STEPHEN KING IS STALKING MY EVERY WORD
By Bob Vickrey                                                

Waco Tribune-Herald, July 22, 2012

Writer Stephen King pretty much claimed the horror genre as his very own in recent decades. However, the fright he gave readers in his countless novels was nothing compared to the terror he has inflicted on me in recent days.

I made the mistake of picking up his book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, and am now taking his rather savage abuse by his reminder that I’ve broken most of his rules of basic writing. He’s slapped me around pretty hard this past week, and I’m only halfway through the book. I feel like one of his victims in The Shining or Misery who can’t find an escape route from the clutches of their pursuer.

King recommends the classic book The Elements of Style as the true bible for writers. I’ve always felt like I’m maneuvering through a veritable minefield of potential grammatical traps in attempting to navigate the uncharted waters of Strunk & White’s seminal work. I’m quite sure I’m going to be punished for my habit of using overly-wrought prose. I can almost envision King’s ‘Grammatical Swat Team’ prowling my front yard any day now.

My defense is that I grew up reading William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe. Both Southern writers had the distinct tendency to ‘ham it up’ a bit when describing the flowery bloom on the garden rose bush. Wolfe would take a simple thought and turn it into a 50-word sentence.

King likes the simpler approach to writing. He likes short sentences. He likes them punchy. He probably wouldn’t appreciate my love of adverbs. He says, “While to write adverbs is human, to write “he said, she said” is divine.” (I could have gotten at least 20 more words out of that sentence!)

When I worked in the book publishing business, our company published best-selling writer Pat Conroy. He grew up in the South and has had an undying love of the English language since he was a kid. His mother read him stories long before he was old enough to read. His lavish use of the language is testament to the gift he was given as a young devotee of storytelling.

News legend Walter Cronkite once introduced Conroy at a banquet and described his prose as: “pearls that are strung together like a beautiful necklace.” Even a writer of Cronkite’s stature was seduced by the flowery language of the Southern writer.

The author of The Prince of Tides and Beach Music told the assembled crowd that his high school English teacher had been concerned about Wolfe’s effect on his writing. I’m quite sure that Stephen King would still be distressed over the author’s opulent use of the language, although legions of Conroy fans would wholeheartedly disagree. 

I’m quite certain that Mr. King would be a huge fan of my former Baylor professor and current journalism professor at the University of Houston, David McHam, who preaches the virtues of economically using words. On the first day of feature writing class, he hands out a copy of his favorite story to the new students. McHam’s short anecdote is about growing up in a small town in North Carolina:

R.E. Price was the editor of the local paper
He wrote about funerals.
Price liked the country church funerals the best.
He wrote about the hymns that were sung and what the minister said about the deceased.
The services often took up much of the day, oftentimes a Sunday.
Mr. Price almost always closed his stories the same way:
“Dinner on the grounds was served and a good time was had by all.”

Professor McHam had attempted to drive home a point to his students. Many of them left his class while scratching their heads over the sheer simplicity of the story. It appears that I missed the message on that particular day in his class years earlier. (Perhaps Conroy had overslept during his professor’s class that first day as well.)

So, I’d like to thank readers for slogging through my intolerably long Faulkerian sentences in my unflagging Quixotian quest to finish a simple thought. There, you see what I mean? Old habits die hard.

In the future, I’m hoping you will notice a difference in my writing. I’ll be brief. I’ll get right to the point. I’ll reel it in. I’ll be succinct.

That way, we’ll all feel like having dinner served on the grounds, and I’m willing to bet that a good time will be had by all.
 
Bob Vickrey is a freelance writer whose columns have appeared in several Southwestern newspapers including the Houston Chronicle and the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. He is a member of the Board of Contributors for the Waco Tribune-Herald. He lives in Pacific Palisades, California.