Alec Nevala-Lee

Today is my birthday, which normally would mean a day off, but not this year—I’ve got about four months to deliver the sequel to The Icon Thief, so every writing day counts. Still, I’m looking forward to a celebratory dinner tonight, as well as a chance to reflect on the events of twelve highly eventful months, more than half of which, amazingly, have been spent on this blog. I hope you’ll agree that we’ve come a long way from my first post at the end of November, and I’ve been gratified to get so many regular visitors and perceptive comments. Thanks, everyone!

Also, in case you haven’t heard yet, I have some fairly big news: The Icon Thief is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. There isn’t a lot on the page at the moment—no cover art or description, for instance—but there is a release date: March 6, 2012. I’ve just confirmed with my publisher that this is, in fact, the real thing, so you can go ahead and mark your calendars. You could even buy it right now, although the estimated shipping date is ten long months away. And in any event, it’s cause for celebration. (All credit to Cake Wrecks for the photo above.)

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.

—Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew…

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.

—J.K. Rowling, in a commencement address at Harvard University

In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas’s Pilgrimage: “Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.” The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan; Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment”

I was sitting writing at my textbook but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold confirmation: long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the rest of the hypothesis. Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, then perhaps we shall find the truth… But let us beware of publishing our dreams till they have been tested by waking understanding.

—Friedrich August Kekulé, on his discovery of the ring structure of benzene

It would be nice to claim that the clinky xylophone-like accompaniment of “Little Things” is meant to reflect the brittle hollowness of Joanne and her fellow sophisticates, but in fact it’s the result of where I wrote it: on the Queen Mary during my one transatlantic boat trip. I was en route to deliver the first few songs to Hal Prince, who was shooting a movie in Bavaria, and since ocean liners, like the plays and musicals I had grown up with, were on the way out, I decided to travel in the old glamorous fashion. The purser arranged for me to have a small salon room, complete with piano, so that I could work while I traveled, assuaging my guilt over such luxurious time-wasting. But the ship kept listing to starboard and I unwittingly kept sliding toward it on the piano bench, resulting in a preponderance of treble plinks. Thus is insightful art produced.

—Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat

“More books have been written about [Lincoln] than any figure in human history, with the possible exception of Jesus Christ.”

The photo above was taken three years ago by my then girlfriend, now wife, at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. I didn’t get to go, alas—I was living in New York at the time—but the museum, as I was endlessly informed over the next few days, is tons of fun, with elaborate dioramas of the White House, Ford’s Theater, and other family-friendly attractions, including life-size figures of the entire Lincoln clan. When I saw the text of the plaque above, though, I was outraged, for reasons that might seem hard to understand at first. Here’s my verbatim response, at least as well as I can remember: “What about Napoleon?” I demanded. “What about Napoleon?”

You see, I like Napoleon. I like him a lot. Twenty or so books about Napoleon line my shelves, and I’m always on the lookout for more, the older and more adulatory, the better. Why? Emerson’s essay from Representative Men provides a decent starting point, but the short answer is that Napoleon is the most fascinating person I know in world history—”among the most perceptive, penetrating, retentive, and logical minds ever seen in one who was predominantly a man of action,” as Will Durant nicely puts it. He’s the foremost figure of Western history, a man who, for all his flaws, embodies more than any other individual the limits of human energy, intelligence, and ambition. And I was pretty sure that more books had been written about him than anyone else, including Lincoln.

And yet here’s the thing. Napoleon came from almost nothing, and became emperor of Europe. At his coronation, he took the crown out of the Pope’s hands and placed it on his own head. He was, by almost any measure, the most purely productive human being who ever lived. But these days, all that most people could say about Napoleon, if they recognized the name at all, was that he was a short little guy with a funny hat. (Not that short, by the way: he was 5 feet, 7 inches, or roughly the height of Tom Cruise.) That’s what time does: it reduces even the most monumental figures into caricatures of themselves. Two centuries is all it took to turn the leading light of Western civilization to Ian Holm in Time Bandits. It will happen to Lincoln, too, if it hasn’t already happened.

Napoleon, of course, isn’t alone. I was recently reminded of this whole kerfuffle while reading Dean Simonton’s Origins of Genius, inspired by the Malcolm Gladwell article I mentioned last week. Simonton mentions the work of the psychologist James McKeen Cattell, who, back in 1903, made one of the first systematic attempts to rank the thousand most eminent men in history—there were hardly any women on his list—by toting up mentions in major biographical dictionaries and tabulating the results. Here’s his top hundred:

Napoleon, Shakespeare, Mohammed, Voltaire, Bacon, Aristotle, Goethe, Julius Caesar, Luther, Plato, Napoleon III, Burke, Homer, Newton, Cicero, Milton, Alexander the Great, Pitt, Washington, Augustus, Wellington, Raphael, Descartes, Columbus, Confucius, Penn, Scott, Michelangelo, Socrates, Byron, Cromwell, Gautama, Kant, Leibnitz, Locke, Demosthenes, Mary Stuart [the only woman on the list], Calvin, Moliere, Lincoln, Louis Philippe, Dante, Rousseau, Nero, Franklin, Galileo, Johnson, Robespierre, Frederick the Great, Aurelius, Hegel, Petrarch, Horace, Charles V (Germany), Mirabeau, Erasmus, Virgil, Hume, Guizot, Gibbon, Pascal, Bossuet, Hobbes, Swift, Thiers, Louis XIV, Wordsworth, Louis XVI, Nelson, Henry VIII, Addison, Thucydides, Fox, Racine, Schiller, Henry IV (France), W. Herschel, Tasso, Jefferson, Ptolemy, Claudius, Augustine, Pope, Machiavelli, Swedenborg, Philip II, Leonardo da Vinci, George III, Julian, Pythagoras, Macaulay, Rubens, Burns, Mozart, Humboldt, Comte, Cousin, Cuvier, Justinian, Euripides, Camoens.

Now, much of this list remains unimpeachable. The top ten, in particular, would presumably be very similar today, though Bacon would probably give place to Newton, and we’d need to find room for Einstein and, yes, Lincoln. (Also, hopefully, for some women. The only other women, besides Mary Queen of Scots, to make Cattell’s top two hundred were Elizabeth and Joan of Arc, although, at this rate, it’s only a matter of time before we see Sarah Palin.) But with all due respect to my French readers, when I see names like Guizot, Bossuet, Thiers, Comte, and Cousin, among others, my only response is a blank stare. And this is coming from someone who loves Napoleon.

All in all, though, Cattell’s list reminds us how quickly even major reputations can fade. (For an even more sobering reminder, look no further than the bottom of his top thousand. Fauriel, Enfantin, Babeuf, anyone?) And I have no doubt that a contemporary list of the top hundred figures in history, like this one, will look equally strange to a reader a century from now. Just because you made the list once, it seems, doesn’t mean you’ll stay there.

We often talk about the three B’s, the Bus, the Bath, and the Bed. That is where the great discoveries are made in our science.

—An unnamed physicist, to Wolfgang Köhler

As long as we’re on the subject of ensembles, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the best ensemble sitcom of the decade, and arguably the best television show of any kind: Arrested Development. Like most people, I caught up with this series long after it had been canceled, and for a while, I was reluctant to try it, mostly because it was clear to me that this was a writer’s show, with elaborate plots and storylines, which are usually deadly to comedy. I couldn’t have been more wrong, of course: once I finally gave it a chance, thanks to its availability on Hulu, I discovered that this is the rare series that successfully blends comedy, farce, and surrealism into a flawless whole. And while Arrested Development remains so singular a series that it turned out to be difficult—even for its creator, Mitch Hurwitz—to apply its lessons elsewhere, it’s still tempting to ask how the show does what it does.

Granted, nothing ruins a joke like explaining it, and Arrested Development can hardly be reduced to a set of rules. Still, it’s possible to gently examine the roots of the show’s appeal. First off, it has a strong cast playing extraordinary characters, all of whom compete fiercely and successfully for the viewer’s attention. It’s worth emphasizing how unusual this is: in most ensemble shows, not every character is equally compelling, but in Arrested Development, everyone in the primary cast is ridiculously watchable, and even among the scores of recurring characters, there’s barely a dud (except perhaps Martin Short’s painfully unfunny Uncle Jack). And as the AV Club’s Steve Heisler recently pointed out, the enormous cast works, from a dramatic perspective, because each character has a clearly defined selfish agenda. (I once used The Godfather as an illustration of how large casts need to be defined by their objectives, but Arrested Development may be an even better example.)

Second, this is an incredibly organized show. One reason that Arrested Development struggled to find an audience is that it makes the viewer work, or at least pay attention, in a way that other sitcoms don’t. As David Mamet likes to point out, you can tune into a show like Friends halfway through and know, within seconds, what the story is. Arrested Development is the exception: it asks us to keep track of a huge cast, an intricate ongoing plot, and throwaway gags that often don’t become clear until after multiple viewings of an entire season. This isn’t entirely unprecedented: The Simpsons did it for many years. But it took The Simpsons at least three seasons to ramp up to its peak velocity, while Arrested Development hit the ground running. And, as in most great shows, form is inseparable from content: it was the first sitcom to use the now-popular documentary format, but so far, it’s the only one to use that form (with cutaway shots, archive footage, and above all Ron Howard’s terrific narration) to increase the density of information that the viewer can process.

Third, and perhaps most crucially, the show used its exceptional cast and innovative narrative techniques to tell strong, emotionally grounded stories. True, the emotion usually only crept in at the last minute of each episode, but as writers on The Simpsons like to point out, fifteen seconds of sentiment is often all you need, while two minutes is probably too much. Arrested Development‘s greatest achievement lies in making you care, weirdly, about the characters: Will Arnett’s work as Gob stands as a master class in turning a gloriously unsympathetic character into someone easy to love. The result was a show that, for all its frenetic pacing, was also willing to take its time when it counted—for instance, in the slow burn of Charlize Theron’s arc as Rita, Michael’s mysterious girlfriend, which took five episodes to build to an unforgettable conclusion. And for all its imitators, it stands alone. There may or may not be a movie; Mitch Hurwitz may never have a chance to make a show this good again. But he did it once. And that’s enough to ensure his immortality.

In the meantime, though, here’s some Tobias:

I prefer a giant dose of bullshit any day over the truth.

—Lady Gaga

On Friday, my wife and I finally caught Bridesmaids, which is a classic example of energy and a star-making performance (by the sensational Kristen Wiig) bringing out the best in a formulaic, if nimble, script. It also benefits, like most films from the Judd Apatow factory, from a remarkably deep bench of supporting actors, including Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Ellie Kemper, Jill Clayburgh, and Jon Hamm. The ensemble is so good, in fact, and has the potential to pair off its actors in so many surprising ways, that it’s something of a disappointment when the movie starts to focus exclusively on Wiig. We’re given a couple of scenes with the bridal party as a whole, but they all occur in the movie’s first half, and we’re never given the sort of inspired, inexorable comic set piece that the chemistry of the cast might have led us to expect. (Perhaps that will have to wait for the inevitable sequel.)

The movie’s decision to shy away from its supporting cast—the characters played by Ellie Kemper and Wendi McLendon-Covey, in particular, all but disappear in the third act—is a puzzling one, both because of the thrust of the marketing and because ensembles, especially in comedy, can result in unforgettable moments. Many of the recent films in the Apatow universe have revolved around putting a bunch of funny actors onscreen, rolling a lot of film, and hoping that something great happens. And occasionally it does. This is especially true of in television: even a mediocre episode of The Office, for instance, is usually worth watching for the sake of the cast, which retains a lot of viewer goodwill and still yields unexpected combinations. And as I’ve said before, it was Mad Men that opened my eyes to the potential of large casts of characters and the possibilities they provide.

Ensembles are particularly useful in television, where the various arrangements of characters can supply material, hopefully, for years of stories. To put it in the nerdiest terms possible, it’s an instance of Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the value of a social network is proportional to the square of connected users (n², or, more precisely, n(n − 1)/2).  A cast of characters is a peculiar kind of social network: it’s assembled by a producer, set into motion by the actors and writing staff, and its value lies in its connections, as various characters collide in interesting ways. The number of dramatically useful interactions also tends to increase over time, which is why the second and third seasons of a good television show are often the most interesting, once actors have had a chance to discover their most fruitful combinations. (Which is also why it’s sad that so many promising shows never get the chance to find this rhythm.)

Of course, there are limitations to such a model. Too many characters, and the show may never get the chance to adequately establish its supporting cast, so the pairings seem forced or arbitrary. (See: Glee.) But if exercised judiciously, it’s a useful tool for all kinds of narrative fiction, including the novel—and particularly for writers who otherwise tend to overlook such possibilities. As I’ve mentioned in previous postings, my first novel was a fairly focused story, with a limited number of important characters, largely because the plot itself was already so complicated. The sequel has a much larger cast, partly because I wanted to put some of Mad Men‘s lessons to use, and because I hoped that an expansive supporting cast would take me to interesting places. And I’m not the only writer to recognize this. In one of the notebooks he kept while writing Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann writes:

Nothing yet has been done about staffing the book with meaningful subsidiary figures. In The Magic Mountain these were provided by the personnel of the sanatorium, in Joseph by the Bible; there it was a question of realizing the potentialities of the Biblical figures…The characters will have to be supplied out of the past, out of memory, pictures, intuition. But the entourage must first be invented and fixed…

More than almost anything else, a rich entourage of characters, if it arises naturally from the plot and setting, can take the story in unexpected directions. A large cast isn’t always a good thing. But if you’re looking to expand the world you’ve created, there’s no better way than to select two characters at random, put them in a room, and see what they have to say.

Creativity is not like a freight train going down the tracks. It’s something that has to be caressed and treated with a great deal of respect…You’ve got to program your brain not to think too much.

—Bob Dylan

Last week, my good friend Erin Chan Ding interviewed Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City and the recent In the Garden of Beasts, for the Huffington Post. The interview is well worth reading in its entirety, but I was especially struck by Larson’s description of how he got the idea for his latest book, which focuses on the experience of William Dodd, the first United States ambassador to Hitler’s Germany, and his daughter Martha. Larson says:

I mean, the way the whole thing got started was that I was looking for an idea and reading William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I was following my own advice and reading voraciously and promiscuously when I was looking for an idea. That book had always been on my list of book to read, and I was instantly enthralled…I was looking for characters through whose eyes I can tell that story. At some point, I came across Dodd’s diary and at some point after that, I came across Martha’s memoir…So once I found them, and I got a sense of the interesting characters. Then it was a question of finding as much about them as I could.

What I love about this account is that it treats a writer’s search for ideas as an active, focused process that involves wide reading and deep thinking. This may seem obvious, but it’s not the way we tend to think about creative ideas, which sometimes feel like external events that come to us by luck and happenstance. I’m currently reading Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which argues that until around 1200 BC, humans weren’t fully conscious or introspective in the way they are now, but experienced important decisions as auditory hallucinations originating in the right hemisphere of the brain, which were interpreted as the voices of gods or muses. And while the jury is still out on Jaynes’s overall thesis, it strikes me as very similar to how we still think about the origin of creative ideas.

Ideas, we’re often told, arise from somewhere outside the artist, who is occasionally fortunate enough to catch one as it drifts by. Even the language we use in discussing this problem implies that ideas originate from a specific, mystical place. The very questions “Where do ideas come from?” and “Where do you get your ideas?” implicitly assume, in their wording, that there’s a location, external to the author, where ideas can be obtained. Hence the slightly flip response of authors like Neil Gaiman, who has been known to say that he gets his ideas “from a little ideas shop in Bognor Regis,” or Stephen King, who at one point in his career said he got his ideas from Utica. (Perhaps, in the parlance of No Country For Old Men, we can say that we get ideas from “the gettin’ place.”)

Yet the reality is often closer to what Larson describes above, when he says that he “voraciously and promiscuously” sought an idea. And this is as true for novelists as it is for nonfiction writers. The issue is slightly obscured, of course, by the fact that such intellectual voracity is inseparable from a professional writer’s daily routine. But when you look at the origins of great works of fiction, you often find that external inspiration can’t be separated from the deliberate pursuit of ideas. One of the most famous such origin stories, which William Goldman says changed novels and movies forever, was when Peter Benchley was walking along a beach and thought to himself: “What if the shark got territorial?” The idea, apparently, came out of nowhere. But Benchley was already thinking about sharks when the idea came, and spent years researching and developing the idea before he wrote Jaws.

Looking for ideas, then, is something like fishing. Clearly there’s a lot of luck involved: even the best fisherman is constrained, to a point, by what happens to swim by. But there are ways in which you can control the circumstances. You select your equipment, pick your location, know how to use your tools, and above all else, know how to react when you feel that first tug on the line. All of these things come with time and experience. Similarly, as a writer, you hone your craft until it becomes intuitive, choose a promising area to start exploring, and learn to recognize a good idea when you see one. (As a writer, you can even use a net instead of a rod and reel, or, in certain situations, dynamite.) Sooner or later, if you’ve done your work properly, you’ll catch something. And sometimes, very occasionally, it might even be a shark.

The only way I really work is to assemble a strange pig’s breakfast of visual images and thoughts and try and shake them into some kind of coherent pattern.

—Tom Stoppard, in an interview with Mel Gussow

The release of Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence, a grand summation of a life in letters by a major critic at the age of eighty, gives me a welcome excuse to reflect on the legacy of our leading reader, canonical champion, and defender of the great books. As I’ll point out below, Bloom has severe limitations as a critic of contemporary literature, and he’s often made himself into a figure of fun. His evolution from serious academic into something close to a brand name hasn’t been entirely painless. But there’s no doubt that he’s one of our greatest living intellectuals—his omission from both editions of the Prospect public intellectuals poll is a crime—and his impact on my own life and reading has been surprisingly substantial.

First, the bad news. Bloom has various minor shortcomings as a writer—notably his tendency to repeat himself endlessly, with slight variations, which makes me suspect that his books lack a strong editorial hand—but his real problem is that he no longer seems capable of discussing authors with anything other than unqualified praise or sweeping condemnation. When he’s talking about Shakespeare or Tolstoy, no one is more eloquent or insightful, but he seems incapable of performing nuanced readings of lesser writers. This leads him to brusquely dismiss certain authors of unquestioned canonicity, such as Poe, and into such travesties as his attack on the National Book Awards Medal for Stephen King, in which his only evidence was a critique, also completely nonfactual, of J.K. Rowling. (As I pointed out at the time, this is sort of like saying that Steven Spielberg can’t be a good director because Attack of the Clones was a lousy movie.)

It’s clear, then, that we shouldn’t turn to the current Bloom for credible opinions on contemporary culture, but for deep, almost aspirational readings on authors whose canonical eminence is undisputed. And he remains unmatched in this regard, both for his passion and his readability. At times, it isn’t clear what his point is, except to create in us a state of mind receptive to being changed by literature—which is a worthwhile goal in itself. And his isolated insights are often exceptional. His thoughts on the strangeness of the Yahwist—as in the uncanny moment in Exodus 4:24, for instance, when God tries to kill Moses—and his writings on Joseph Smith, whom he considers a great American prophet, have deeply influenced the novel I’m writing now. And his observations on sexual jealousy in Othello have shaped my understanding not only of that play, but of Eyes Wide Shut:

Shakespeare’s greatest insight into male sexual jealousy  is that it is a mask for the fear of being castrated by death. Men imagine that there can never be enough time and space for themselves, and they find in cuckoldry, real or imagined, the image of their own vanishing, the realization that the world will go on without them.

In recent years, Bloom has become less a literary critic than a sort of affable cheerleader, moving past his old polemics on “the age of resentment” to simply extoll the cause of close reading of great books for the pleasure they provide. It’s a simple message, but a necessary one, and one that he is qualified above all other living critics to convey, with his prodigious reading, infinite memory, and nervous, expansive prose. I’ve always been a sucker for canons—I tried to read all fifty-four volumes of the Britannica Great Books series in high school, came close to applying to a similar program at St. John’s College, and finally ended up in the Classics—and Bloom remains my primary gateway into the great books, as he is for many of us. For that, his influence has been incalculable, and I’m glad we still have him around.

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

—Harold Bloom, The Western Canon

[Shakespeare] was master of the revels to mankind…As long as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. But when the question is, to life and its materials and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me?…Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he been less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate: but that this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos,—that he should not be wise for himself;—it must even go into the world’s history that the best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men

All writers have heard somewhere or other that Balzac had a horrendous routine. Two weeks to two months were spent on a book. During this time he went to bed after eight after a light dinner with white wine; he awoke and was back at his desk by 2 A.M., where he then wrote until six, drinking coffee from a pot kept permanently on the stove. At six he took a bath for an hour, than drank more coffee until his publisher came with proofs and took away corrected ones from the day before and new manuscript pages. From nine until twelve he wrote again, then breakfasted on eggs and more coffee. From one until six he worked at corrections.

When a book was done he then saw friends or mistresses, or disappeared from sight.

—Hallie and Whit Burnett, Fiction Writer’s Handbook

Over the past year, I’ve sold two novelettes to Analog that have strong overtones of horror, a genre in which I’d previously displayed limited interest as a writer. “Kawataro” is my homage to Japanese horror movies, while the upcoming “The Boneless One” is sort of a haunted house story and murder mystery set aboard a research yacht in the Atlantic Ocean. I didn’t set out to write stories this creepy, but seem to have arrived at them by accident. The more I think about it, though, the more I suspect that they reflect the influence of a writer whose impact on my work is invisible but pervasive. He’s a novelist of massive fluency and technical proficiency, enormously inventive and imaginative, with a real gift for character and setting. He seems capable of doing just about anything within the conventions of the popular novel—although he rarely knows how to end a story. And through sheer cultural dominance alone, he’s had a subterranean influence on a whole generation of writers. He’s Stephen King.

King’s lasting mark on writers my age reflects one of the fundamental truths of fiction: if you want to change your readers’ lives forever, get them while they’re young. I don’t remember the first King novel I read, but it was probably The Talisman, picked up when I was a fifth grader as a tattered paperback at the much mourned Roskie & Wallace (later known as Gray Wolf Books) in San Leandro, California. Over the next two years, I worked my way through most of King’s oeuvre, the high points of which were, and remain, It, The Shining, Pet Sematary, and The Stand. Was I too young to be reading King? Sure. But that’s the best time to be reading his novels—when you’re just a little too young for the violence and sex and ideas they contain, so they seem to promise all of the primal power that fiction affords. The comments on this AV Club article imply that my experience was shared by millions of young men (and women) who came of age in the last thirty years. As a result, I think that King will influence, and has influenced, the writing of this generation in ways that will become increasingly clear as time goes on.

King, although far from a faultless writer, is certainly the most powerful popular novelist alive. His medium is horror, but very rarely has this seemed like a commercial calculation. Rather, it feels like an inner compulsion, a sense that horror and the supernatural provide him with the best way of exploring the themes to which he repeatedly returns—childhood, family, the inevitability and unfairness of death, the power of imagination, the memory of place. That willingness to follow character and theme wherever they lead, all the way into the darkness, makes King utterly unlike most other mainstream novelists. Reading It again two years ago, I was simultaneously impressed by how convincing and rich these thematic elements remained, and how dated the horror had become. It no longer has the power to scare me—though the thought of Tim Curry in clown makeup might—but it still has the power to move me. It might be my favorite popular novel in any genre.

Not all of King’s books have aged as well. The Talisman, on rereading, remains hugely inventive and textured, but structurally all over the map; the uncut version of The Stand is one of the most ambitious of all popular novels, but its mythic confrontation of good versus evil hasn’t dated well, and it’s also clear that King had no idea how to end it (a shortcoming that affects nearly all of his books). Pet Sematary, though, is almost flawlessly imagined and controlled, up to its grand guignol conclusion, which strikes me now as a failure of nerve, while still undeniably effective. And King’s best short stories are particularly fine—they may end up being his most lasting work. But his real legacy is impossible to measure. For thirty years and counting, through sheer skill, scale, and luck, he wound up shaping the inner lives of almost every young person who saw a future for himself, or herself, in imaginative literature. No other living author can claim nearly as much.

The experience of most artists is that the quality of their production is in keeping with the intensity of their wish.

—Ernest Dimnet