Stephen King Couldn't Write This

Writing fiction is controlling all the characters in a made-up world where obstacles are met, and hopefully overcome. It is an exercise in imagining situations and working your way through them with all of the flaws of the human existence thrown in for good measure.

I've always found that writing fiction is actually an exercise that leaves me feeling exhausted, but thrilled to have taken the ride. Reading fiction is somehow just as freeing and I've done that since I learned how to comprehend what I was looking at. I've read everything from Steinbeck to Stephen King and back again. As luck might have it, I'm reading Stephen King right now - Duma Key - one that slid by me a couple of years back.

As I've read this one, I thought about the fact that King had suffered a horrible accident back a couple of years when he was hit by a car, whose driver was supposedly trying to restrain a dog. I can remember thinking that even he couldn't think up such story, but somewhere along the line it occurred to me that the idea that truth is stranger than fiction is actually dead-on.

There have been times in the last five weeks when I've felt like one of the characters in something I've written, where the true emotions and horrible truths are no longer hidden from view. I've watched true heroes emerge and unsettling matters arise. I've wondered about character, and faith, and misery and doubt. I've wrung my hands trying to rid myself of the petty fears and immature thoughts and all the while I've wondered why we live like we do for the majority of the time.

Yet when you are trapped within the confines of a nightmare that is too ghoulish to even consider, you find yourself tripping back to a story written long ago. A story of great suffering and misery, but one that hopefully ends in a spirit of growth.

Every fiction writer worth his weight has found a starting point, and moved his characters through to a resolution of sorts. The end of the story is established well before the beginning is even complete. The middle part is the difficult aspect of the journey as the writer tries to figure out how to get his character through the disturbing aspects of his life.

I feel like I'm smack dab in the middle.

Midway through a story that even Stephen King wouldn't try to write.

Comments

Rosie said…
and we're all praying for a happy ending...for Jeff, you, and all the Fuzzy's.

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