Stephen Koch

Well, I have taken one more step into the twenty-first century. I have a digital reader. (Mine is a Nook. But I could be talking here about any of them.)  I can’t let my own industry pass me by: the most recent royalty report from The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop shows that ten percent of reported retail sales were e-books!

So the MIP (Most Important Person) got my number once again when she gave me a kiss and handed me a Nook for Valentine’s Day. I have been using it for six weeks, and am ready to make a report. Several reports, in fact.

This is report number one, and it’s the simplest. I like digital reading. In fact, I like it very much. Moreover, I am doing a lot of it. I was born and raised in the pre-computer generation, so the gift I opened on Valentine’s Day felt rather futuristic, and a little spooky at first.  Those of us raised on Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World were trained to see the future as a threat to all that is best in people and culture. 

Six weeks later, the threat has vanished. Digital reading feels futuristic good, not futuristic bad. Writers! Cheer up! This is not the death of what we do! It is a revitaliation of the reading experinece, an expansion, splendid with possibility!  In future posts I’ll be talking about its good (and right, some not so good) effects, about how with it I read more, read with sharper focus, and—publishers note well—buy more books. 

Does it replace the printed book for me? Not even close. Does it supplement  the printed book? Very much so.  I am convinced that once this technology has been been assimilated, improved, and its possibilities grasped, it will the basis for a splendid new advance in literacy. 

More posts will be coming soon on my responses. For now, just one thought. If I were Warren Buffett, (and of course, Warren and I are just like two peas in a pod!), I’d be investing big-time in the supposedly dying publishing industry. Because a very strong digital wind is about to fill its sails.

Some readers of The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop have complained that the book is way too short on career advice. Well, I admit that’s true, but to be frank, maybe career advice should come from somebody with a different kind of career than mine has been.

I’ve recently read (absorbed)  Lee Child for the first time. Now there’s a career!  Here is a clip of the author of the Jack Reacher series giving what is, in my view, some of the soundest advice I’ve heard on what should go on between writers and publishers. Most of the interview is ho-hum: the life focussing remarks about success come in the last third or so. They are worth waiting for.

For anyone out there who was interested in this blog, I’m back. I dropped out many months ago, and for my return, I think I should explain why. After my last post—which was on Peter Hujar and Richard Avedon—I froze up partly because the next thing I had to say about Peter and Avedon was, uh, a little difficult. It was about Avedon, Hujar, and the very tricky subject of success.

But a factor that was every bit as important in my fade-out was that I had not yet mastered (or even grasped) the technique of the blog. I have written a book on the techniques of writing, but I didn’t have even a clue about how to write a blog.  Maybe I still done, but I do see—throught he fog—some basics: shortness, ease, relaxed connection, and most of all, speed.

In my last posts, the damn thing was taking way too long. The work was cutting into my other writing too much, and I was doing things—heavy, nuanced essays—that belong in other venues.

So—relaxed intimacy and speed, here I come. And to anyone who’s listening, you’ll be hearing from mt more often from now on.

When The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop came out, more than one reader asked me why on earth I’d said what I’d said about Stephen King. There was genuine bewilderment over my praise for King’s work. How could a highbrow such as myself, (a stereotype I did precious little to discourage), speak so respectfully about the author of Carrie?

 Well there’s a little story in there somewhere. As with many stories, there’s an official version and there is a more real, get-down version. Herewith, a chunk of the latter.

Sometime in the innocent days of 2000, just as I was coming up from my first plunge into the writing of The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop, I was strolling back to my tiny office from lunch when I spotted in Barnes and Noble’s window a huge stack of a new book called On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

By Stephen King.

I stopped. I stared. Then the still small voice within me murmured, “Well, shit. I’m writing my big opus on writing, and what happens? Before I’m even done with draft numero uno, Stephen effing King beats me to it, and his book is in Barnes and Noble’s window in a stack as high as the Tower of Babel.”

Now let me be clear. I had never read one single syllable by Stephen King. Nor did I have the slightest intention of reading one single syllable by him.  Ever. Why would I read Stephen King? I was a highbrow, remember?

But this? This was the competition. I had no choice but to read it. Right?

So with grinding jaw I acquired On Writing and began to read.

 I opened the book and sort of glanced in.  (”I’ll just skim,” I told myself.) Then King said something about being a kid who wildly wants to write, and it was just exactly like what it had been for me to be a kid who wildly wanted to write. Then he made me laugh out loud with a story about poison ivy. Pretty soon I wasn’t skimming any more. Or skipping one line. And then the universe began to jiggle a little around me. On the table, teaspoons were skittering to the edge all on their own, and clattering to the floor. The known world—my known world—was shaking on its foundations.

Because this man was getting it right. It was just plain right.  I had been working up close and personal with young writers for twenty years, reading their work, watching it take shape, confronting their typical problems, listening to their fears and hopes more times than I could count. And now….this celebrity, whom I thought unworthy of my attention, was getting the big things right again and again and again.

I was kind of dazzled, and it was kind of exciting to be dazzled. Troubling too, but undeniably exciting.

Clearly, I was going to have break down and read an actual novel by Stephen King.  Still pretty sure  this was just a passing fancy, an amusing aberration, an inexplicable, not uninteresting, but trivial ripple on my serene literary pond, I strolled into Barnes and Noble and almost at random picked up—because I had seen the movie, of course!—The Shining.

It happened that just then I was due to go to Hungary. Double Lives had been translated into that country’s magical and mysterious language, and I was told that it was doing well enough to warrant a trip across the pond. Even the Prime Minister—then Victor Orban—had read it and given copies to friends. It was in the news. It was selling.

So off I went. In Budapest, I gave some lectures and an interview, went to some wonderful book signings, did not meet his Excellency the Prime Minister, but was shown the city of my ancestors. (My father’s grandfather had been a Hungarian, active in the revolution of 1848, who fled to America when the Habsburgs were restored.) At one book signing, I met the descendants of Theodore Maly—one of the most moving and remarkable figures in modern espionage, about whom I’d written in Double Lives. It was all a lot of fun, and when it was over, I got on the plane wondering what am I going to with these eight plus very cramped hours? (I and six-foot two, and please do believe me, I feel every millimeter of my height crunched into a standard airplane seat.)

Then I remembered. The Shining was still in my shoulder bag. I’d been too busy in Budapest even to glance at it, but these eight hours were going to be wasted hours anyway. Right?

As the seat in front of me ground down my bones, I read every word of The Shining, and as the hours and chapters flew by, I saw more and more clearly that I was dealing with something—some kind of masterpiece—which I had no idea how to accommodate in my old ways of thinking.

By the time we landed in Kennedy, it was clear that my life—my literary life, and therefore my whole life—would have to change.

How it changed is another and longer story, for another time.

Slip me some truth serum, and I might confess what I see as the unseen flaw of every book I’ve ever written. Even though I work very hard on every one and invariably hand my publisher the very best I can do, I know in my heart that each book has its flaws. I even know pretty much what those flaws are.  Mind you, this is not an apology. I am plenty proud of my writing.

But perfection?  Even a book like The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop, which regularly revels in warmth of generous praise like this has …well, its special little secret. And so far, it seems only I know what that secret is. At least, not one of the book’s countless critics has guessed it so far. And now, even without any sodium pentathol in my Christmas martini, I’ve decided to reveal it now. So get ready, get set… revelation!

There’s a whole chapter missing from the book. It’s a major, mind-changing, indispensable chapter, about something that defines writers’ lives like nothing else, and it’s just not there. It never got written.  In fact, I never even contemplated writing that chapter until well after The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop was out and in the stores.

There is no chapter on the writer’s subject. Except for some passages in the chapter called “The Story of the Self,” the MLWW says next to nothing about the elephant in the room, the big, blunt question: What are you going to write about?

My only defense—and it’s a poor defense—is that I am not alone. My impression is that a failure to explore finding your subject matter is one of the most common shortcomings of writers’ workshops all across the country…very possibly including the one you’re in right now. Many writing teachers have precious little to say about the subject of subject, and that little is often not very helpful. All too often, the attitude seems to be that a writer’s relation to her or his subject should be intuited, found by magic, defined by some ineffable process that is beyond discussion. The real subject of art is lies…  um, within. Right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

In my experience, writers who start out with a firm grip on whatever turns out to be the right subject for them are in the minute minority. Gifted young writers are almost always in touch with their talent long before they have a clue about what they should be writing about. That is a very real problem, and young writers rarely get much help with it—including, I regret to say, from The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop.

I can’t provide the whole missing chapter of The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop in this blog, but I can get down some basic thoughts on the subject of subject. Some of my points will be obvious. Some are counterintuitive. One is controversial. All are important.

• You must have a subject. Neglect it at your peril. It is impossible and pointless to say you’re writing about “yourself,” or about “everything,” or about “whatever.” Almost always, the firmer your grip on your subject, the better your prose will be.
• You are not a subject.  You are a person. Even in a memoir, your story must be shaped by your relationship to people or things other than yourself, and they define your subject more than you do.
• Your subject must be interesting. And I mean objectively interesting, interesting to to you and the other people whom you have to make care about what you have to say. Your own interest alone is never enough. We are all interesting to ourselves. The path to subject is genre. And the path to genre is subject. No subject, including that “big story” you want to tell about your own life, will come alive until you find the right way to talk about it. That means, until you find the kind of story—the genre—you need to make it live.  The union of genre with subject is the way—the only way—things become meaningful on the page.

This last point is the controversial one. What I insist is the vital bond between subject and genre is a real table-pounder. Among writers, the issue of genre almost always starts some sort of argument—over commercialism, over modernism, over good and bad taste…it’s just endless. That’s why so many writing teachers shy away from the subject of subject.

No matter. You’ve got to face it. The living link between subject and genre is baffling and mysterious, but like many mysteries, it is also ridiculously simple once solved. And every writer must resolve it, usually more than once, in her or his own way.

I’ll be returning to the subject of subject here many times.

Until then, I hope you’re enjoying a good end-of-the-year glow. The Most-Important-Grown-Up and I and the teenager Angelica are currently visiting Grandma in Waltham, Massachusetts. We all celebrated Christmas quite happily, though I’m the only one also celebrated the Feast of the Nativity.

In church, I mean.

That’s because I’m the religiously observant one. Betcha didn’t know that! There’s real controversy for you.

And a good subject.