 763
Nightmares & Dreamscapes, 816
Hearts in Atlantis, 528
Everything's Eventual, 464
Just After Sunset, 367
Full Dark, No Stars , 368
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, 512
Novella
Riding the Bullet, 65
Ur, 61
Throttle, 47
Blockade Billy , 112
Mile 81, 80
A Face in the Crowd, 50
In the Tall Grass, 64
Non-fiction
Danse Macabre, 400
Nightmares in the Sky, 128
On Writing, 288
Secret Windows, 433
Faithful, 432
Others
Creepshow, 64
Six Stories, 199
Stephen King Goes to the Movies, 592
American Vampire, 200
Guns, 25
Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, 110
Carrie, 199
Salem's Lot, 439
The Shining, 447
Rage, 211
The Stand, 823
The Long Walk, 384
The Dead Zone, 428
Firestarter, 426
Roadwork, 274
Cujo, 319
The Running Man, 219
DT: The Gunslinger, 224
Christine, 526
Pet Sematary, 374
Cycle of the Werewolf, 127
The Talisman, 646
Thinner, 309
It, 1138
The Eyes of the Dragon , 326
DT II: The Drawing of the Three, 400
Misery, 310
The Tommyknockers, 558
The Dark Half, 431
DT III: The Waste Lands, 512
Needful Things, 690
Gerald's Game, 352
Dolores Claiborne, 305
Insomnia, 787
Rose Madde, 420
The Green Mile, 400
Desperation, 704
The Regulators, 480
DT IV: Wizard and Glass, 787
Bag of Bones, 529
Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon , 224
Dreamcatcher , 620
Black House, 625
From a Buick 8, 368
DT V: Wolves of the Calla, 714
DT VI: Song of Susannah, 432
DT VII: The Dark Tower, 845
The Colorado Kid, 184
Cell, 351
Lisey's Story, 528
Blaze, 304
Duma Key, 607
Under the Dome, 1074
11/22/63, 849
DT: Wind Through the Keyhole, 336
Joyland, 288
Doctor Sleep, 531
Mr. Mercedes, 436
Revival, 403
Finders Keepers, 434
Collections
Night Shift, 336
Different Seasons, 527
Skeleton Crew, 512
The Bachman Books, 692
Four Past Midnight , 763
Nightmares & Dreamscapes, 816
Hearts in Atlantis, 528
Everything's Eventual, 464
Just After Sunset, 367
Full Dark, No Stars , 368
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, 512
Novella
Riding the Bullet, 65
Ur, 61
Throttle, 47
Blockade Billy , 112
Mile 81, 80
A Face in the Crowd, 50
In the Tall Grass, 64
Non-fiction
Danse Macabre, 400
Nightmares in the Sky, 128
On Writing, 288
Secret Windows, 433
Faithful, 432
Others
Creepshow, 64
Six Stories, 199
Stephen King Goes to the Movies, 592
American Vampire, 200
Guns, 25
Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, 110
The number after each title is the page count of the work. Summing these, we find Mr. King has written 34,892 pages in the 41 years since Carrie's publication, which works out to 2.3 pages per day assuming my arithmetic is correct. That might not sound superhuman, but that's 2.3 pages a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, for over four decades. And that's not counting revisions and deleted scenes and unpublished works and essays and letters and grocery lists and book tours and having a life. This guy makes Tolkien look like Harper Lee.
Footnote: Truth be told, I'm not really a fan of Mr. King. I don't mean that as a criticism. Many people enjoy his work and that's fine by me. I suppose I simply no longer possess the capacity to be shocked. I've spent most of my adult life doing medical research. I've seen things that would make Stephen King curl into a fetal ball. If you really want to explore a world of the macabre, go have a look at what diseases of the nervous system do to people. It can happen to anyone, at anytime, and there's exactly nothing you can do about it. And the treatments are worse than the disease.
If there is a lesson here, and I guess there needs to be, it's that I'm worried about Stephen King. I don't really believe he writes 2.3 pages per day, the Word paper clip popping up to announce today's quota has been reached, upon which he sets his laptop aside and scampers off. Rather, I suspect he writes in a frenzy, agitated and focused, excising the drama within so to be at peace. Each sentence a torment until it is wrestled onto the page. Writing as an organic necessity, like a goldfish gulping for air at the end of an Alice in Chains video, mention of which will hopefully distract PETA lest they show up at my door with a bad look to them and rope.
Today not 2.3 pages, but 10 or 50 or 500. Desperate for another sting of the whip. Driving the story forward as far as it will go, until the Muse staggers backward blinking and exhausted and a little disgusted with herself. Never waiting for tomorrow, for tomorrow she might pick a new mount to savage.
After 35,000 pages and dozens of published works, he does not relent. After more awards and -- I shall be blunt -- more money than most authors dare dream, he does not relent. Why? Who knows. Perhaps we should not ask why. It is a question best left unanswered, a mystery best left unsolved. The truth might burn the sanity from your eyeholes, and then you would appear in Stephen King novel #55, maybe not as the protagonist but at least as a supporting character who gets killed off in the denouement.
Let us leave Mr. King's prodigious output as a silent exemplar. A monument of the possible. The next time you're whining about having to write a two-page double-spaced whatever or a stupid abstract for your dissertation, just remember: There's a guy who wrote more than that every day for 40 years, and he once got run over by a van. It's time for the rest of us to buck up.
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