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Recent Updates:
I have one signing left for the Spring, this one at Sumrall Public Library in Sumrall, Mississippi, on April 25th. After that, I’ll be planning and scheduling my Summer events. To stay up to date, follow me on Facebook.
Project Progress:
I’ve gotten all of my beta feedback for HUM, and am going to start going through those edits once I finish the first round of editing on Book 2 of Calarine.
Speaking of, I’m about 70% through this initial round of edits of Book 2. Steady progress!
A wildflower along the sidewalk in Jackson, Mississippi. Photo by the Author.
Recent Fascinations | The Fiction Books that Made Me #4: The Stand by Stephen King
Want to understand what this series is? Go Here
“No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become.”
It is at this point we have entered the realm of the uncontested. From this point forward, meaning this post and the three to follow it, I am no longer just arguing for a book’s influence on myself, but for a status of literal perfection. These four books, to me, are all absolutely perfect. There is, also, a connective theme across all of them both as books and their influence on me as a writer, which we’ll see as we walk through them. It is fitting, then, that we begin this run of books with not only another novel from Stephen King, but perhaps the most controversial of these four books I could give the “perfect” label to.
THE STAND, especially the Unabridged and Uncut edition, is infamously long. There are, of course, a fair number of people who would say it is TOO long. They are, I’m sorry to tell them, wrong.
The length of THE STAND is both what makes it a perfect novel to me AND what led to it having such a strangle hold over me as a writer. I fell in love with the characters of the story immediately. I don’t care that it’s 1200 pages long, and I often wish it was 1200 pages longer. Those characters live and breathe in a way that I have seldom seen in other books (except the books ahead of it on this list). Without the book’s length, the characters, and in turn the entire story, would not have the time to settle so deep into the reader’s bones. For the people whom the book works with, it works BECAUSE of its length.
As a writer, though, it wasn’t the characters that so deeply pulled me into THE STAND, but the way that they interacted with the story. The characters in THE STAND make bad decisions. They are selfish and foolish and idiotic and sometimes all three. Still, though, they remain fundamentally human, real, and relatable. Even the most broken of the villains (Oh Trashcan Man, can you hear him, yes you can), is a character with a reality that surrounds him all his own. When I first read this book in 2020, I was in the middle of grad school and taking a break from writing long-form fiction. A year later, though, when I started the project that eventually became BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS, THE STAND hung effervescent in my mind. More than once when working through a foolish decision from one of my characters, I was reminded of the essential craft lesson of THE STAND.
Sometimes, despite our better efforts, people are stupid.
That isn’t meant to be some revelatory statement, to be clear. It is very obvious, more so everyday, that people are often very stupid. However, many writers, myself included, often veer toward making our characters, our protagonists, hyper-competent. As part of this, we often get stuck in a loop of trying to find the BEST way for a character to resolve a conflict, instead of the most realistic. And, sometimes, the most realistic result is for even our best characters to fuck up and make a mess of the entire situation.
And sometimes, if we are especially lucky, those messes make our stories even more interesting.
Thanks for reading.
