Rolling Stone has posted their interview with Stephen King (rollingstone.com/culture)
The interview is interesting. King admits he still feels insecurity. He also admits that there is a cost to being "too political." King says he never liked Tom Clancy, not because of politics, but because he did not feel Clancy was a good writer. Keep in mind, Clancy is almost totally plot-driven, while King is character driven. However, King likes an author named Stephen Hunter, and he's a republican. So his taste in books and writing are not driven by his political views. Or, put another way -- you can read novels by someone you politically disagree with. (Sounds familiar to me)
Funny thing, King says he watched about half of the room 237 documentary and then got "impatient" with it. He also says he doesn't "get" the cult following that's grown up around Kubrick's version of the Shining.
Discussing his upcoming novel Revival, King said he's had the idea since he was a kid. He also noted that actually writing a book takes at least a year for him as it moves through various drafts. "I read this story called The Great God Pan in high school, and there were these two characters waiting to see if this woman could come back from the dead and tell them what was over there. It just creeped me out. The more I thought about it, the more I thought about this Mary Shelley-Frankenstein thing."
When asked if he is done writing the Dark Tower books, King said he's never done with the Tower. He then drops something of a Tower-Bomb by revealing "those books were never edited, so I look at them as first drafts." Really? King says the problem is in finding time to rewrite the books. He acknowledges, "There's a missing element – a big battle at a place called Jericho Hill. And that whole thing should be written, and I've thought about it several times, and I don't know how to get into it." I've been reading Dark Tower books -- and I agree with him. I like the novels, bu it does feel like there is more to be done.
The interview also covers familiar ground about addiction and how in the world King would churn out bestsellers while hooked on coke.
Discussing his best and worst novels, King fesses up that in his view The Tommyknockers is "an awful book." The problem? Well, he says there might be a 350 novel in there -- but it's 700 pages! That's insightful. I've thought for a long time King should give us a revised/smaller version of the book, just as he gave us an expanded version of The Stand.
King also admits that he does not like Dreamcatcher. That's a novel I also struggled with; even though the early pages were totally engrossing. But what is his favorite book? Well, it's another I can't get through! King chooses Lisey's Story. "That one felt like an important book to me because it was about marriage, and I'd never written about that. I wanted to talk about two things: One is the secret world that people build inside a marriage, and the other was that even in that intimate world, there's still things that we don't know about each other."
After discussing his struggles with organized religion, King spoke about his personal belief, stating, "Yeah. I choose to believe in God because it makes things better. You have a meditation point, a source of strength. I don't ask myself, Well, does God exist or does God not exist? I choose to believe that God exists, and therefore I can say, God, I can't do this by myself. Help me not to take a drink today. Help me not to take a drug today. And that works fine for me."
Asked if he wants to go to heaven, King replied, "I don't want to go to the heaven that I learned about when I was a kid. To me, it seems boring. The idea that you're going to lounge around on a cloud all day and listen to guys play harps? I don't want to listen to harps. I want to listen to Jerry Lee Lewis!"
As I read views on religion, I wonder -- who taught this guy? People on clouds? That's -- NOWHERE. Harps? He must have had like the worst Sunday School teacher ever.
Ahaha! People on clouds with the sound of harps......!
ReplyDeleteTwo things are worth observing about King and religion. The first comes from Douglas Winter's the Art of Darkness:
ReplyDeleteKing: Part of me will always be that Methodist kid who was told were not saved by work alone, and that hellfire was very long - the idea that the pigeon comes to polish his beak on the top of the iron mountain once every ten thousand years, and by the time that mountain is worn down, that's the first second of your stay in hell. When you're six or seven years old, that kind of stuff bends your mind a little. So it keeps coming back in my fiction. And the major reason, I think, is that most of the ideas expressed by Christianity - particularly the progression from the Old Testament ideas to the New Testament ideas - are morally valid.
"My religious feelings haven't changed very much over the years - they are as traditional as the stuff I write. I believe in God; I believe what I write when I say that I think that we live in the center of a mystery. Believing that there is just life, and that's the end of it, seems to me as primitive as believing that the entire universe revolves around the earth (Winter, 17, mass market paperback)".
The second thing to note is from King's notes to Just Past Sunset on his story Willa:
King: "I was raised as a perfectly conventional Methodist, and although I rejected organized religion and most of it's hard and fast associations long ago, I hold to the main idea, which is that we survive death in some fashion or other. It's hard for me to believe that such complicated and occasionally wonderful beings are in the end simply wasted...(King, 361, Hardcover)".
ChrisC