Cry, the Beloved Stephen King

(This was originally written for the "Celebrity" issue of the Los Angeles pop-culture zine Ben is Dead. Unfortunately, Darby ended up losing the article and it never ended up running!)

First, a bit of background on me, so you'll understand my story.

I am a writer in Chicago, a writer mostly of novels. I work very hard at my writing, and I hope one day for it to be paying all of my bills and then some. Of my novel writing, I have four books completed and one in print; a fairly simple, fairly populist love story called Dreaming of Laura Ingalls.

Of the people who have read Dreaming of Laura Ingalls so far, there has been a general trend of reactions. My other literary friends, the ones who also take their writing very seriously and who also hope to someday be making a full living from it, tend to like my novel but generally feel like it's missing something, that it's not quite up to the standards of what we as a group enjoy reading. And of my other friends, the ones who either can't or choose not to pursue a career in the creative arts, I have had some fanatical reactions to the novel. I have had various people over the last year and a half that I was first giving out, then selling, the novel, come up to me teary-eyed, clutching my shirt and yelling, "That was one of the most amazing fuckin' books I've ever read! You made me cry, right there on the el, in the middle of public!" I don't tell you this to boast, and certainly this has not been everyone's reaction. I just tell you because this reaction is important to know if you wish to understand my story.

These two reactions, understandably, worry me. As a "man of letters," whatever that might mean, I like to think that the people who create things that I respect, who write the things that make me cry and laugh and who read the things that I read and enjoy, will hopefully enjoy my books. I hope that these people will see the inherently good things that I myself see in my novels. And even though I certainly enjoy the friendship I have with this other group of people and even though I respect their opinions and their judgment values, the fact that they are fanatical about the book and my other friends find it lacking makes me feel, understandably, like a bit of a hack. It gives me a dreadful worry that I cannot separate for myself the good and bad things in my writing, and that I am destined to be a John Grisham or a Stephen King, writers alternately derided by educated, literary people and worshipped by the general populace.

So.

One of the other types of writing that I do besides novel writing (and the kind you're reading now, personal essay) is short work written expressly for public performance -- monologues, mini-theatre, slam-style poetry, etc. Not only have I been having some success in this realm as well, but Chicago has what I believe to be the largest spoken word scene in the country right now (fourteen different open mics a week, plus the nation's first poetry slam, still running for eleven years now). As a result, I go to a lot of spoken word events in town.

A couple of weeks ago, right when I was asked to write this article and was trying to decide how exactly I was going to write on the topic of "Celebrity," I went to a spoken word event with the theme "The Prom." About the middle of the evening, a woman got up to read, a refugee from the heady early-eighties "goth" scene of Chicago, a scene that was extremely overwhelming to this town (for those who don't know, Wax Trax! was headquartered in Chicago in the eighties, and was the birthplace of bands like Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Thrill Kill Kult and, indirectly, Nine Inch Nails). There is still a large contingent of ex-gothers in Chicago, refusing to let go of their dream, even as their wrinkles become more and more apparent under their Siouxie makeup and their potbellies start showing under their skin-tight "Bauhaus" t-shirts. But this is another story for another time.

This woman on the stage was dressed (as can be guessed) in a ripped black prom dress, black-and-white striped stockings, and full face makeup. She started reading her story, a first-person "inside the head" account of a prom gone horribly wrong, when it started becoming apparent that what this woman was actually relating was what may have been going through Carrie's mind, of Stephen King's first novel, Carrie, during the fateful prom scene where she was jokingly elected Prom Queen, a bucket of animal blood was dumped on her, her telekinetic powers got away from her, and she killed her entire graduating class.

This fact would be one thing by itself. But now add to this the ferocity of the woman's relating of this story, the emotion and power and intensity of her performance, culminating in her actual crying -- physical crying -- on the stage when the bucket of blood was "poured."

My first reaction -- as I imagine many of yours would be -- was a inward shaking of my head, rolling of my eyes, and a thought somewhat along the lines of "Jeezis Christ. Fuckin' Stephen King." I would be lying if I said that this is not my first general reaction when someone tells me, by words or by action, what a big fan they are of these types of writers. It wasn't until later in the week, spending yet more time trying to figure out what I was going to write, that the full implications of my action hit me, how it relates to my upbringing, and how it relates to the problems of my own writing.

I now feel like it was wrong for me to have this kind of reaction that I did. And I feel like I'm never going to be able to appreciate my own writing, and what I obviously am subconsciously trying to achieve with it, until I come to grips with it. The rest of this article is an explanation why.

"Yeah, I worry about getting really successful because I might, uh, sell out or something." -- Leonardo DiCapprio, 1996 interview

Another fact to know about me is that I recently bought my first Macintosh, a Powerbook 1400cs (that absolutely kicks ass and proves why every Windows machine ever built should be burned in a giant bonfire one fine spring day in Lawrence, Kansas -- but again, I digress). One of the first things I did when I received my new computer was spend about a week sorting through and organazing the 150-odd floppy disks I had collected over the last eleven years that I have been using Macintoshes -- in school, at work -- determining what was on some of these old, old single-sided 400K disks and what was worth keeping.

It was a really enjoyable process, digging through my old writing, and one that I recommend to everyone. It was fun to watch my writing progress, to laugh at the horrible quality of some of my pieces, to marvel at the relevancy of others. One of the things that I found was an essay I wrote called "Why Can't Johnny Gaze?" from a chapbook I published in college called One Slacker's Confessions It related to my major, which was fine-art photography, and talked about the problems inherent in contemporary art and how it relates to the common society. Here are a couple of quotes:

"I, and most people who study or make art, tend to believe that a necessary part of the rise of a civilization is the profession of aesthetically challenging the public into thought -- in other words, contemporary art is one of the things that separates us from a Spartan society. Perhaps if a nationwide art history program had been in place years ago, we would not have the problems of today, like the continuing NEA disasters fueled by conservative senators, or the widespread crisis over funding for the local arts."

"...part of the solution is to get art out of the elitist grey-walled galleries in the ivory towers, and out onto the streets where it belongs."

Pretty fiery stuff, I know, but I was young.

My point is that my philosophical ideas about art and creativity mattered to me then, and still matter to me now. It's important for me to know that I'm not compromising my ideals, even as they subtly shift as I get older to recognize the ever-broader and more complex views I form about the world around me. It's still important to me that I try to live my life in the small ways that compliment my philosophy about how to be a good person -- I try to buy my books at independent bookstores; I try not to watch over ten hours of television a week; I try to support young artists and young entrepeneurs whenever possible; and on and on.

And yes, I still believe that the best place for contemporary art to exist is on the streets, in the hands of the people who have not devoted their lives to studying or practicing the fine arts themselves. This is where the arts are the most exciting, the most relevant, and is the best place for these creations to make a difference and profoundly affect people. If I believed otherwise, I wouldn't be such a big proponent of reading and writing for zines and open mics, but instead just concentrate 100 percent on my novel writing.

However... when I first adopted this school of thought, it was when I was still very young, artwise. I was young enough to believe that everyone would naturally love me, that everyone who came in contact with my work would naturally see the profoundness involved and fawn over it for that reason. With this attitude, it's easy to theorize exactly where and how you wish your work to be shown.

Now I am a little older and just the tiniest bit wiser, and I understand more complexities about life. I understand that not everyone is going to love you, that indeed, some artwork you create for the street level is precisely the opposite of what many academics and fellow creators would like to see you do.

The question I face now is how to reconcile this conflict, how to write things that an average reader likes while it still being appreciated for the intelligence and subversity that I know is there. And I'm not sure exactly how to do that. But Stephen King, and our post-goth reader, have given me a clue.

"Once I create a piece, it leaves my control. It becomes its own being." --Cindy Sherman, 1992 interview

Is this article insulting? I'm not sure. I just stopped right now and read through the whole thing so far, and realized that I'm not getting my point across very well. For that, I apologize.

What I mean is that there's nothing wrong with being a non-literary person. It doesn't mean that you're an idiot or that somehow your opinion means less than mine. There are certainly many, many subjects that I don't know a single thing about, not even the fundamentals, yet are subjects I deal with on a daily basis. And when I may like a certain car I see on the street, usually because "hey, man, look at that car! That car looks fuckin' cool!" it does not take into account the car's engine, its fuel economy, its safety record or any of those other things that you must be educated about to know. My opinion on cars, to expand this example, has little or nothing to do with any educated, qualified criteria for judging a car. But this doesn't make me an idiot about life in general -- just uneducated about cars.

So. You have an enormous amount of people in this country who are not highly educated about the subtleties and nuances of literature -- the sense of metaphor in a story, proper grammar, the complexities of marrying good character development with believable plot -- yet these same people do a lot of reading. And there are certain things that they like, and certain writers that they like, and certain reasons why they like these writers.

A friend of mine in Chicago made a very astute observation about me once. He pointed out that the two main creative outlets in my life so far -- photography and writing -- are both endeavors that are not strictly fine-art, yet can both be used for that specific purpose. That is, unlike sculpture or oil painting or calligraphy, both photography and the written word are used for many boring, day-to-day, "street level" things, everything from crime photos to vacation shots to the very base level communication that we as humans have.

He thought it interesting that, as someone who has such a philosophical ideal that I do about breaking out of the ivory tower, I would choose these distinctly non-elitist forms of creativity to work in. He thought it said a lot about how much I still hold this issue to my heart.

I suppose he's right. And it makes me wonder -- if the whole reason I'm creating work is to try to find relevancy to the general public, than why am I so worried when I prove myself successful at doing precisely that? And why do I roll my eyes when someone mentions Stephen King, the one human being that's done more towards getting Americans to read than perhaps any other individual in the entire twentieth century?

"Who's that?"

"That's Such. He's a singer or something in real life."

Real life, Claire thought. I wonder what I am in real life.

--Kristin McCloy, Some Girls

I suppose I roll my eyes because I can see the flaws. I can see the problems in these books and want to tell the people around me, "Don't you see this plot hole? Can't you recognize this flimsy attempt at character development? Don't you understand this cheap cliche the author's using to get out of some hard work that a better author would do here? Don't you know how many better writers there are out there?"

But this is not my place, really. One of the basic rules of bringing artwork to the street level is then letting the general public decide what they like and don't like. If I was to stand up and declare, based on my own opinion, what is "good" literature and "bad," then I'd be just as bad as the opinionated ivory tower people who I'm trying to separate myself from.

Not to mention, it's not entirely horrible literature, either. I have been known to enjoy a Michael Crighton book on a lazy Saturday. I found John Grisham's The Firm highly entertaining and really compelling. And when I recently re-read King's The Shining this spring, anticipating the arrival of the new mini-series, I found the experience just as creepy and scary and nightmare-producing as the first time I read the book, back in high school, and got all creeped out and scared and had nightmares to begin with.

So no, let's not deride these authors for being celebrities. They produce work that people want and enjoy. It lets the population think and be entertained and actually use their fucking brain, which less and less of our entire popular culture is letting us do these days. It is these authors who are continuing the tradition of The Popular American Contemporary Novel. And for those who don't know, the entire concept of a 'novel,' of one story that is long enough to make up an entire book by itself, is only a little over one hundred years old and would have never have become popular in the first place if not for the insatiable reading habits of those pesky Americans.

And in turn, I will try to not worry about whether the "literature" scene enjoys my work. I will be glad if they do, it will flatter me... but, really, once I think about it, I'm not really writing for them. I'm writing for that one person, that one who is across the el from me on a Tuesday morning, making their way to work with their business suit and their tennis shoes, their carryall slung over their shoulder as they make their way to the Loop. I watch her reading my book, without her knowing that I'm watching her read the book that I've written. And, suddenly, out of nowhere, I watch her put her hand to her cheek, totally engrossed in my novel, and a tear drops from her eye.

Hell yeah. That's who I'm writing for.

Copyright 1996, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved.