I’ve been thinking a lot about your multiple requests for my story title, and I think a way for me to keep the give-and-take balanced—to genuinely pay homage to Mr. King while also sharing some details about my writing—is to tell you in more detail what I meant when I said Mr. King's descriptive writing style had a tremendous effect on me.
I’ll begin by confessing that I've not read the majority of his work, and aside from "On Writing," I've not read anything of his lately. But (and this ‘but’ is a big one), I believe I read just enough of his work to impact my life forever.
In my opinion, Mr. King writes by putting a spell on his words so that they don’t just permeate my brain through my eyes, they entrance me through every sensory means. His words reach my nervous system through my fingertips, as if I’m wearing Polly Chalmer’s kid gloves from “Needful Things” over my own gnarled knuckles. His words pulse on my eardrums as if I’m hearing the tapping of the nail of “The Moving Finger” while it ascends the drainpipe of my own bathroom sink. I breathed in his words in “Head Down,” and I relive the experience of this non-fiction story every time I smell a dewy grass, an earthy infield or the cakiness of a chalk line. Probably the most impressionable vision that Mr. King conjured for me was the lump on the back of Ardelia Lortz’s neck in “The Library Policeman.” I can see that lump as if I’ve been looking at it on the neck of a bitter, surly, lopsided old aunt my whole life.
If I could place a magical selection of words on a page in an order that creates this kind of multi-sensory reaction in a reader, I would feel completely fulfilled. The best little passage that I feel I’ve written thus far comes from a short essay I published about the days leading up to my mom’s death. This is the one place where I think I’ve come closest to Mr. King’s wizardry—admittedly, I’m still quite the amateur. My mom had been on a respirator for a few days, and this is how I described my most emotional night after being by her side at the hospital for another full day:
“That Saturday night, when I returned home from another long day at the hospital and after my sons were tucked into bed, I told my husband I was going to bed myself. As soon as my head hit the pillow, the emotions overwhelmed me: the pain of watching my mom suffer this way, the guilt of knowing that she didn’t want to die like this, and the dread of knowing that death was near to her. I cried and wailed and flailed and then gasped for air because I didn’t want to breathe or think or feel anything. I wanted to save her by making her live; I wanted to save her by letting her die. I wanted to die, to escape.”
Anyway, that’s what I would share with Mr. King himself, if that hypothetical “name five famous people who would you have lunch with” opportunity ever came true for me.
Thank you again for your kindness and encouragement. I’ll end with my favorite quote from “On Writing”—his statement that is the pillar on which I strive to stack every word: “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
. Sincerely, I didn't come here for self-promotion--really just to say 'thanks' to my muse.
sorry, had too.
