Well, his writing tends to be a little dense. Remember, the average reading level of America is about fourth grade. I think this is one reason why Michael Chabon isn’t more popular - that fucker sends me running for a dictionary five or six times each page.
But, I believe genius is an appropriate label.
This is probably a good idea, but King’s memoir isn’t really so Englishy. It’s more about his process and how it developed. He goes into his office at nine and revises his writing until about ten, and then, he says, his muse shows up. He says his muse is a short, fat, bald guy that smokes a cigar, and if he goes down every morning at nine, the muse shows up at ten. If he misses an appointment, the muse takes a few days off.
It’s a little more like Annie Dillard’s “Writing Life” than a text book, and I don’t remember him talking much about structure, more about process.
Many of the great screenwriters make the point that author (novel) plus screenwriter plus director is greater than the sum of their parts. I wonder about the message getting muddied by to many chefs, and while I didn’t think THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER was necessarily a great novel, or a great movie, Stephen Chbosky wrote the novel, the screenplay, and directed the movie.
At some point you may need to embrace structure, certainly if you want to be commercially successful, which you stated isn’t important to you, and I get. Teaching Comp is going to get mind numbingly boring for you, trust me. You’ll want to publish enough to teach Creative Writing.
You may find this article interesting.
I saw myself in his description of many of the students. In thirteen classes, I saw maybe two or three people that could actually write. I know that is condemnation of the program I attended, but one of our textbooks was by a chick that went to UCSC and her experience was similar. I know UCI will be different, but, you’ll see people that you can tell don’t really belong, trust me.
Remember, we want to write because we like to read, but, because our ability to read is far ahead of our ability to write, we think, often, that our writing sucks.
But, it doesn’t - it’s just a shitty first draft. However, I saw a lot of students that couldn’t revise for shit, and, after all, good writing is rewriting.
Bro, you got me off on a rant, my apologies.
I loved it, would definitely do it again, and my program wasn’t near the quality of UCI (Anteaters/Zots).
Anyhoo, sorry to get so far into left field.
I have family near New Bern, and in Durham. Where are (were) you?
I spend my summers in Santa Cruz, you’ll love California.