In his pitch perfect account of the writing life On Writing, Stephen King tells us that ‘people love to read about work.’ I for one agree with him, and it’s precisely this kind of detail in King’s stories – pages and pages on what it’s like to be a lawyer, a truck driver, a hotel manager, whatever – that makes them so alive, so present. One of my favourite King tales is the novella ‘Dolan’s Cadillac’, the lead story in the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes and a wonderful variant on Poe’s perennial theme of premature burial. I have it on audiobook – I love to listen to King while I’m cooking – and must have heard it twenty times. I know whole sections by heart but I’m still not bored with it.
It’s perfectly plotted and as a ‘revenger’s comedy’ there’s not a word out of place. But what keeps me coming back is the stuff about the Nevada Highway Department and RPAV and how to hot-wire a front end loader. The minutiae and office politics of someone else’s trade. Writing like this reminds us not just that everyone has a story to tell, but that anything can be a story if we can only tell it well enough.
I’ve spent the past couple of days stripping the walls of a large quantity of woodchip wallpaper. Performing an arduous physical task for eight hours straight leaves you with aching shoulders and blistered hands and a lot of time to think about whether there might not be a story in it. If I was a proper horror writer I’d have no trouble coming up with a plot involving a steam-powered wallpaper stripper. (Dangerous things, those steam hoses.) As it is – and as in King – it’s the process that fascinates me. the ingenuity of the human mind to invent such a thing, the small miracles of everyday physics. There is a story in it, certainly, and I intend to start writing it as soon as I’ve finished the damned woodchip stripping.
Looking out of the window while I waited for the umpteenth tank of water to start boiling it occurred to me that I was actually living on the set of one of my own stories anyway….
