Happiness. It's relative.
Yesterday I returned a book to the library that I bought on Amazon a few weeks ago. It was Stephen King’s Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. I returned that book along with another by Sue Monk Kidd about Jesus’ wife called The Book of Longings. That one really was a library book.
Some might make a symptom out of this unintentional return to the library of a book I own. Or owned. Actually, one could make a case that I just gave the book to the library and now it’s theirs. It went from being owned to being a gift. It’s hard to regard that as a bad thing.
No matter. The point of talking about it at all, other than to come clean about this weird mistake and thus, somehow, negate it as a sign of declining capacity, is to say that I used Stephen King’s narrative device in a story I just wrote called “Margaret’s Billy.”
This is my fourth story. My little lane change from nonfiction to fiction has been very slow, like a beginning driver who keeps her turn signal on for ten miles before creeping over into the next lane. I have been stuck on the fourth story for weeks – not having a premise or characters or setting or anything. And then it came to me. Shawshank Redemption. Tell the story like Stephen King tells it in the book – a savvy narrator who sees it all but is fascinated by the main character, watches the main character, and tries to figure out what makes that person tick.
I just finished the story. It ends with a mystery which I like. I don’t like everything to be neat and straightened up at the end of a piece. ‘Left hanging’ is the feeling I’m aiming for in a lot of my writing. Often, it’s because I don’t know myself how something should end up, usually it’s because everything in my life has always been unresolved, pending, or, better said, evolving.
Anyway, I like this story, “Margaret’s Billy,” an awful lot and I have Stephen King to thank for helping me get off the dime.
Jan, I love this post. Reminds me of a successful author (??) who guested recently on Stephen Colbert’s show. Asked about his writing mode, the author said (paraphrased) — “I start out with a clean idea and then let my characters take over. They lead me to a conclusion that I often don’t see in my original conception”. In other words, writing fiction can be a mysterious, uncertain journey. Just let your characters lead you down that yellow brick road. I hope all’s well, Jan. (I haven’t read “Shawshank” but just saw the film and, yes, I loved it and wondered why I’d avoided it for years.)
Hi Jan, so no I really want to read your story! Are you going to post that or we just going to have to drool and be frustrated!
Hi Barbara! Thanks for wanting to read it. I’m still deciding what to do with it. 🙂
I’d never read Shawshank either but then made a crazy resolution to read all of Stephen King which, right away, is ridiculous. Also working on 11/22/63 which might take the rest of my natural life. 🙂
Jan, I loved “11/22/63”. Some of his narrative reads like prose. So beautiful. I’m not a die hard King fan but have also enjoyed his memoir about growing up a Red Sox fan and visiting iconic (overused word, yes!) ball parks. Thanks, again, for this post.