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WorldCrafters Guild

Workshop: Theme - how to get away with anything. 

 

>>I've just started Stephen King's BAG OF BONES. The first line is fairly innocuous: "On a very hot day in August of 1994, my wife told me she was going down to the Derry Rite Aid to pick up a refill on her sinus medication"-- yet I felt drawn to keep reading. By the end of the first paragraph we know the narrator's wife is dead. (Well, we knew that from the jacket copy, if we read it.) Then he goes on to backtrack and describe how his wife died, with lots of mundane details about the town, the other people she encounters, and what she bought at the drugstore.

>>If I tried to do it this way, the editor who's publishing my werewolf novel would say, "Why are you telling us all this stuff?" and ask me to condense everything up to the accident itself into a couple of paragraphs. But King makes it all fascinating and un-put-downable. How does the man do it? HOW DOES HE DO IT?!

> >It's possible that King has a big enough reputation as a writer now so that editors accept his prose as written.

JL here:  I haven't read a lot of King, but it might be interesting to look at some of his earliest work and see if his above described style of  writing beginnings is there too.

I've seen him speak in person and on Television. I have not read BAG OF BONES -- and in fact never finished a Stephen King book all the way through because I just don't like horror. (but he CAN write -- he's a very very good writer -- I just dislike his topic and philosophy.)

However, I know how he does it and it's what I've been teaching you in the Workshop here.

THEME. The glue that holds those apparently unrelated bits of TELL together so you can't put it down is THEME.

I know this because I analyzed several of his books. I know this because I've heard him SAY it in person. I know this because I've heard him on television saying things to the non-writer audience that BESPEAK this. And he says it in such a way that even when not using the word "theme" -- someone who knows what I know about the place of theme in the structure of fiction knows what he's talking about even though the non-writer doesn't.

He has spent his entire youth studying THEME -- and one tiny subset of fictional themes, the horrors that give us the willies. He said that on a couple of talk-shows.

He has done with Horror exactly what I did with SF that produced S~G.

He addressed an underlying ASSUMPTION using thematic anaylsis. And his thematic analysis is RIGHT ON the general public's buttons.

That's how he does it.

Stick with this workshop and you will do it too. JL