A friend had introduced me to King's Gunslinger series recently. Prior to that, I'd read Carrie, The Dead Zone, and The Stand, and decided I wasn't much of a Stephen King fan.
After working through the earlier books in the Gunslinger series, I came to these conclusions: 1. King is a better storyteller than he is a writer. His plots can be fascinating and compelling. Unfortunately he indiscriminately adds details about every thing including the kitchen sink, which can make the writing very hard to slog through. 2. People are far more interested in good storytelling than they are in good writing, hence King's (and many other popular authors') popularity. 3. People who are both good storytellers and good writers are worth gold. After reading Wolves of the Calla, I concluded that Stephen King has managed to learn something about good writing over the 40 years or so he's been writing. And I'm still not much of a Stephen King fan. As a writer, however, I do feel he taught me something. In the end, it's usually the storytelling that wins out commercially. Is that what wins out in the end to determine if a book is a classic? In part, yes. The other factor I think makes a classic is how well the author has pinned down basic human nature. I think Shakespeare was considered a hack in his day. But he knew human nature, and made sure we knew he knew it, and we still read him today. Many of today's classics, if written now, would make today's writing teachers cringe: Some contain sentences so full of modifiers and phrases it's sometimes hard to find the subject and verb. That doesn't stop people from loving them, because the human foibles they are about are still human foibles today. Amanda Just my two cents Maru (And no, I haven't read King's book on writing yet.) _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
