My life in books 2

Last week I posted "My life in books 1" and the start of this tale. I loved hearing about everyone's first favourite books! If you haven't yet, go back and join the conversation.

As my friend Nicole (an old friend, who perhaps knows too much about me) mentioned in those comments, there was one book in particular I had to put face down in a closed drawer before I could sleep.

When I was very young I found It in my dad's bookcase. It was that cover, above on the left. The cover unsettled me. Later, when I read it, I bought myself a version that had Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown on the cover. You guessed it-- this was the book that had to be locked up at night.

It terrified me. I loved it. I had no idea horror could be so fun. I was too young, maybe twelve years old when I read the "bonding" scene at the end. (If you've read it you know what I mean. What do you think: what's "too young?") I moved right on to The Tommyknockers, Salem's Lot, Nightmares & Dreamscapes. Eventually something occurred to me: it wasn't the horror on its own that was so great. His movies prove it. The films that focus on the scary elements are usually bad-- really bad-- and the ones that focus on the characters (Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Stand By Me, Dolores Claiborne, Apt Pupil) are so good it's difficult to convince non-King-fans that they're based on his stories. His stuff has depth, and maybe it's sometimes missed in the thrill of the story, but it's there, no question.

I bought The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon for my mom, to try to justify my long obsession. She read it in a night, remarked with surprise that he was actually very good, and in return read and recommended On Writing, which has become one of my favourite writing books. Whatever readers might think of Stephen King, most writers agree that he knows a lot about good writing, that he didn't arrive where he is on luck alone, and that there's something to be learned there, something important. I'm one of that crowd. But I may be more unique in having absorbed his more worrying stories at a somewhat worrying age, and whether I consider the result "scarred" or just "tweaked," it's permanent.

Actually, I like that. King "tweaked" me. Thank you, King.

I've never considered it before, but I guess I might have been one of those kids who people worry about, saying, "She reads a lot, but all she reads is crap."

It's true that I've never been a book snob. If a book was referred to as "Literary," I often snobbishly preferred something else. (I know.) But at some point a few books broke through that bias. First of all I read Oscar & Lucinda in preparation for the film and fell completely, irretrievably in love. Further proof, if I needed it, that it's the characters that make the book.  In university I studied a minor in English Literature and was force-fed classic Atwood until I finally read The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx & Crake on my own and realized how great they were, and how great is that?, to write a book like that, a well-crafted character-driven story about a possible future, sci-fi and more? And a boyfriend lent me Slaughterhouse 5 and I finally understood genius, and felt a little cheated because I knew that wasn't me. (The boyfriend later became my husband, but I'm sure it wasn't just about Vonnegut... probably.)

Literary books don't have to be misery. A book doesn't need a genre label to be fascinating, imaginative, and insane. I had to learn this, just like some people have to learn that a book doesn't need to win an award to be brilliant. A story needs to stand on its own no matter the biases stamped onto it by the publisher, the bookstore, whoever. As a writer this lesson is gold.

So I learned it. And then I knew my imagination was limitless. I knew I could write my own books, my own stories, whatever they were. Like much of life when you're just out of high school, floating in the murk of pure university "wisdom," everything seemed limitless. Freedom was absolute. That's great, and it's also, um, really confusing. What I really needed, to be frank, were guidelines.

Anyone else get a little lost in the freedom of it all when they began taking their writing seriously?

Next time on "My life in books:" No more Miss Nice Writer! And I start to tell the truth.