Why Stephen King Can't Write (according to some guy)

@Mckk and @daemon, you both make some pretty good points and I agree to an extent. Honestly, I like world building and learning more about the world so long as it doesn't distract. It'd be like reading Harry Potter and then suddenly reading about McGonnagal falling in love with a muggle only to break things off with him because of the Statute of Secrecy. It doesn't add to the narrative and only drags the story. But it's a fascinating bit of the character as well.
One of the things I love about Marvel comics is how they built their world. Spider-Man sees a different piece of the world than the Fantastic Four who see a different part of the world than the X-Men, but they all add to the world building. I think the best example of this is in Alias where the main character, a retired super hero, puts her unique perspective to the Marvel universe at large.

 

No, it's not. Neither is the opinion of anyone else. At the end of the day, an opinion is just an opinion. Sure, some opinions are more informed than others, but can anyone truly say that one piece of art is objectively better than another? I would argue no.

 

Haha, that's good enough for me.

 

Does that mean they aren't worth listening to? A closed mind gathers no thoughts.

 

He's Stephen King. He's in the position to say and write the hell he wants.
Agree with the guy on the overall, as I am almost persecuted for any word misuse/overuse. The story and
the number of words should go hand in glove with general understandability/readability. King's writing has become a monopoly on words and the way he uses them.

 

This pretty much sums up the argument for or against King in this thread.

 

King won that so hard I almost feel bad for Poe.

 

Poe could back is stuff up better, but yeah - I'm under no illusions King won that. He did have the last say after all.

 

I tapped out when the author admitted to not knowing what rank and file is.

 

I must confess that I tried very hard to read S.King as a teenager, and I failed to get myself entertained by any of his ...novels When I was 16 I saw them as pages upon pages of boring, repetitive, unprovoking, ultimately un-entertaining text which, mind you, has it's only proclaimed value specifically in being pure entertainment. I mean, King was supposed to be fun for the fun of it, entertainment for the sake of entertainment, with a clear "I-piss-on-high-brow-literature" attitude. And it bored me to death. I hated the aunt who bought me It - the book took up too much space on the bookshelf. And of course, if it failed to stir anything in my fledging young being back then, when it was still fledging and young, you can imagine how I feel about it three decades later....

Which all has nothing to do with the topic, but I just couldn't help myself from writing it I still find reading the dish-washer's instructions in Korean to be more entertaining than King.

But I also found the OP article uninspired and hardly informative. "Here's a paragraph, see how stupid it is?" Really? It seems like ever since H. Bloom expressed his disgust over King (rightfully, I must add) people who share his (our?) opinion think they "get it" and can point out so easily what's "wrong" with King's prose. I fail to see the point. Mainly because, as so many people (including the writer of the article!!) and including a load of previous posters LOVE to point out:

Which, of course, is a completely moronic argument that has nothing to do with the actual quality of those said millions of books - and the whole issue was quality in the first place. Are you really going to argue that BurgerKing food is better than organic vegetables because it sells better?

 

Not gonna lie, I'm trying to read Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, but it drags on and on about events that have nothing to do with the actual plot. Let me just sum it up. It's about Dan Torrance as an adult, and he must protect a young child, who also has the Shining, from a gang of paranormal killers (they use the Shining of children to empower themselves somehow...)

I'm on Chapter 4, and the kid is just learning about her powers. The actual protecting her from the bad guys hadn't happened yet. So far it's been about how Dan is struggling with his alcoholism and trying to get his life in order with a few scares here and there. Is this his usual style of writing? Build the world and the mystery before the big plot? Not that I mind, of course.

That said, there is a reason he's one of the most popular authors out there. Personally, who am I to say who can or can't enjoy Stephen King? It could be worse. It could be a marriage of Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey. I think I'll stick to my Stephen King, thank you. Of course, we could always wait for Stephanie Meyers to write the next book that takes the vampire-human love to its logical conclusion: in Romania on top of an ancient dragon perched on top of an ancient castle. With werewolves and vampires battling it out below.

 

It very much is his usual style. At least in the ones I have read. I myself like it very much.

 

It's a very interesting style, @Mike Hill . It'll take some time getting used to, but it's interesting.

 

I'm reading Different Seasons, his first collection of novellas, and to be honest - so far it's been a pleasant surprise. There is a lot of damn fine writing here actually.

I'm on to the second novella 'Apt Pupil', which I've not read until now. It's interesting.

 

I have to check that out. I have seen the movie of Apt Pupil. It was very good and I think avoided many problems King sometimes has with his stories.

 

So far I would recommend checking it out. What you said is true of the novella too, 'Apt Pupil' has been avoiding King's bad habits, so I have high hopes for it. The Shawshank story was very good - I noticed the film (which I love) changed a few things, and morphed characters together, but I know why they did that. So far it's been good, but I'm going to reserve ultimate judgement until after I have finished the collection.

 

So...who wants to bet there'll be a movie based off of Doctor Sleep? I imagine given how popular The Shining was, there'll be a hankering to make the sequel soon.

 

It's amazing how different the film of The Shining is to the novel. I actually think they are purposely two different worlds of each other in Kubrick's imagination.

 

Whoa - Harold Bloom wasn't too kind to King but I get what he's talking about - http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ed...les/2003/09/24/dumbing_down_american_readers/

 

I thought Shakespeare would lovingly appear in something written by Bloom. In all honestly, though, I like the man a lot: he was a fine critic worth reading; though he has a weird habit of giving perhaps too much praise to England's national bard in my opinion. He is even right on the money with both Stephen King my old arch-nemesis J.K. Rowling. If someone wants to tell me IT is some sublime masterpiece then they are going to get some rather choice words in response - one of which may be 'cretin'.

 

I have a love/hate relationship with Bloom. I enjoyed The Anxiety of Influence, but his Western Canon is full of dead white males. It gives me the impression that he isn't very well-read when it comes to contemporary literature and Eastern literature.

 

It's the Western Canon. It doesn't involve Eastern literature by definition. (This also explains the whiteness of the dead males.)

And of course the Canon is full of dead white males. White males wrote most of Western literature in centuries past, and they're dead now. I mean, back in the day there weren't very many female writers, so they don't make up much of the Canon. Also, Western literature goes back over two thousand years. Why would you think contemporary literature would make up much of the Canon?

White males wrote most of the books published in the Western world before, say, 1900. Just on a percentage basis, you'd therefore expect the Western Canon to be full of dead white males. If it were not, it wouldn't be Western and it wouldn't be a Canon.

 

And this is where we end up deconstructing the notion of "canon" and reminding ourselves that canon is meant to be a collection of books that happened to influence a lot of people in a specific culture, not a "top 100 best books of all time" list.

 

I must admit, I always have issues with the idea of the Western Canon being a load of dead white males. Sappho was a woman, and Homer we think may have been Turkish. The Bible and Torah (who deserve mention) were written by many authors, some of whom were from Africa and Asia, and the earliest Greek philosophy was also Asian and African. with Roman writers, not all of them were white.

'Dead white male' may be true of the English Canon (which was the lesson I learned when I tried to make my own canon list) but the Western Canon I am beginning to think should only include the writers that can claim to have inspired all of western literature, so any inclusion of a writer like Shakespeare is not going to be 100% truthful. To be honest, I think the 'Western Canon' should maybe end with Dante if I was feeling nice, or maybe end with the fall of Rome.

Also, yes again it applies to the English Canon. England is a cold country, where males have had most of the power over the long years of 'English' culture. (English as a language, not just focusing on England here).

 

I should have been more clear. He does include some Eastern literature (the Indian epics, for example), but I don't know why he even bothered. If his goal was to create a Western canon, why include them in the first place? On the other hand, if his goal was to include everything that inspired the Western canon, why not include more Eastern literature? For example, Western literature was influenced by the Persian poets of the Middle Ages, yet they're left out for some reason even though he includes some modern Middle Eastern poets. He makes some odd choices, that's for sure. That's actually another one of the criticisms I have. He states somewhere in the book that his goal is to create a list of essential writers, but he doesn't fully explain his choices. It's like he expects us to believe him based no his reputation alone.

What I was getting at is that minorities are way underrepresented. You don't see very man African American writers or even South American writers in his book (I seriously think there's only one African American writer on his list). He also focuses way too much on writers who wrote in English. This would be fine if he at least acknowledged this shortcoming, but he doesn't.

As for contemporary literature, it looks like I was wrong. He does have a good, proportional amount of it on his list.