Unit 8.1 DB: The Writing Process

Doug McLean
Stephen King brings us two new novels in 2013 — one on
shelves already, and the other forthcoming. In June,
Joyland was published by Hard Case Crime, an imprint
showcasing classic and contemporary crime writers in
paperback editions dressed up like vintage pulps: Stylized
covers feature ominous taglines, brooding private dicks,
and draped-out femme fatales. Though Joyland’s story is
haunted by a terrifying killer of young women, the book
mostly chronicles the yearning rhythms of one adolescent
summer — carny talk and plushie toys, boardwalks and
broken hearts. In The New York Times, Walter Kirn aptly
compared the book to a fair ride — it’s brief, thrilling, and
sweetly quaint.
ADVERTISING

King’s second book, Doctor Sleep, which will be published
in September by Scribner, is everything Joyland isn’t. On
his website, the author calls it a "return to balls-to-the-wall,
keep-the-lights-on horror." This long-awaited sequel to
1977’s The Shining revisits traumatized child psychic
Danny Torrance — he goes by Dan, now — all grown up and
still struggling to understand his frightening gift. "It’s a
good book, a scary book, but I wonder if some people won’t
like it as much as the original," King told me. That book’s
pre-Kubrick readers are 35 years older now. "I can hear
everyone saying, ‘That wasn’t so scary. The first one really
scared me," he said. "Well, that’s because you read the first
one when you were 13 fuckin’ years old, hiding under the

covers with a flashlight!"
When I asked him to share a favorite passage for this series,
King couldn’t choose between two favorites; both, we
noticed, were first sentences. So, he analyzed both his
choices as part of a broader discussion about opening lines
— a topic not addressed at length in his memoir-as-craftmanual, On Writing. King paid tribute to Douglas Fairbairn
and James M. Cain, looked back on favorite intros he’s
written, and explained how he approaches a book’s first
moments. Stephen King spoke to me by phone from his
home in Maine.
Stephen King: There are all sorts of theories and ideas
about what constitutes a good opening line. It’s tricky thing,
and tough to talk about because I don’t think conceptually
while I work on a first draft — I just write. To get scientific
about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar.
But there’s one thing I’m sure about. An opening line should
invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen.
Come in here. You want to know about this.
How can a writer extend an appealing invitation — one
that’s difficult, even, to refuse?
We’ve all heard the advice writing teachers give: Open a
book in the middle of a dramatic or compelling situation,
because right away you engage the reader’s interest. This is
what we call a "hook," and it’s true, to a point. This
sentence from James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings
Twice certainly plunges you into a specific time and place,
just as something is happening:
They threw me off the hay truck about noon.

Suddenly, you’re right inside the story — the speaker takes a
lift on a hay truck and gets found out. But Cain pulls off so
much more than a loaded setting — and the best writers do.
This sentence tells you more than you think it tells you.
Nobody’s riding on the hay truck because they bought a
ticket. He’s a basically a drifter, someone on the outskirts,
someone who’s going to steal and filch to get by. So you
know a lot about him from the beginning, more than maybe
registers in your conscious mind, and you start to get
curious.
This opening accomplishes something else: It’s a quick
introduction to the writer’s style, another thing good first
sentences tend to do. In "They threw me off the hay truck
about noon," we can see right away that we’re not going to
indulge in a lot of foofaraw. There’s not going to be much
floridity in the language, no persiflage. The narrative
vehicle is simple, lean (not to mention that the book you’re
holding is just 128 pages long). What a beautiful thing -fast, clean, and deadly, like a bullet. We’re intrigued by the
promise that we’re just going to zoom.
Of course, it’s a little do-or-die here for the writer. A really
bad first line can convince me not to buy a book — because,
god, I’ve got plenty of books already — and an unappealing
style in the first moments is reason enough to scurry off. I’ll
never forget the botched opening lines of A. E. Van Vogt -a German science fiction writer, long dead, who liked to
effuse a little bit. His book Slan was actually the basis of
the Alien films — they basically stole them to do that, and
ended up paying his estate some money — but he was just a
terrible, terrible writer. His short story, "Black Destroyer,"

begins:
On and on, Coeurl prowled!
You read that, and you think — my god! Can I really put up
with even five more pages of this? It’s just panting!
So an intriguing context is important, and so is style. But
for me, a good opening sentence really begins with voice.
You hear people talk about "voice" a lot, when I think they
really just mean "style." Voice is more than that. People
come to books looking for something. But they don’t come
for the story, or even for the characters. They certainly don’t
come for the genre. I think readers come for the voice.
A novel’s voice is something like a singer’s — think of
singers like Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan, who have no
musical training but are instantly recognizable. When
people pick up a Rolling Stones record, it’s because they
want access to that distinctive quality. They know that
voice, they love that voice, and something in them connects
profoundly with it. Well, it’s the same way with books.
Anyone who’s read a lot of John Sanford, for example,
knows that wry, sarcastic amusing voice that’s his and his
alone. Or Elmore Leonard — my god, his writing is like a
fingerprint. You’d recognize him anywhere. An appealing
voice achieves an intimate connection — a bond much
stronger than the kind forged, intellectually, through crafted
writing.
With really good books, a powerful sense of voice is
established in the first line. My favorite example is from
Douglas Fairbairn’s novel, Shoot, which begins with a
confrontation in the woods. There are two groups of
hunters from different parts of town. One gets shot

accidentally, and over time tensions escalate. Later in the
book, they meet again in the woods to wage war — they reenact Vietnam, essentially. And the story begins this way:
This is what happened.
For me, this has always been the quintessential opening
line. It’s flat and clean as an affidavit. It establishes just
what kind of speaker we’re dealing with: someone willing
to say, I will tell you the truth. I’ll tell you the facts. I’ll cut
through the bullshit and show you exactly what happened.
It suggests that there’s an important story here, too, in a
way that says to the reader: and you want to know.
A line like "This is what happened," doesn’t actually say
anything–there’s zero action or context — but it doesn’t
matter. It’s a voice, and an invitation, that’s very difficult for
me to refuse. It’s like finding a good friend who has
valuable information to share. Here’s somebody, it says,
who can provide entertainment, an escape, and maybe even
a way of looking at the world that will open your eyes. In
fiction, that’s irresistible. It’s why we read.
We’ve talked so much about the reader, but you can’t forget
that the opening line is important to the writer, too. To the
person who’s actually boots-on-the-ground. Because it’s not
just the reader’s way in, it’s the writer’s way in also, and
you’ve got to find a doorway that fits us both. I think that’s
why my books tend to begin as first sentences — I’ll write
that opening sentence first, and when I get it right I’ll start
to think I really have something.

The best first line I ever
wrote is the opening of

‘Needful Things.’ Printed by
itself on a page in 20-point
type: "You’ve been here
before." All there by itself on
one page, inviting the reader
to keep reading. It suggests a
familiar story.
When I’m starting a book, I compose in bed before I go to
sleep. I will lie there in the dark and think. I’ll try to write a
paragraph. An opening paragraph. And over a period of
weeks and months and even years, I’ll word and reword it
until I’m happy with what I’ve got. If I can get that first
paragraph right, I’ll know I can do the book.
Because of this, I think, my first sentences stick with me.
They were a doorway I went through. The opening line of
11/22/63 is "I’ve never been what you’d call a crying man."
The opening line of Salem’s Lot is "Everybody thought the
man and the boy were father and son." See? I remember
them! The opening line of It is "The terror that would not
end for another 28 years, if it ever did, began so far as I can
know or tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper
floating down a gutter swollen with rain." That’s one that I
worked over and over and over.

But I can tell you right now that the best first line I ever
wrote — and I learned it from Cain, and learned it from
Fairbairn — is the opening of Needful Things. It’s the story
about this guy who comes to town, and uses grudges and
sleeping animosities among the townspeople to whip
everyone up into a frenzy of neighbor against neighbor.
And so the story starts off with an opening line, printed by
itself on a page in 20-point type:
You’ve been here before.
All there by itself on one page, inviting the reader to keep
reading. It suggests a familiar story; at the same time, the
unusual presentation brings us outside the realm of the
ordinary. And this, in a way, is a promise of the book that’s
going to come. The story of neighbor against neighbor is
the oldest story in the world, and yet this telling is (I hope)
strange and somehow different. Sometimes it’s important to
find that kind of line: one that encapsulates what’s going to
happen later without being a big thematic statement.
Still, I don’t have a lot of books where that opening line is
poetry or beautiful. Sometimes it’s perfectly workman-like.
You try to find something that’s going to offer that crucial
way in, any way in, whatever it is as long as it works. This
approach is closer to what worked for in my new book,
Doctor Sleep. All I remember is wanting to leapfrog from
the timeframe of The Shining into the present by talking
about presidents, without using their names. The peanut
farmer president, the actor president, the president who
played the saxophone, and so on. The sentence is:
On the second day of December, in a year when a Georgia
peanut farmer was doing business in the White House, one

of Colorado’s great resort hotels burned to the ground.
It’s supposed to do three things. It sets you in time. It sets
you in place. And it recalls the ending of the book — though
I don’t know it will do much good for people who only saw
the movie, because the hotel doesn’t burn in the movie. This
isn’t grand or elegant — it’s a door-opener, it’s a table-setter.
I was able to take the motif — chronicle a series of
important events quickly by linking them to presidential
administrations — to set the stage and begin the story.
There’s nothing "big" here. It’s just one of those gracenotes
you try to put in there so that the narrative has a feeling of
balance, and it helped me find my way in.

Listen, you can’t live on love, and you can’t create a writing
career based on first lines.
A book won’t stand or fall on the very first line of prose -the story has got to be there, and that’s the real work. And
yet a really good first line can do so much to establish that
crucial sense of voice — it’s the first thing that acquaints
you, that makes you eager, that starts to enlist you for the
long haul. So there’s incredible power in it, when you say,
come in here. You want to know about this. And someone
begins to listen.