stephen king: the archeologist

Around five years ago, I belatedly decided that I wanted to be a professional writer. Like the terminal impostor syndrome patient I am, I sought out the closest things I could find to instruction manuals on the topic. It is in this effort I discovered Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I had read King’s work before, and was obviously aware of his immense cultural footprint, but I couldn’t say I was greatly influenced by him until I had read this book.

On Writing has more than earned its cultural status. I have rarely met a fellow writer who has not read it, and one of the reasons for this is that King is unflinching in his depiction of the reality of being a professional writer. It is, as the title says, a memoir of the craft, and as such King is focused on the technical and structural aspects of writing. This makes sense, as King was forged in the fires of the pulp fiction sphere of the sixties and seventies, and is aware of the practical realities of writing professionally: first among them being that your deadlines aren’t going to wait for you to find your muse. He is laser-focused on the simple task of getting words onto paper, and the book is structured around how to do this frequently and consistently.

The most potent piece of advice that King has to this end is what I have come to call his archeological theory of creativity, which I’ll allow him to describe in full:

When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Mark Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories aren’t souvenir teeshirts or GameBoys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.

In the years since I have read the book, I have thought about this quote extremely often. At first glance, it’s a straightforwardly useful piece of advice. Every writer I’ve met has had the experience of staring vacantly at a blank page and feeling all their mental faculties come to a grinding halt. It is extraordinarily difficult to look at an empty space and tell yourself to generate something from nothing. It sometimes feels like a task reserved for the divine, and not something within the ability of mere mortals.

But King takes a novel approach to this problem. He basically concedes the point — admits that it’s impossible to create something from nothing — but as he says this is because stories are not wholly unique, one-of-a-kind marvels springing from the minds of world historic geniuses. Instead, they are discovered, found, and excavated. “Creativity” is a misnomer. There is only synthesis.

It’s in this assertion that the writer’s sole “job” is discovery rather than creation where we find the larger implications of King’s idea. As he says, even the journalist interviewing him found the notion so alien that even the interviewer refused to believe that a man of his stature would believe it. But the interviewer’s reaction isn’t all that surprising when you consider that at least in America we are absolutely overwhelmed by “Great Man Theory” propaganda in every part of our lives. From the very first moment we begin to learn about our society, it is through the lens of the cults of personality built up around the stables of statesmen and industrialists we’re made to worship — the Founding Fathers, Carnegie and Rockefeller, and more recently the cyclical waves of rabid obsession around Silicon Valley elites.

This obsession with the individual’s contribution is not unique to politics or industry. Steamboat Willie entered the public domain two weeks ago at the time of writing. This was notable in part because Steamboat Willie was due to fall into public domain in the 90s, but Disney and other cretinous IP holders embarked upon an unprecedented crusade to get Congress to kick the ball down the road. Presumably, the poor disenfranchised stockholders wouldn’t make it through the winter without the exclusive right to hawk Mickey Mouse plushies for another few decades. The motivation of Disney and the other IP holders is obviously primarily financial, but there is a second, philosophical assertion underneath: creativity is an entirely internal exercise. In their world, “synthesis” is a misnomer. There is only theft.

In a world where creative works are seen first and foremost as individualized property, King’s courage to tell the truth about the reality of creation — that it is a process of drawing upon the entire legacy of mankind — so remarkable. It’s an admittance of humility, and an acknowledgement that our idea of the “derivative” is arbitrary, and formed by assumptions given to us by ideology, rather than intuition. Great artists don’t “steal” — they unearth the fossils their forebears rightfully gave them, and leave their own behind for the ones that come after.