The Man Behind Stephen King's Throne

Writer Stephen King makes much of the importance of the Ideal Reader (in his case, wife Tabitha King) in his memoir On Writing, but he doesn’t talk much about his reliance on his good right hand.

King’s hand is Russ Dorr, a mild-mannered physician’s assistant who has been at Sir Stephen’s side since just after Carrie came out in 1974. I ran into Mr. Dorr last month as part of the New Hampshire Writers Project’s annual “Writer’s Day.” Dorr and King hooked up when the author fell ill and came in for a doctor’s appointment. They hit it off, and King asked Dorr for some advice about a book he was writing (a super flu kills 98 percent of the population and spawns dueling religious cults). More consultations followed.

“He’d write a book -- it would be his first draft – and he’d ask me to take a look at it,” Dorr said. “We started with the manuscript typed. He’d give it to me, and I’d read it. And I’d make corrections or suggestions. Then he’d do a second draft, and the book would be published.”

The First Fifty Minutes

It’s 6:30 a.m., and, coffee in hand, I open my classroom door to the world. The first representative in is Rufus, the math guy. He comes in at 6:45 every day, sits in the same place, and turns to something arcane in his AP Calculus Book.

I lift the latch on my carefully hoarded extroversion. “’Morning, man. What’s the good word?” 

 “What?” Rufus says.

“The word. Good day. Bad day. Cosine. Plastic …”

“Good day.” He returns to his math.

On my way to the first of two pre-bell bathroom visits (ninety-minutes can be a mighty long time) I run into Brenna. “Mr. Greene, do we need exactly 600 words for the first draft?”

Wicked Busy

Readers of this blog may have noticed that, in recent months, I’ve shifted from weekly posts to bi-weekly posts. HAVE NO FEAR: I will resume weekly posting, post haste. I have been, in the parlance of my people, wicked busy and have had to pick and choose where to allot energy. Likely, I will remain busy (better besieged than bored, I always say), but I expect to be riding the wave soon rather than clawing my way through it.

Several recent projects have come to at least semi-fruition:

How to Review (Anything) Books

     A review has three parts, made up of at least three paragraphs. Part one is the summary of content, part two is the critical assessment, and part three is the answer to the Big Question.

     The summary of content is generally one to three paragraphs long. In this part of the review, you tell the reader what you are reviewing, who made it (including some other things they may have made), what genre and subgenres the thing represents and what the thing is generally about. Important: This is not a summary. You are writing a review to let people know whether or not they should try it, not to tell them the ending. Don’t be a spoiler!

The Seven-Day Novel (or, I'm Getting too Old for This)

The Writing Workshop, a club I advise at Nashua High South, will be writing a novel(ish) in seven days next week. Here's the outline we came up with. The novel will come together (in a publicly accessible Google Doc) on Friday, April 27 (noon to four) if you care to tune into the creative process. I'll send the document link out closer to the day. On Friday, I’ll randomly assign each of my young protagonists a chapter.

When all is said and done – cover designed, text “edited,” and blurbs written (likely by Saturday, April 28) – we’ll release the thing under a Creative Commons license and throw it up on Amazon Kindle and various other places.

Thanks to John Herman for sparking the idea. Here's the plan ...

Books for Writers: Doubting The Diezmo

 Rick Bass is an award-winning writer, an avid outdoorsman and a dedicated environmental activist. My kind of guy.

Bass' 2005 novel The Diezmo is a mostly fictional account of the Mier Expedition, a 1842 military incursion into Mexico by soldiers from the then-independent nation of Texas. In the story, two young yokels answer the call of duty and glory and join the militia to teach the Mexicans what happens when they mess with San Antonio. More than 500 riders went south; less than 70 stumbled back. (This we learn in the first chapter: no spoilers.)

Books for Writers (and readers): The Suburbs of Heaven

                I fell right into the world Merle Drown created in The Suburbs of Heaven; two dozen years ago I might have lived there myself. In the book, published in 200o, Drown writes about blue-collar, semi-rural New Hampshire, a place I feel I know well. True, my own upbringing took place in blue-collar, semi-rural Maine, but my real-life folk and Drown’s creations are all Yankees under the skin. Yankees are hardy folks, and we do what we need to put food on the table, gas in our trucks, and women in our beds.

The Creativity Equation

I teach creative writing at a large public school, and there's not a day that goes by when I don't hear one student or other whinge about “not being creative” or not knowing “what to write about.” On those occasions I give them my patent-pending Creativity Equation: Character A plus Situation B equals Story, which is greater than the sum of A plus B, or A+B=S>A+B.

This equation falls under the nonlinear algebraic subgroup “magic math,” which most students are not familiar with. So, I dumb it down to an axiom: Creativity is the ability to link two points into a not-yet existent third. 

It Feels Like the Very First Time

     I worked as a print journalist for more than a decade — first as a reporter, then as an editor —writing for everything from start-ups to established papers with circulations in the tens of thousands.  I estimate I’ve written 1,000 to 2,000 articles, columns, and editorials. I won some journalism awards at the state and regional level.

     I’m a writer. I can put a sentence together, and I used that skill to pay my bills and buy my beer for at least a quarter of my life. Every week I put my name on work and stuck it in the public eye. No muss, no fuss, no stress.

This Post Could Save Your Life

It snowed today, not an unusual occurrence in New England, but the first real accumulation since the freak October “Snowpocolypse” that left thousands of my neighbors without power and caused a four-day shutdown of the school system that employs me.

This storm’s timing was good. The public schools were already out for February break, so the resulting half foot of snow only caused a couple of hundred closings of various kinds. Traffic rolled on and most folks made it to work, albeit a little late. I went out to shovel twice, drank a lot of tea, napped, and hung out with my spouse, who opted to take the day off.

It could have been worse; it has been and likely will be again. That fact, and my recent perusal of William Forstchen’s EMP-disaster novel, One Second After, got me thinking, again, about my household’s disaster readiness.