There’s just something so lovely about a black and white image. I’d imagine a lot of really clever people have spent a lot of time thinking about why that’s so, they’ve probably written down some of their thoughts, too.
If I think about writing I can imagine a spectrum that captures a lot of things. On one end there’s the academy, all the stuffy writing about black and white photography or fossils or skinner boxes or even writing itself. On the other end there are love letters. They’re even further to one side of the spectrum if they’ve only been read once, further still if they were never sent in the first place.
I think novels could be categorized that way. I’ve been reading a lot of Stephen King so I’ll organize some of his writing thusly:
|Billy Summers -- The Institute -- The Long Walk -- The shining -- Misery -- Salem’s Lot -- Pet Semetary -- On Writing -- The Green Mile -- Cujo -- The Stand -- IT -- The Dark Tower|
That’s everything I’ve read by Stephen King. It was a curious little exercise organizing them by what is essentially romanticism. Most surprising perhaps is the fact that On Writing is very nearly in the middle. What finds one of his books towards the stuffy end, rather than the psycho-casual end has a lot to do with money and world view, I think.
Billy Summers is pretty boring and feels like a fun little spy movie traipse, but it also feels like a cash grab. The Institute is good, but it lacks the world-shattering almost religious philosophization of IT or The Dark Tower books. King builds his own religion in those books, the madman. He does it with the unrelenting faith of a child.
If I think about writing I can imagine a spectrum that captures a lot of things. On one end there’s the academy, all the stuffy writing about black and white photography or fossils or skinner boxes or even writing itself. On the other end there are love letters. They’re even further to one side of the spectrum if they’ve only been read once, further still if they were never sent in the first place.
I think novels could be categorized that way. I’ve been reading a lot of Stephen King so I’ll organize some of his writing thusly:
|Billy Summers -- The Institute -- The Long Walk -- The shining -- Misery -- Salem’s Lot -- Pet Semetary -- On Writing -- The Green Mile -- Cujo -- The Stand -- IT -- The Dark Tower|
That’s everything I’ve read by Stephen King. It was a curious little exercise organizing them by what is essentially romanticism. Most surprising perhaps is the fact that On Writing is very nearly in the middle. What finds one of his books towards the stuffy end, rather than the psycho-casual end has a lot to do with money and world view, I think.
Billy Summers is pretty boring and feels like a fun little spy movie traipse, but it also feels like a cash grab. The Institute is good, but it lacks the world-shattering almost religious philosophization of IT or The Dark Tower books. King builds his own religion in those books, the madman. He does it with the unrelenting faith of a child.