Results of Ruminations

Note: Since the new film version of the book is coming out soon, I'll put a spoiler warning on this post, if only because someone may be planning on watching the film without having read the book. So here it is: As I mentioned before , I'm reading Stephen King's It. The book is massive--clocking in at over 1,400 pages--and tells the story of a haunted town called Derry, set in King's home state of Maine. A handful of kids end up being compelled to defeat the evil entity known as It (or Pennywise the Clown), and then, when they get older, they have to return to Derry in order to defeat It once and for all. So the set up is pretty straightforward, but part of what I found so interesting was how  the story was told. Despite its sprawling size, the book is tightly connected. Small details ripple through the narrative, which spans a summer in 1958 and a spring in 1985. Even the paper boat that kicks off the tragedy and terror and leaves by the end of the first chapter...

There are two basic philosophies about how you write a novel: Gardeners or architects--also known as pansters and outliners. The idea of "pantsing" is that you're writing by the seat of your pants. You don't have a lot of stuff written down. You feel a story is in there somewhere, and that you need to write about it. Here's how Stephen King phrases it in his memoir/writing advice book (page 163-164): I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground...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. Technically, he's discussing the gene...