I started reading the new Stephen King last night. It’s early days – only another 700 pages to go – but right there on page 11 I came upon a paragraph that’s been hogging my attention for most of the day. The narrator Jake Epping is an English teacher. Here at the start of the book we find him marking student compositions:
The spelling in the honors essays was mostly correct, and the diction was clear (although my cautious college-bound don’t-take-a-chancers had an irritating tendency to fall back on the passive voice) but the writing was pallid. Boring. My honors kids were juniors – Mac Steadman, the department head, awarded the seniors to himself – but they wrote like little old men and little old ladies, all pursey-mouthed and ooo, don’t slip on that icy patch, Mildred. In spite of his grammatical lapses and painstaking cursive, Harry Dunning had written like a hero. On one occasion, at least.
Epping then goes on to talk about ‘the difference between offensive and defensive writing,’ and now I find I can’t stop thinking about precisely those categories, about Mildred and the icy patch, about how easy it is to fall into a way of writing that takes no risks. Or that doesn’t take enough risks, anyway. The pressure on writers to ‘succeed’ is so immense now. It’s easy to lose sight of what you were wanting to write about in the first place.
We should be writing like heroes. I think it’s good to keep that in mind.