Another King and “Fairy Tale”

The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll plays a big part in my unpublished novel, but today I want to talk a little about another King. Stephen King.

I’ve read lots of Stephen King novels going all the way back to The Stand. If I had to choose, I’d say he’s among my favorite reads. Those massive books are my not-so-guilty pleasure.

But nowadays, after a couple of years writing, rewriting, editing and editing and editing my own creative work, I’ve become hyper-conscious not only about the craft of novel structure, but of mistakes on the page. Even in a big-time published Stephen King book.

I’m reading one of his latest. It’s called Fairy Tale. It’s quite different, not a pure horror story like The Shining, more of a grim—very grim—Grimm’s Fairy Tale coming-of-age story. 600 pages you can’t put down. That’s Stephen King.

But here’s the thing, Mr. King. I’ve noticed a few items the editors and proofreaders at Scribner/Simon & Schuster should have picked up. For one thing, redundant or duplicative narratives or timeline non-sequiturs.

Hampers and baskets, oh my!

At one point in the story, the teenage main character is entering a once-glorious ancient city, now overridden by demons and monsters. Charlie comes upon a deserted, rundown plaza, the entryway into a sports arena. He imagines the people in better times laughing as they arrived, “carrying lunches in hampers or baskets.”

Several pages later when Charlie re-enters this area he again imagines the people who once streamed in “carrying baskets of food …” Baskets again. Like a Harry & David assortment, maybe?

Later in the tale, one of his captors (Charlie is imprisoned for a time and forced to fight in the arena) warns him, “Next time you fight a friend.” Just three paragraphs later, another captor says to him, “Next time you’ll fight one of your friends.”

Elsewhere, Charlie’s character recalls going to see the Chicago White Sox at “Guaranteed Rate Field.” Only problem is, this story takes place in 2013 and the old Comiskey Park was called U.S. Cellular Field in 2013. It didn’t become Guaranteed Rate Field until 2016, three years after the time frame of this novel.

And so on.

Word count woes

Maybe it’s just what happens when you publish a 150,000-word, 600-page book. But I get it. My first draft was bloated out in well above Stephen King word count territory. It took many months to wrestle it down to size, redundancies and mistakes and all.

In editing later iterations of my book, I’ve combed through the manuscript line by line, to make sure I didn’t use or overuse the same phrases or wordings or include any historical inaccuracies.

The Maine thing

Something you gotta love about Stephen King novels: Maine. The mysterious state “Down East” is often a character in itself in his books.

But Fairy Tale takes place in Illinois (at least until the “fairy tale” begins). And yet, early in the story, the main character refers to going to the basement of a house as, “down cellar.” That’s a Maine/New England phrase if you ever heard one, and I doubt that Charlie from Illinois would say that.

Another unique term in Fairy Tale is “spandy clean.” Not sure I’d ever heard that one in conversation, but I think it also appeared in the last Stephen King book I read as well, The Institute.

Writing killed reading

My only point here is that, for me, writing a novel seems to have killed the spontaneity of reading novels. I can’t help doing internal proofreading in my head. If something on the page feels off, it stops me cold.

Like when I was re-reading the novel Sharp Objects recently, and the narrator, supposedly a reporter, kept referring to going “off-record” and “on-record” with a source. My entire career I understood the phrase to be “off THE record” and “on THE record,” so that small thing disrupted my sense of believability. I never heard anybody say, “off record.”

Okay, now that I’m on the record with all that, I’ll just go back to obsessing over my own manuscript, making sure I don’t dare rock the jailhouse multiple times in the narrative or have anyone step on someone’s blue suede shoes more than once in any given chapter.