Enter Label: Stephen King on Healing

Dear Companions,

I bet you agree—to bring up a Stephen King novel in reference to illness, one might do well with Cujo, or The Stand, but for the Healingvrse, I come with his Memoir of the Craft on Writing. There he gives hard-nosed advice on how to truly (wait! no adverbs as per Mr. King) embody a writer. For example, write 2000 words per day. Read 80 books per year. Work for 4-6 hours per day. If that is uncomfortable for you, don’t quit your day job.

As edicts, these are not a cultural fit at the moment. I use writing as a hoisting device, to pull myself out of a heartbreaking state of mind; the daily duration is susceptible to the ebb and flow of symptoms, motherhood, resuming life. (I am attempting more semicolons!). So instead, I will act as a traveling bee, taking King’s advice on writing, and extracting the healing salve.

Felt cute might delete later

In On Writing, there is a passage where King describes the giant oak desk he used for years to write novels, largely in a drug addled state. It is popular lore, after all, that he does not remember writing Cujo, and from what I gathered, that spooky mist encompasses a number of his famed books. At one point he describes the intervention his family staged:

Tabby began by dumping a trash bag full of stuff from my office out on the rug: beer cans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles, and cocaine in plastic baggies, coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and Nyquil cold medicine, even bottles of mouth wash.

Well, thats what we call an unfair advantage! But I do wish Mr King shared more on the steps he took to heal. He skips ahead simply saying that he never stopped writing.

Some of the stuff came out tentative and flat, but at least it was there. I buried those unhappy, lackluster pages in the bottom drawer of my desk and got on the next project. Little by little I found the beat again, and after that I found the joy again.

So back to the Oak Desk. Mr. King always dreamt of a massive oak slab that would dominate a room, and when he finally got one, he…

…placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study. For six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship’s captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere.

This resonates on many levels. First, we all have our creative fetishes—writing, singing, photography, drawing, dancing, and so on. We imagine to be ready for pursuit, we must first obtain the proper instrumentation: an oak slab desk, a studio, technology. But we also chide ourselves; we know it all to be artifice. In the trenches of sobriety, Mr. King learns this lesson too:

A year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of that enormity….I got another desk— it’s handmade, beautiful and half the size. I put it at the far west end of the office in a corner, under the eave. I’m sitting under it now with bad eyes, a gimp leg, and no hangover. I’m doing what I know how to do, and as well as I know how to do it.

And his advice to writers:

Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.

Indeed, this can be said to those of us meandering in the healingvrse. It’s easy to get stuck in search of the perfect practice. But we heal in order to live; we do not live to heal. At some point, if you are lucky, you take the practice outside, to the heated argument, to the strained relationships, to the crumbling stuff. Sure at the beginning, it’s almost impossible. But eventually, you hope to be a calmer person, producing great states of mind from a humble desk.

Another bit of salve extracted—Mr King’s advice on storylines. This whole time I’ve been searching for a theme, amidst what, at times, feels like a life in ruins. It’s rare I luxuriate in the potentiality all of this might lead to. I’ve been told on many occasion, however, that finding a narrative for this experience will make me feel better, but right now, the story is unfolding, and I have no conclusive theme to lean on. That leaves me sometimes feeling queasy, anxious.

What is the actual point. Am I supposed to detach to survive? Am I supposed to practice non-attachment? To appreciate the “little things.” Was I missing that so criminally that this is what I needed in order to appreciate a tangerine sunset. Am I supposed to turn myself inside out, become a different person? Or stay the same, with spiritual alterations? Is that enough penance? What if I just harden with bitterness? Are those even themes or just character arcs?

This also reminds me of something my friend J once shared. His doctor told him—some people who get a second chance after a serious illness will go back and live a much healthier life. The others, realize life is short and start to live more dangerously. Become an altruist or live the island life?

I know for certain, things are happening, and certain people will be part of my life that where not there before, but as for the theme? The redemptive character arc?

The desire to be pain-free is simply story; it’s what winning feels like, but it’s not a theme.

Thankfully, according to Mr King, the theme emerges later. He believes that once your basic story is on paper, then you can worry about the theme.

Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.

This also speaks to why people change during big, tumultuous events where the foundation of life is torn up. It’s unintentional. The themes might present early on, but because they are new, it takes a while to see them clearly. It reminds me of the myth that indigenous populations couldn’t see the explorers’ boats because they didn’t know boats existed.

But, indeed, there comes a time where you go back through the story and intentionally introduce the themes.

Once your basic story is on paper, you need to think about what it means and enrich your following drafts with your conclusions.

Of course, in a story it’s easier to understand when the first draft is done. But in life? Recovery? Is 70% healed enough? How about 55.5% on Wednesdays?

If I share some themes now, I fear they would be incomplete. For example:

• Ultimately, we are alone, and thats not necessarily a bad thing. But also friendship, community are the difference makers. I’m thinking a lot about the difference between being alone versus isolation.

• We are reborn in hard times, gooey and everything. But not as new people—as who we were as kids.

• Our subconscious is in the driver’s seat. But also one’s conscious willpower is the key to the ignition.

• One leg in, one leg out, over the white picket fence, and the affect on ovarian counts

• Self-compassion heals. Self-compassion leads to altruism. Self-compassion is almost impossible.

• Live creatively or die. A few years ago, that would have read, conform or die.

• Anything Becker’s Denial of Death. Also Clockwork Orange.

As Mr. King says, we all have but a few themes in our lives.

I don’t believe any novelist, even one who’s written forty plus books, has too many thematic concerns; I have many interests, but only a few that are deep enough to power novels. These deep interests include how difficult it is—-perhaps impossible!—to close Pandora’s technobox once its open; the question of why if there is a God such terrible things happen; the thin line between reality and fantasy; and most of all, the terrible attraction violence sometimes has for fundamentally good people. I’ve also written again and again about the fundamental difference between children and adults, and about the healing power of the human imagination.

I’ll close with a clip from an amazing essay, Notes On Punctuation, by Lewis Thomas (1913-1993) to punch up my tangential point on semicolons from the first paragraph, which is that I’m unclear on how to use them.

Will learning how to properly use these punctuations help me find my themes? In some strange way, yes. I think they may be breadcrumbs on the way to one: writing is self, liquor and air.

I have grown fond of semicolons in recent years. The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added; it reminds you sometimes of the Greek usage. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you don’t get all the meaning you wanted to, expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.

Well, that’s all for this week. Adieu, adieu, adieu! Much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca