Perfect Day

This was it. It was now or never (well, probably not, but he always had a flair for the dramatic).

She was sitting at her desk, her eyes glued to the computer, her hand moving the mouse left and right, up and down.
She paid no attention to him.
Her hair was dark and long and curly, strands of it falling and covering her left eye.
She twisted her lip and puffed some air up and the renegade curl flew away.
His heart skipped a bit.
He said:
“Hey”.
She tilted her head and saw him. Her eyes were brown and large. How he loved those eyes of hers.
“Hey!” She replied, leaning back and stretching her fingers. “God, this report is a pain in the ass”.
“So take a break”.
“Yeah, I guess I should. What’re you up to? Still with the fall paperwork?”
“Yeah”. He said.
“Poor guy”.
“Oh, that’s alright”.
Ok, enough with the damn small talk.
“Listen, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you”.
“Hmm..?
“Would you like to… you know… go out and do something togeter? Maybe this Saturday?”
She looked at him with her big eyes. His heart sank for a minute.
This can’t be a surprise to her, he thought. The way he’s been talking to her, the way he’s been trying to be close to her, she must know that he likes her more than just a friend. She must.
“Sure” she said.
He felt a smile appear on his face, widening and widening. He felt himself turn into the Cheshire Cat.
“Great!” He said.
“What did you have in mind?” She asked.
“Mini Golf? At The Grover Grounds? On Saturday”
“Yeah, sure”.
“Then we can go to Kiki’s”.
She smiled again.
“Listen” she said, “Lets talk later. I have to get back to this damn report”.
“Yes” he said, “Yes. Okay, so… thanks. I mean, good.”
She laughed.
“You’re funny”.
He went back to his cubicle, but there was no chance he could focus on his work today.
No chance in hell.

Saturday morning was beautiful and sunny. They met at the entrance to the Grounds and played till 11:30. He won, but it wasn’t really important. He helped her choose her clubs and aim. She let him hold her arms and guide her. It was wonderful to touch her, to smell her. His whole body and mind were on a natural high.
Then they went into town and he bought her ice cream. She laughed at his jokes. At some point she held his hand.
They talked about all kinds of stuff, sitting in the park eating their ice cream. They talked about what movies they last saw, about the wonderful weather in this April day – as if god arranged it just for them after a week of rains. They talked about his family and her family, about life in a small town and their dreams of getting out. They talked about books and music and cats. They both loved cats.

They didn’t talk about work at all. Not even one bit.

After the ice cream they didn’t feel like lunch so they went to the Gladstone Theater instead to catch the 4:30 show.
He couldn’t beleive his luck. They showed Casablanca.
When they went back out into the street (part of them still in the black and white wonder), they needed a few seconds to adjust. He felt like he’s hovering a few feet above the ground.
But it was getting dark.
And they were tired.

Her place was just a few blocks away and he walked her there.
When they got to the walkway in front of her house, she turned to him and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
“Thank you” she said. “I had  a wonderful, wonderful time”.
“It’s me who should thank you” he said. “thank you for a perfect day”.
“It was great, wasn’t it?” She said.
The sun was setting, making their shadows growing longer and thinner on the pavement.
Then he leaned and kissed her. She let him.
He held her tight.
“Yes, it was wonderful” he said. “Let’s do it again soon”.
“No” she said.
He let her go and looked at her, befuddled.

“I’d have to say no” she said from behind her desk. She wasn’t really smiling anymore. And she did act surprised, for some reason.
“Ah, okay”. He blurted.
She went back to her computer.
“I just thought I’d try, you know. You only live once”.
“Yeah, I know” she said. This time she smiled, but it wasn’t the smile he was looking for. “But it’s still no, okay?”
“Okay” he said. He kept standing there for a few seconds as if someone poured concrete on his shoes, but she didn’t look at him.

It was as if he wasn’t there.

He turned and slowly went back to his cubicle.
It was longest walk of his life.
He felt eyes looking at him. But they couldn’t have heard the conversation, could they? Could they?
He sat back on his chair ans stared at his computer.
He would keep staring at it until it was time to go home.

Home.

The weatherman on TV said that the rains will be over by the weekend.

He said Saturday will be sunny and warm.

He said it’s going to be a perfect day.

Make ‘em laugh

Getting ready for my screening at WILDsound Film Festival in Toronto, I started to think how nerve-wrecking it is to do a comedy compared to all other film genres.
With comedy, the rules are simple. If the audience don’t laugh, you’re screwed.
If you do a drama, a horror film, an action-adventure, you usually never know if your film worked until the credits start to roll. Then, either people clap, or boo, or couldn’t care less. You may know if it worked by talking to the audience, by looking at their faces or listening to their conversations when they’re leaving the theater, but comedy is the only genre where you absolutely know if your film worked WHILE it is shown.

But does a comedy HAVE to make you laugh to be considered successful?

Well… Yes.

I’m the first one to admit that my film, Hype, is not a laugh-a-minute-riot, nor is it a slapstick comedy or a comedy of errors. Instead, it relies on a certain punchline to deliver the laugh.
Whenever I watch it with a group of people I always get very anxious at the end, because i know that if people don’t laugh now, the film didn’t work for them.
So tonight, watching Hype with the (hopefully) largest audience I ever had for it, I feel excited but mostly anxious. You sit there and you know that if people won’t laugh, your film is a misfire, a dud, a waste of space. A comedy is meant to make people laugh through satire, irony, black humor, slapstick. Like every good film, it needs to say something about life and the world we live in, about the characters, and it needs to do so in a way that makes you laugh. Maybe not all the way, but I believe a good comedy has to have at least one big laugh proportional to its length.

Woody Allen made some great comedies. Some of them were funnier than others. Bananas and Love and Death were ribald and crazy. Radio Days and Mighty Aphrodite were much more subtle. All of those films made you laugh at one point or another. But while Allen’s first films are considered his funniest, his later comedies are considered to be more deep, more rounded and profound. They are more about something, while his early spoofs are more like 90 minute sketches.

But they are all comedies, and they all work in their own way. I love comedies such as Take The Money And Run and Airplane because I love nonsense humor, but I also admire comedies that are more mature. There’s a lot of leeway inside the genre confines, but the rule always stays the same:

Your audience needs to laugh. And laugh for the right reasons, too.

A comedy can sometime tickle your funny bone without causing you to burst uproariously with laughter. There are countless examples of that. But as I’ve said, it’s not enough. If you strive for a comedy, you need those laugh-out-loud moments. Because what comedy filmmaker would want to sit at a screening of his film and have everyone chuckle inside for 90 minutes, or 20 minutes, or 5 minutes?

No, when we do a comedy, we want to make ‘em laugh.

And we will sit in the dark and hold our breath until then…

3-day novel contest – 3rd day and epilogue

The third day was the easiest one. I finished writing the book on Sunday night and had 85 pages on my hand, and the 3rd day was spent on editing and especially stepping outside and feel the wonderful sun on my face. I also felt the fatigue in a tremendous way.

At night I did some more editing and that was that. I haven’t sent it in yet. I still haven’t figured out how to do a proper numbering in the openoffice Writer, but I’ll fix it soon enough.

So what can I say about those 3 days? I don’t think it really sunk in yet. The longest thing I have ever written in prose form up to now was a 25 page novella and it took me 6 months to finish fist draft. Here I wrote 85 pages in what was basically two days. The ramifications to my physical and mental well being are still to be determined, but it was like an out-of-body experience. I done nothing but write, eat, go to washroom, write, eat, go to washroom, sleep, wake up screaming, sleep again.

Who the hell needs to go to a shack out in the woods to write? If you get enough into your story you forget there’s a world out there anyway. And if the outside world invades your little cocoon all you need to do is put the headphones, listen to some music, and lose yourself.

I drank copious amounts of tea and even a cup of coffee which I usually don’t drink. Parts of the novel were written in a Starbucks in a book store. I like writing surrounded by books. At some point I even tried to download a software which enables you to speak instead of type and the words get written that way, but it didn’t really work out and I realized I was just procrastinating again.

It’ll take me some time to get back to the story to do some more editing (the version I’m sending to the contest includes of course whatever editing I managed to do in the 3 days and nothing more). I feel energized though in a peculiar sort of way. Maybe I’ll try and get back to my short story roots and write a couple of them that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time.

My short novel is called The Forever People and it has to do with the effect movies can have on our lives, especially when we’re young and impressionable, about coping with loneliness and heartbreak and missed opportunities, and about following your dreams and not be afraid to be yourself.

It may all sound terribly cliched and familiar, the way i put here, but you know what? Tough break.

I only had three days!

3-day novel contest – 2nd day

Wow, this was a crazy day.

Yesterday seems like a walk in the park compared to today. Yesterday had a 30 page output, while today I added 43 more.  But today was hard mainly because I was stuck a lot of the times. At the end I decided this is not going to be a 100 page novel. I will have to make do with 80. I knew my ending, but there was no way  I would feel another 20 pages with fluff.

So that was it.

Tomorrow will be mainly devoted to editing and giving the mess some kind of shape, but the book is basically finished, I think.

And I hope i’m not wrong!

3-day novel contest – 1st day

The day isn’t over yet but I’m taking a break, and taking the opportunity for a quick update. Right now I’m on page 23, which is less than I hoped to achieve by now (10 pm). I must have at least 30 pages done today, so that means working at night until I get it. My original plan was to begin last night after midnight but after a hard night of partying (and I make no excuses here. I partied because I needed to!) I came home at 2 AM, head buzzing with alcohol, set at my computer, stared at the blank page, typed the word PROLOGUE, shut down the computer and fell on the bed like a ton of bricks.

I woke up at 6 am, determined to begin my writing now. I went to the washroom, brushed my teeth, went back to the living room, went past the computer, looked at it, looked at my bed, looked at the computer again, looked at my bed. Somehow, I don’t know how, I ended up in bed and fell asleep again.

I woke up at 10 and then I finally started writing. I did it almost without any breaks except for lunch and a stroll to a near-by coffee shop with my laptop because, you know, there IS a world out there.

It’s hard keeping consistency. There were a few instances where I went back and had to change names or facts because I changed my mind about the plot at some point. I’m sure there will be consistency issues but that’s what you get.

Anyway, a quick break (a person has to shower) and then back to work.

3-day novel contest – The pre-show

Okay, I’ll make it quick.

This weekend, that’s what I’ll be doing:

http://www.3daynovel.com/index.html

The challenge was too enticing to pass by. Yes, I had my doubts. For a guy who sits in front of a computer almost 50 hours a week, doing intense typing for 48-72 hours isn’t something that he looks forward too. But yet, I think there’s a way to do it.

I have an idea. I’ve had it for weeks. But it doesn’t mean I won’t change it at the last minute. Perhaps what scares me the most is getting stuck in the middle and not knowing where to go from there. I just know I’m going to feel the panic at some point!

I have been writing for years now. Short stories, screenplays, and in this weblog. I haven’t ever written a novel, though, and figured this contest is a great excuse to finally do it. I think I operate well under pressure when it comes to writing, but we’ll see…

I don’t have a real plan for writing the story. No outline. Just a bunch of details I jotted down in my notebook, like character traits, the inciting incident, and some background. That’s it. Similarly, I don’t have a plan for how to write it. I’m not going to sit for more than three hours in a row, I think. I’ll also go outside and write in a coffee shop. I will eat my regular meals not in front of the computer. I will have some snack near-by and drink a lot of tea. I will disconnect myself from the Internet. I know the breaking point will arrive at some point and I think I need to hang a sign above my desk which will say DON’T GIVE UP!

And most of all, I hope the story will carry me through to the finish line. I hope to lose myself in it and forget about the outside world.

I think this is the only way to write a novel in 3 days…

See you on the other side.

Express yourself

For me, writing is hard. Everything about it is hard. From forming ideas, to formulating plot and characters, to actually sit down and write. It’s 90 percent torture and 10 percent joy. It’s joyous when it’s flowing, when the story seems to actually write itself. But that is so rare. Usually I have to hammer at it and write with fits and starts. I can’t remember when was the last time I actually wrote continuously for 3 or 4 hours.

Sitting in front of a blank screen and trying to find the first words is a very stressing experience.

True, I write in this Weblog. I write in this Weblog much more than I write screenplays or stories. It’s easier to write in a blog. First of all, it’s not a story. You don’t have to think about plot turns, dialogue or characters. It’s a much more intuitive, flowing form of writing. The second reason is that I’m much more motivated to write here because, as a friend of mine mentioned, it’s the instant gratification of seeing your work published, pure and simple. You write something, hit “submit”, and it’s out there, for all the world to see. A miracle of modern technology.

So why is it so hard for me to write fiction? When I look at my body of work over the years, I get depressed. I first began setting pen to paper about 20 years ago and been at it continuously in one form or another ever since, and what I got to show for it is three short decent stories, one feature screenplay, and a couple of other screenplays in varying lengths, from 5 pages to 45 pages.

this is not meant as another self-depreciating rant like I’m “fond” of doing, but as a clear view of the facts. In 20 years, I have produced very few completed works of written fiction. Sure, I wrote dozens of short stories in my youth, but they were easier to write because I couldn’t care less about characters or sensible plots. I just wrote them intuitively, applying things I learned from reading other people’s stories. Sadly, all those stories were thrown away over the years and so I can’t really look at them today and see what they were really like. I suspect they were crap, but it could be that some of them held good nuggets of ideas or even just characters that I could’ve used today. And so I have many, many beginnings of stories just laying around in my computer, begging me to complete them, but I have no idea how.

So why is it so hard for me? As I see it, a writer is someone who sits down and write. All the time. And not come up with a script every five years. I now read George R R Martin’s amazing Song of Ice and Fire series and I marvel: How does he do it? each book is a tremendously detailed and flowing and riveting and highly readable tome of 800 pages or more, obviously the product of an incredible effort behind the scenes, of planning and then planning some more. The guy must have 50 drawers full of background and research material.

And this is what separates the professional from the amateurs. The level of commitment. You have to be committed for it with every fiber of your being. You have to skip on television, movies and even eating. You have to skip on being with people. you have to sacrifice your social life. In order to be a prolific writer, you have to cope with the loneliness of the writer. Sitting in a room for hours and typing away.

Just look at Stephen King, who has written more than 50 books in 30 years. His memoir, On Writing, is highly recommended for every aspiring writer. King’s methods may not suit everyone, but he has some very good points to make about the craft.

I find it hard to mold ideas into a narrative. I lack the patience and the peace of mind. I’m too restless. That’s why most of my work is short. Short stories, short screenplays. The idea of writing a feature, not to mention a book, intimidates me. When I see a book written by some model about her life I get envious. Even people who don’t consider themselves as writers manage to finish a book and get it out there. That’s a great accomplishment in my… hmm… book.

Because I’m a guy who thinks too much as it is, and sits alone at his house too much as it is, the notion of making this life style into a profession intimidates me in some way. That’s why I love to direct and create a visual story with other people – collaborate – then sitting alone at home and write. I write the scripts, because if I want to make a film, nobody is going to write the story for me, unless I purchase the rights for written works which is out of my budget right now.

There is one clear resemblance between writing posts on the weblog and writing stories. I write them only when I have something to say. The most underwhelming experience a writer can have is the feeling that he has nothing to say. That there’s no issue or theme or a facet of the world or the human condition that motivates him to sit on his ass and start working. Crafting a story is work. Writing in a blog is a hobby, unless you do it professionally. It helps you flex your writing muscles and communicate ideas in another form, but for me, at least, it is no substitute for fiction writing.

Coming up with ideas is easy. Ideas are dime a dozen. But it takes commitment and passion to actually sit down and do something with them, and doing that can be torture. Procrastination can be an art form for a writer. I also don’t believe in writer’s block anymore (at least for the most part. I do acknowledge that sometime a writer just hits a creative block and is unable to continue, but that usually happens in the process of a work, not when you first sit down to begin).
Also, an idea that comes up in King’s book as well in other professional writers’ musings can basically be summed up like this: “Fuck inspiration”.

Waiting for inspiration to grab hold of you can be a long wait indeed. In order to write you have to make yourself write, adopt a writing routine and have self-discipline, traits that I’m not capable of achieving right now, apparently. You need to work hard and not wait for inspiration. When it arrives, it arrives. IF it arrives at all.

And the most important question of all: Are you really a writer if you’re suffering most of the time? There’s this romantic notion of the suffering writer which may or may not be true, but many successful writers admit that they just do it because they love every minute of it. So I guess it shouldn’t be that torturous.

I know that today I write much better than I did 20 years ago. Practice always makes perfect. But it’s still not enough, I feel. That’s a big question that I sometime ask myself: If you only wrote one piece during your entire life, but it was a masterpiece, are you considered a writer? I think so, but I think you can only be considered an author or a screenwriter if you actually have the body of work to show for it.

With the advent of the Internet, writing has become more widespread than it ever been. Everybody blogs, writes reviews, writes articles. Everybody’s commenting on everything. On Amazon, you have comments for the reviews. Soon we’ll have comments for the comments for the reviews. It’s a lot of clutter and noise, but I also find it fascinating. Are we better people because we all write now? Human beings need outlets to deal with urges. If those are not dealt with through creativity, they can explode in negative ways such as violence and anger.

My answer will have to be no. The violence and anger is seen clearly all over the Internet, so the fact that you’re writing a comment instead of punching the guy doesn’t make you a better human being. Everybody’s a big hero behind the mask of anonymity the Internet provides. Everybody’s a writer in some form or another. Illiteracy is an unheard of notion in the Western world, but I don’t think it makes us better human beings.

Hey, that could be an idea for a story.

Life as a Montage

There is a tendency in me to picture my life in scenes, as if they were part of a movie. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I think it’s neutral, depending on what I do with it. If I expect life to be this way, I am bound to be disappointed. If I just see it as an amusing flight of fancy, I might get a kick out of it, or even an inspiration.

Regrettably, I think I tend to be more disappointed than inspired.

I once was in love with a girl. I pictured us in different scenes. In some of them, we strolled at night, I gently stroked her cheek, she smiled and knew what I wanted to say without me even saying it.
And then we kissed. And laughed. And it was magical. And pretty ridiculous.
In another scene, we sat on the couch at my apartment, watching a movie. Then suddenly, she put her head on my shoulder, leaning against me. I put my arms around her and we just sat there, holding each other, without saying a word.
There were more “scenes” like these, all of them framed with the exact appropriate shots in my mind. Some of them even had background music. I derived great joy from these imaginings, but I also knew they were dangerous, I knew that if she doesn’t feel as I do, I am in for a great big huge fall. A thundering disappointment.
At the end, I didn’t really find the perfect moment or the perfect timing to be with her alone. I guess I was afraid to actually cross the Imaginary Zone and step into reality. I thought she felt the same way, but I wasn’t sure.

One night, while we were casually talking, she mentioned that she has a date with some guy. I guess the disappointment showed clearly on my face, although I didn’t say anything. The next day she apologized for hurting my feelings and said she only sees me as a Good Friend. Or in other words, a male girlfriend. How sweet.

That scene wasn’t even close to what I imagined. The dialogue was awkward, I stumbled and mumbled. We weren’t standing in a street corner with soft light on our faces, but sitting on the grass in broad daylight. And not long after that it just ended. Our friendship, I mean.

There were no big speeches, no emotional, heart-breaking moments. We kept in touch for a while and then we just didn’t anymore. It was over. I was heart-broken and lost. It was confusing, pointless, drawn-out.

It was real life.

A movie scene is a carefully structured slice of heightened reality. It usually has some kind of conflict at its core, because conflict is drama and drama is interesting to watch (that’s actually something not very positive in real life. We wouldn’t want to be in conflict all the time, would we? On the other hand, in movies as in life, conflict usually breeds a progress of some sort).
It usually has a to-the-point dialogue. People in movies say the exact, appropriate words, even if they mumble them. They don’t go home thinking: “Yes! That’s what I should’ve said!” as it is in real life. In movies, timing is almost always perfect. It has to be.

If we are to create drama, we must condense life, we must take a situation and dramatize it. For example: Three different phone calls between estranged lovers, each phone call by its own is drawn out, too long, too full of fat. We take it and condense it into one heated, dramatic conversation. We cut to the chase. We mine the conflict. We unveil the dramatic core. A dramatic scene is a clean, efficient, stylized facsimile of life. Storytelling, or drama, as Hitchcock once said, is life without the boring, pointless bits.

Of course, people do have experiences and life journeys as depicted in the movies, it’s just not happening the same way. For example, during the pre-production for my short film, I ran to and fro, been in this location and in that location, did this and did that, sat in front of the computer for hours, sending and answering e-mails… at some point, when I was nearly exhausted, I had a comforting thought: Hey, this is a montage!

You know how in the movies, when someone is going through a long, result-oriented process over a period of a few days or weeks or even hours, we get to see a montage? (The best example is of course the training montages in all those Rocky films). Well, this is exactly what I was experiencing. I was having My Montage. If this was a movie, all these past few weeks would have been condensed into a carefully edited reel of 3-5 minutes, with some cool song or music in the background. Maybe even “Eye of the Tiger”!

Real life is messy, arbitrary. It seldom has closure or catharsis. We, as humans, usually want closure and catharsis in our stories. Heck, we need them. It comforts us, it gives us a sense of order, of meaning. It lets us experience life in a more controlled manner. It gives us a sort of hope. Although there is some excellent drama out there which doesn’t obey these classic paradigms (The Sopranos, for example, which makes up for it in spades with its psychological and philosophical depth), those are the exception to the “rule”.
Even my dreams sometimes have a soundtrack and shot-compositions. I don’t know if I should be comforted or disturbed by this, though. I just know that for me, movies are a big psychological outlet in dealing with life. I love movies with all my heart. They’re the greatest thing in the world. Good movies, and good stories in general, help us make sense of things, they aim a spotlight onto a theme and let us see it clearly, away from the clutter and chaos and contradictions of the reality outside. They are the magnifying glass of the human condition.

They tell us who we really are.

Leap of Faith

You’ve got to see this movie!

This, the opening line from my short script, Hype, is probably the only thing left in its entirety from the original work, except the title.

Fashioning a screenplay is a patchwork of trial and error. Perhaps more than a book, a script is an ever-changing work, first in rewrites and then in the shooting itself. Even when you locked a final draft, you never shoot the script exactly as it was written, and that is especially true in extreme low-budget productions, as mine is. You have to take into account the conditions on the location itself, and aspire to use its advantages and disadvantages to move the story forward. In low-budget filmmaking, it’s not the location you want, but the location you can get.

During the exciting, frustrating and exhausting maelstrom of pre-production, the filmmaker has a commitment to have the story in front of him in all times, to never forget its essence, its themes, its heart. While occupying myself with finding locations, doing technical research, recruiting people and scheduling them, I always tried to take the time to get back to the script and go through it again, to remind myself of why I’m doing it in the first place. In narrative filmmaking, everything exists to serve the story. And the characters, and consequentially the actors, are the nexus of it all.

While a story at its core is about the truths of the human existence, Filmmaking itself is a contradictory beast. It is ethereal and practical at the same time, belongs to the real world and out of this world at the same time. It is, as is well known, art and business all at once; in order to be successful in this field, one often need to be a shrewed businessman as well as a gifted director/producer/writer.

Taking care of all this practical stuff, all this doing, and trying to remember the story – and it was quite hard sometimes – was, and still is, like trying to be several personalities at the same time.

At my core, I think abstractly. I’m not good at practical, fact-based stuff like mathematical quizzes or crossword puzzles. They frustrate me and bore me after a time. I like to daydream, to imagine, to think about possibilities, to see connections, to find beauty in whatever I can, to imagine people doing strange, funny stuff in places they shouldn’t be doing it, to picture different lives in different worlds, to wonder what would’ve happened if–

That is the writer side of me, more than anything. But the director and the producer cannot afford to be this way. They exist in the real world, in the here and now. They must be practical and active. They cannot daydream. They must do stuff. They must act. If they sit and think all day, nothing will happen. They cannot afford themselves the luxury of pure artistic flights of fancy. The producer is the one that wills a movie into being. The director creates the visual storytelling out of the written word, aided by his skill-specific crew, in the only art form to incorporate all other art forms, which is what makes it so fucking awesome.

Hype goes into production soon, leaving behind its ethereal existence on the page and making its way to the practical, technical, money-dependent universe we all inhabit.

And that’s the greatest leap of faith in the world.

The King and I

I love the books of Stephen King.

Maybe that’s not the most original literary or cultural statement out there, because, I mean, the guy has a lot of fans, and I’m sure it would’ve been much more impressive if I came here and told you that my favorite author is some unknown genius that I’ve discovered long ago and he’s my fun little secret. Well, that’s not the case here.

Because there’s no denying one simple fact: During the last 30 years, King has published 51 novels and short story collections, and I’ve read 26 of them. Now, that’s roughly half, and I’m sure there are far greater King afficionados out there than me, but the fact is that there is no other single writer of whom I’ve read so many books.

It took me some time to start reading King. As a kid, I was too frightened by his gruesome reputation, I guess… , but I think it was sometime in the early nineties when I picked up my first King, Gerald’s Game, one of his lesser known works but one of his most terrifying ones, and I was hooked ever since. To this day I think that Gerald’s Game is one of his best.
The Stand is an epic tale about the end of the world as we know it (Cell, one of his latest novels, a brilliant refelection on our cell-phone addicted society, reminds that classic in more ways than one). The Shining is a frightening piece about descent into madness, and It is a masterpiece about the pains and joys of childhood, with a shivers inducing twist.

Many have already said this before, but I feel I can’t write about King without saying that myself: The genius of this author is in his ability to weave the supernatural and the horrific into an everyday reality we all know and are able to identify. His stories do not take place in dark, grimy, cob webbed castles or in hunted forests, but in broad day light, usually in picturesqe American towns.
The real horror lies in the psyche, in the stuff men are able to do and dream of, in parallel realities just beyond our doorstep.
In his magnum opus,The Dark Tower, King plays the parallel reality idea to the hilt, along with countless influences ranging from Sergio Leone’s westerns to The Lord of The Rings books. It tells of a parallel world which at some point coalesces with our own and sends our heroes into an enormous quest.

The Dark Tower is super cool because it inhabits not only its own storyworld, but also many of King’s other stories, which, if you’re an avid King fan, makes for a lot of fun reading.
This series has its upside and downside. It is filled with amazing imagination and harrowing scenes (It is more Fantasy than Horror, but why pigeonhole it?), but it was not envisioned as a seven book series from the outset, meaning King basically made it all up as he went along – and sometimes it shows – But still, The Dark Tower is a wonder to behold. I wish I could make-up-as-I-go-along a story like this. 

Stephen King was in Toronto a few days ago as a guest of the Canadian Booksellers Association. The ceremony included some warm words from fellow writers Margaret Atwood and Clive Barker (who went up and spoke with such a husky voice, I wasn’t sure if it’s from cigarretes of if he just screamed all week at someone). Barker told of how Stephen King helped launch his career by calling his first short stories collection “The future of horror”. After that the both of them hugged. It was quite touching.

And then King went up for a one-on-one interview conducted by American writer Chuck Klosterman, which turned out to be poignant, informative and extremely funny. One only have to read a King book to know that the guy has a great sense of humor, but to see him on stage crack jokes is another thing entirely. After the interview was over, King recieved a life-achievment award, said a few words, and then it was over.
Here are some picturs (sorry about the blurriness…)

King gets his award…

…and the speech afterwards

Today King is probably the second most famous writer in the world (after J.K Rowling), and it was amazing to see the crowd’s enthusiasm when King entered the theatre. You could’ve thought we weren’t there to listen to an author speak of his work but to watch a rockstar doing his thing. King himself isn’t very comfortable with all of this, he admited, but he learned to accept it, and even enjoy it.

I think that a big part of Stephen King’s charm is his generosity and down-to-earth attitude. He doesn’t sit in his Ivory tower and looks down upon us mere humans, and he doesn’t carry himself with a dishonest humility. He knows he is good, but he knows that what he does is not some sort of humongous task that isn’t possible for others to tackle, and by that I don’t mean the fame but the success as a writer. One only needs to read his amazingly candid and inspiring work, On Writing – part autobiography (including the tale of his accident from 1999), part an unpretentious and extremely readable guide for the basics of writing fiction – to realize that.

It was really exciting and special to see and hear Stephen King in person. I don’t think even J.K Rolling has that – The ability to charm and entertain an audience to such a degree. In spite of what King says, I think he has some performer genes in him. He’s very good at it.

During the interview, he said that he’s not writing horror, but books. The reason his books are in the Horror section is ”they need to be arranged alphabetically somewhere”. I think there is some truth in it, but I also think that Stephen King has managed to tap the the human psyche in a way that few authors – or artists for that matter – has been able to do. His characters, even the minor ones, carry within them a psychological whirlpool of amazing versatility, including pop-references galore. When he’s at his best, Stephen King forces us to peel our eyes, forget about all the bullshit which dominates our world – both our inner world and our outer world – and through his characters, makes us peer into our souls and seek out the truth. And although the truth is sometimes unpleasent and usually scary, it can also be liberating.