Originally Posted: September 13th, 2019

Steven King’s On Writing

I've been re-reading Stephen King's excellent On Writing, and thinking about what I want this silly little blog to become. I have pigeonholed myself as an Apple fan and critic, but my interests are wider than that. There are tons of people who do it better than I can. John Gruber, Jason Snell, Kara Swisher, Matthew Panzarino, Lauren Goode, Joanna Stern, Rene Richie — just to name a few.

Here's to not coming lightly to the blank page

Writing doesn't have to be any one thing. I don't need to write obsessively about Apple's every move (Although, I do have a piece on the iPhone 11 I have been chewing on for a few days. That will come later.) For now, I am focused on the miracle of writing. Because writing is telepathy. Mr. King puts it down on the page better than I can.

My name is Stephen King. I’m writing the first draft of this part at my desk on a snowy morning in December of 1997. There are things on my mind. Some are worries, some are good things, but right now all that stuff is up top. I’m in another place, a basement place where there are lots of bright lights and clear images. This is a place I’ve built for myself over the years. It’s a far-seeing place. I know it’s a little strange, a little bit of a contradiction, that a far-seeing place should also be a basement place, but that’s how it is with me. If you construct your own far-seeing place, you might put it in a treetop or on the roof of the World Trade Center or on the edge of the Grand Canyon. That’s your little red wagon, as Robert McCammon says in one of his novels.

This book is scheduled to be published in the late summer or early fall of 2000. If that’s how things work out, then you are somewhere downstream on the timeline from me... but you’re quite likely in your own far-seeing place, the one where you go to receive telepathic messages. Not that you have to be there; Books are a uniquely portable magic.

So let’s assume that you’re in your favorite receiving place just as I am in the place where I do my best transmitting. We’ll have to perform our mentalist routine not just over distance but over time as well, yet that presents no real problem; if we can still read Dickens, Shakespeare, and (with the help of a footnote or two) Herodotus, I think we can manage the gap between 1997 and 2000. And here we go—actual telepathy in action. You’ll notice I have nothing up my sleeves and that my lips never move. Neither, most likely, do yours.

I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We’re not even in the same year together, let alone the same room... except we are together. We’re close. We’re having a meeting of the minds.

We’ve engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy. I’m not going to belabor the point, but before we go any further you have to understand that I’m not trying to be cute; there is a point to be made. You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.