An Author's Dilemma--You Write One, You've Written 'Em All?

Or maybe this is a reader's dilemma, I don't know.

I'm currently reading Pat Conroy's recent offering, South of Broad. Now, I am a huge fan of Mr. Conroy. Yeah, he's a little long-winded at times, but I have long been in awe of his skill with the craft of description. He uses words the way an artist uses a brush to paint a picture. Unbelievably gifted.

And yet I find myself very lukewarm about South of Broad. The worst part, though, is that I have a sneaking suspicion that not only am I going to be disappointed with this book itself but I'm going to find that it's ruined Conroy's other works for me ... and that would just be a shame.

I never realized before how similar all of Conroy's characters are; there is very little change from book to book beyond names, occupations, and who has almost irreperably betrayed whom. Even his sentence structure, his phrasing, his very word choice is alarmingly reminiscent of earlier works.

This, of course, begs the questions: at what point does an author realize that he or she is basically writing the same story over and over again? Some of them are okay with that (Danielle Steele comes to mind, although I would only refer to her as "author" in the very basest form) and others try to reinvent themselves (a la Dennis Lehane, who created a couple of very endearing protagonists then just left us hanging for a decade ... not that his other stuff isn't good, but I want to know what's up with Kenzie and Gennaro) while some admitted that they were only good for one book (Harper Lee ... Margaret Mitchell ...).

Even Stephen King, an author I believe to be the most gifted of the past century and arguably of all time, has an occasional sameness. Being King, he brilliantly incorporated this into his whole Dark Tower theory, but the fact remains that there are times (and with King it's minimal, but still ...) that the works become redundant.

Is redundancy okay? Am I being too hard on Mr. Conroy here? And, well, since my Swine Flu and I are going to sign off and go read the book, I guess it can't bother me as much as I think it does ;) It definitely gives me something to think about as a writer, though ... an area I hope to avoid, redundancy.

Stephen King's Fascinating Analogy to the Craft of Writing

It shouldn't be any secret to anyone that's read this blog with any sort of regularity that I'm a major Stephen King fan. Some may write him off as a sell-out and an example of someone with moderate talent being in the right place at the right time, but I would argue that he is the ultimate American writer of this generation. His writing is passionate, poignant, and prolific (sorry, we're on an alliteration kick in one of my classes :-)), and I predict that he will eventually be the subject of a required college course for English literature majors, much the way Shakespeare is.

But that's not my point.

I was rereading "The Body", a novella from the 1982 collection Different Seasons, and I found a quote that really resonated with me.

If you haven't read "The Body", by the way, the odds are still pretty good that you've seen Rob Reiner's Stand by Me, a film that comes fairly close to living up to King's story. In case you haven't, though, it's the tale of four small town boys in the throes of early adolescence heading off to locate the dead body of a boy who was lost in the woods while picking blueberries. Anyway, the main character and first-person narrator, Gordie LaChance, grows up to be a bestselling author. "The Body" is essentially a flashback of this particular adventure he had with his friends and how it shaped him into both a man and a writer. I can relate all too well to Gordie's friends constantly clamoring for him to tell one of his magical stories--although I don't write as well as King, my tales did a fair amount of entertaining my friends when I was growing up.

Perhaps that remembering, that curious mix of pride and shame, is what makes this excerpt echo so strongly in my mind:

"The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation--oh, I have a friend who has done things like write stories in the display windows of bookshops and department stores, but this is a man who is nearly crazy with courage, the kind of man you'd like to have with you if you just happened to fall down with a heart attack in a city where no one knew you. For me, it always wants to be sex and always falls short--it's always that adolescent handjob in the bathroom with the door locked."

I hope nobody is too offended by the sexual references there, but King (writing as "Gordie LaChance", of course, but many of King's protagonists are writers, so I think that inferences can certainly be made) seems to capture the essence of writing as a craft there.

What do you think? Is writing intensely private? Is it hard to share? Do you wish you could share with all your heart, but somehow it's too much? Is comparing the act of writing to the act of sex apt? Is there a better analogy to be made?

I'm not sure, but I do know that this quote (not in its entirety, of course, but I knew the gist--and the text of "The Body"--well enough to find it pretty easily) came almost unbidden to my mind when I got thinking about what to blog about.

That must mean something : )