The new normal (or, "sell Christine time")

So anyone who’s familiar with me or my work knows how deeply important Stephen King has been to me as a writer and, secondarily, as a person. I learned to write by first reading and then writing (while continuing to read) and King, Gaiman, Pratchett, McKinley, and Dunnett — as the authors I devoured and re-devoured most often — have left clear marks on the storyteller I turned out to be.

Bear with me: this is going somewhere.

There are two things King does that resonate particularly sharply with me and those are creating character through voice and describing/explaining specific phenomena incredibly simply and completely. King can introduce you to a character and without lengthy description tell you everything you immediately need to know about them simply through their dialogue, and he has the widest range of voice I’ve ever read from a single author.

(I have some of that myself, but I can’t really yell about it: I got that one in the bag, the thing that makes you able to use dialogue alone to draw a picture. Probably it’s partly due to the fact that I gobbled up play scripts from a young age and spent a bunch of time in the theater: the idea of hanging an entire scene solely on the dialogue feels totally natural for me. I’m basically designed to be a scriptwriter, and it gives me huge amounts of pleasure to play with that.)

But what I want to talk about here is King’s way of describing and explaining a complex phenomenon or situation in the most accurate and memorable way imaginable. There’s two instances I’m going to highlight: a writing technique and a description of phases of existence.

The first is Can You? and the subsequent Misery’s Sister moment. In MISERY, King has his author protagonist considering how to make his story work. The protagonist, Paul Sheldon, remembers being a child and playing a game called Can You, wherein an untenable situation is described by the teacher and each child, sitting in a circle, has to try to figure out a way to save the hero, Careless Corrigan, from the peril he’s in. The teacher asks the rest of the group Did They? and if the majority of the class believes the student’s escape scenario, the onus passes to the next kid. Paul Sheldon has to play Can You with himself to save his life, and we get to see his logical sequence of ideas play out — and, crucially, we get to see the point where he has an idea and it clicks and suddenly he knows how the hell to get Careless to safety and the sheer fundamental glee of that moment comes across in the text so viscerally it makes me smile to think about. We get to see Sheldon realizing what if this other character was actually secretly RELATED TO MY PROTAGONIST AND THAT’S WHY SHE WAS BURIED ALIVE:

THE EVELYN-HYDE BABE IS MISERY’S SISTER! SHIT ON A SHINGLE! LOVE IT!

Anyone who’s ever been stuck on a plot point in the history of ever knows what that shit on a shingle moment feels like. It’s glorious. This is how I always describe my storytelling: there’s a horrible stretch of “I can’t win this Can You scenario” until suddenly there’s the Misery’s Sister flash of inspiration and off I go again.

So King can write about writing like no one else. He can also write about life.

In CHRISTINE, one of my perennial favorites, King describes the phases of a person’s existence. Forgive the lengthy quote: it illustrates my point.

“I remember reading somewhere — and I can’t remember who said it, or wrote it, for the life of me — that there are ‘times’ in human existence. That when it came to be ‘steam-engine time’ a dozen men invented steam engines. Maybe only one man got the patent, or the credit in the history books, but all at once there they were, all those people working on that one idea. How do you explain it? Just that it’s steam-engine time.”

LeBay took a drink of his soda and looked up at the sky.

“Come the Civil War and it’s ‘ironclad time.’ Then it’s ‘machine-gun time.’ Next thing you know it’s ‘electricity time’ and ‘wireless time’ and finally it’s ‘atom bomb time.’ As if those ideas all come not from individuals but from some great wave of intelligence that always keeps flowing…some wave of intelligence that is outside of humanity.”

He looked at me.

“That idea scares me if I think about it too much, Dennis. There seems to be something…well, distinctly unChristian about it.”

“And for your brother there was ‘sell Christine time’?”

“Perhaps. Ecclesiastes says there’s a season for everything — a time to sow, a time to reap, a time for war, a time for peace, a time to put away the sling, and a time to gather stones together. A negative for every positive. So if there was ‘Christine time’ in Rollie’s life, there might have come a time for him to put Christine away, as well.”

What does this have to do with me?

There have been several distinct phases of my life, some of them under my control and some decidedly not. Of the more recent phases — after college — most have been dull and endless and without a clear ending in sight. For the past decade and a half I’ve been doing things I don’t want to do in order to eat and sleep indoors: nine hours a day of doing something I didn’t want to do, in clothes I didn’t want to wear, working for a variety of people from truly lovely to extremely toxic, with no real hope of bettering my situation and no fall-back plan that would allow me to explore new options. I was stuck, and never anticipated being unstuck, and also — I thought mercifully — alone.

And then that changed. In the space of about a year and a half I signed with an agent, met an amazing woman, realized I was gay (36, folks, it can take a lifetime before you twig it), got a 3-book deal, got engaged, got optioned, had my fiancee move from Sweden to live with me, and realized that I didn’t have to be stuck. That maybe it was no longer business casual slacks from Goodwill and PayLess pumps time. That it could be a new time, or growing close to one.

And then my wife got a job in New Mexico, and I could — stop. I didn’t have to do the things I didn’t want to do. I could do what I wanted and still eat and sleep indoors. It was revelatory. We didn’t have to rely on my income to live. I didn’t have to have a 9 to 5 job. It’s the kind of luxury I’ve never been able to wrap my head around. I’d loved the Southwest since I was little — my family had spent several summer vacations in Utah and Arizona — and the idea of actually living there was astonishing after a lifetime spent in the muggy jungle of the eastern seaboard. I’d always found the stark, changeable, implacable beauty of the high desert to be wonderful. Granted, that had been a lot closer to sea level than Santa Fe, and I very quickly realized that I couldn’t do the kind of physical activity I’d been able to do in Maryland on account of there is significantly less air in the air at 7000+ feet than there is at sea level — but I adapted. Am adapting.

For me there has been live in the Northeast forever and ever and ever, drown in humidity, lush poison-green summers with fireflies rising out of the grass with the dusk, the sighing of cicadas everywhere time, and now there is live in the high desert where rain comes as a blessing and you cannot not run out into it and dance and laugh and smell the sweetness of the dry earth rising, every single storm time.

Ecclesiastes or King, Dylan or Roud #3, I am so very glad of it.