Book Review: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King My rating: 4 of 5 stars

96.9 percent loved this. I may even knock it up to "It was amazing" as its treasure trove of advice sinks in.

Here's the thing: Stephen King knows how to tell a story. From the early to late 80s- junior high through mid-university- I read nearly everything he'd written. His novels are the only of the horror-genre that I've read; it's never been my cup of tea, either in print or film, but King's writing is a cut above. He is the literary equivalent of Bruce Springsteen. I don't own a Springsteen album, but when I hear one of his songs, from any era, I know I am hearing pure genius. Story-telling genius.

I believe King's mainstream success has little to do with his ability to scare the bejesus out of his readers and everything to do with the emotional chords he twangs with his characters, his dialogue, his everyman dilemmas that arise from the most bizarre circumstances. As he counsels in On Writing, don't worry about writing what you know, write what you love to read. So, King loves sci-fi and scary stuff. And he is able to write about with such astonishing skill that even the most avowed detractor of popular fiction is held captive by his pen.

This writing guide is divided in two parts. In the first, King takes you through his hard-scrabble childhood, focusing on the events that shaped him as a writer. I enjoyed the heck out of this. He recounts his past in a sweet, sad, funny, and completely natural voice. I didn't know anything about his personal life, which included years as an alcoholic and coke addict.

Then he turns to offer practical writing advice, which can be summed up as: Read A LOT; Write A LOT; Create a space of your own; Blow up your television; Use the active voice; Limit adverbs; Watch out for dialogue attribution; and, above all, Write stories. Not plots. Not themes. Just Stories. King believes that if you have a good story, the rest - character development, plot, theme- will take care of itself. King presents his advice with such clarity and conviction that you believe it's all possible.

I have to contrast this concise set of advice with another masterful work on the art of storytelling: Robert McKee's Story. McKee's guide is 466 pages. I took a couple of months to read Story and used a ream of post-its to mark the meaningful passages. McKee's approach is the antithesis of King's. He advocates careful plotting and sub-plotting, character studies, outlines, and a tried-and-true structure that respects the desires of the audience. True, McKee writes about the craft of scriptwriting, but his directives are relevant to literary stories, as well.

As different as these two approaches are- King's organic, McKee's structured- their bottom line is identical: Write stories that people want to read.

King loathes adverbs. This hits home because I am decidedly guilty (see!) of using adverbs copiously (see!!). I've just finished reading James Joyce's The Dead, which is often cited as the best short story ever written (and lauded by King). Here is its last sentence:

"His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Delicious irony. Well, to adverb or not to adverb? Only one way to find out...

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Champagne: How the World's Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times by Don and Petie Kladstrup

La Champagne, the region in northwestern France that is home to the world's most celebrated wine - 'le champagne'- has ever been at the crossroads of European history. In contrast to its rightful claim of a wine of superlative clarity, joy and finesse, it has been the site of some of the bloodiest battles of ancient and modern times.

Don and Petie Kladstrup's lovely and heartbreaking book encapsulates an enormous stretch of history into 300 wonderfully readable pages. The authors originally intended to focus solely on the role of La Champagne during WWI and this crushing war does indeed receive most of the attention. But the Kladstrups realized as they began their research that the story of 'le champagne' could not be told properly without the historical context that defined the region it calls home.

They are quick to dispel the myth of Dom Pérignon- a 17th century monk and cellarmaster- as the father of champagne. Dom Pierre was a fantastically skilled winemaker who presided over the vines and vats of the abbey at Hautvillers. He established some of the earliest winemaking standards that laid the foundation for France's system of delimited wine zones or appellations contrôlées. But the inventor of la méthode Champenoise? Je crois pas, moi! Our monk of Hautvillers endeavored his whole life to stop the process that turned still wine to sparkling. It wasn't until the late 18th century that the process was fully understood and pursued with dedication and precision. It was the marketing genius of the champagne house Moët and Chandon that led to the image of a blind monk tasting sparkling wine for the first time and declaring "I have tasted stars."

The Kladstrups could have taken a few moments to tell the rest of the story- that the process for creating a sparkling wine was indeed invented by monks in the early 16th century, but far to the south at the Abbey of Saint-Hilaire in the town of Limoux, deep in the Languedoc. Silvery-brisk, clean, ravishing Blanquette de Limoux is rightfully the world's first sparkling wine and remains a treasure- at about 1/4 the price of a fine champagne.

I also wish the authors has given just a page or two to explaining how champagne is made. It is hinted at in Dom Pérignon's efforts to stop secondary fermentation in the bottle and his championing of blending wines, at the Cliquot invention of rémuage, at the process of chaptalization, at Pasteur's unraveling the mysteries of yeasts, but they never give the full, fascinating picture of the champagne process. Perhaps this is important only to a wine geek, but it goes a long way to explaining why champagne is so celebrated and so darn expensive.

At the heart of this book is a celebration of France and of its resilient and graceful citizens. Every so often, when France and the United States disagree over a grave matter of foreign policy, I hear grumblings of the cowardice of the French and their reluctance to contribute resources to a military effort. I say those grumblers are in need of a history lesson. Here's a brief one: "Thirteen million lives had been lost in the Great War, with France having suffered the most proportionately. More than one and half million of its soldiers had been killed. Another three million were disabled, one million of them permanently. A whole generation had been practically wiped out." (p.213). This was France in 1918. Twenty years later the shadow of war fell upon it again. Now, please tell me why this proud and beautiful nation should have to justify its trepidation to anyone.

Le champagne, the wine that tastes of starlight and joy, is more than a drink. It is a history, a culture, a story of love and loss; it is a phoenix rising from the rubble of war. Champagne is hands-down the perfect food wine. There is no dish, from omelets to osso bucco, Tarte Tatin to turkey, pizza to pancakes, that wouldn't taste all the more delicious accompanied by a flute of France's finest.