What You Want?

Another book came in today.

My friends know that I love reading so they let me know if they have a book that they can lend me. Last night, a friend brought me "Night Shift" which is actually an old book by Stephen King. Yeah, they know, too, that I am into SK's books. So, to give me a background of what the book's all about, I read the introduction, not by SK but by someone named John D. Macdonald.

And here I quote him ( his reaction when people say: they want to write):

If you want to write, you write.

The only way to learn to write is by writing. And that would not be a useful approach to brain surgery.

Stephen King always wanted to write and he writes.

So he wrote 'Carrie' and 'Salem's Lot' and "The Shining,' and the good short stories you can read in this book, and a stupendous number of other stories and books and fragments and poems and essays and other unclassifiable things, most of them too wrteched to ever publish.

Because that is the way it is done.

Because there is no other way to do it. Not one other way.

Compulsive diligence is almost enough. But not quite. You have to have a taste for words. Gluttony. You have to want to roll in them. You have to read millions of them written by other people.

You read everyting with grinding envy or a weary contempt.

You save he most contempt for the people who conceal ineptitude with long words, Germanic sentence structure, obstrusive symbols, and no sense of story, pace, pr character.

Then you have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can meet.

A damn good piece of advice for me!