I was reading Stephen King's Just after Sunset, a collection of short stories published last year. I haven't read him in years; I raced through some of his classics in my early adolescence and I think I've re-read Misery, It, and the book with "The Langoliers" in it once or twice since. A few days ago I saw this collection on a book truck at work and I'd forgotten to bring the book I was reading from home, so I took it.
What I like about these stories, and Stephen King in general, is that the qualities which could place the work in either the 'horror' genre or the 'speculative fiction' genre are present because they are being used to express basic human experiences. He writes about the universal-human-condition stuff that most of us aim for, only he takes a few hop-skip-jumps away from the realism that we're used to which gives him more range for exploration. The weight of the story is rarely in the genre elements, I find, but rather in the themes (mental illness, fear of death, grief, etc) which are, in some ways, opened up by those very genre elements and the imaginative mindset they require. The realism parts sneak up on me when I'm swept away by the imaginative parts, and sometimes that gives them more power. Like my brain relaxes in a way, knowing that it's going to be thinking about ghosts or demons which it doesn't really believe in, and then boom! -- I find myself weeping over a short story about September 11th.
Which isn't quite the point of this post, but I'm getting there. The story's called "The Things They Left Behind" (an homage to The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, I assume). At the end of the book, King provides some liner notes for his Constant Reader, short explanations of the various origins of the stories. I'd taken to flipping to the end after finishing each story, and when I read the notes for this particular piece I found this:
... I was deeply and fundamentally affected by 9/11. Like a great many writers of fiction both literary and popular, I felt a reluctance to say anything about an event that has become as much as an American touchstone as Pearl Harbour or the assassination of John Kennedy ... I might still not have written it if I had not recalled a conversation I had with a Jewish editor over twenty-five years before. He was unhappy with me about a story called "Apt Pupil." It was wrong for me to write about the concentration camps, he said, because I was not a Jew. I replied that made writing the story all the more important--because writing is an act of willed understanding. (p. 363)
Writing is an act of willed understanding.
I've written some fiction myself, and the sense that some topics or characters or settings are out of bounds has arisen in me many times. The feeling that I have no right to try to describe something that I haven't come close to experiencing, especially when the thing is very meaningful to people that actually have. The idea of misappropriation.
And then today I read this little liner note, this idea put so concisely and sharply, and it just ... clicked. It doesn't mean I'm going jump into a first-person narrative about being a Jewish African-American gay man or anything (at least not tonight) but it's something to remember next time I feel that particular reservation while writing. There are a lot of reasons to go somewhere that feels out of bounds. This is the best one I've heard.
Which made me feel excited, cause I like it when something surprises me, opens up a door in my head, shifts my worldview a degree or two. When that hasn't been happening enough for me, things get kinda grey.
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