JК
Bag of Bones :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 191 из 425Had an old IBM typewriter and aCourier type-ball been the secret all along? That was certainly how it seemed.
What had come out was also amazing. I’d had ideas during my four-year sabbatical; there had been no writer’s block in that regard. One had been really great, the sort of thing which certainly would have become a novel if I’d still been able to write novels. Half a dozen to a dozen were of the sort I’d classify “pretty good,” meaning they’d do in a pinch… or if they happened to unexpectedly grow tall and mysterious overnight, like Jack’s beanstalk. Sometimes they do. Most were glimmers, little “what-ifs” that came and went like shooting stars while I was driving or walking or just lying in bed at night and waiting to go to sleep.
The Red-Shirt &lan was a what-if. One day I saw a man in a bright red shirt washing the show windows of the JCPENNEY store in Derry—this was not long before Penney’s moved out to the mall. A young man and woman walked under his ladder… very bad luck, according to the old superstition. These two didn’t know where they were walking, though—they were holding hands, drinking deeply of each other’s eyes, as completely in love as any two twenty-year-olds in the history of the world. The man was tall, and as I watched, the top of his head came within an ace of clipping the window-washer’s feet. If that had happened, the whole works might have gone over.
The entire incident was history in five seconds. Writing The Red-Shirt &lan took five months. Except in truth, the entire book was done in a what-if second. I imagined a collision instead of a near-miss.
Everything else followed from there. The writing was just secretarial.
The idea I was currently working on wasn’t one of Mike’s Really Great Ideas (Jo’s voice carefully made the capitals), but it wasn’t a what-if, either. Nor was it much like my old gothic suspense yarns; V. C. Andrews with a prick was nowhere in sight this time. But it felt solid, like the real thing, and this morning it had come out as naturally as a breath.
Andy Drake was a private investigator in Key Largo. He was forty years old, divorced, the father of a three-year-old girl. At the open he was in the Key West home of a woman named Regina Whiting. Mrs. Whiting also had a little girl, hers five years old. Mrs. Whiting was married to an extremely rich developer who did not know what Andy Drake knew: that until 1992, Regina Taylor Whiting had been Tiffany Taylor, a high-priced Miami call-girl.
That much I had written before the phone started ringing.
What had come out was also amazing. I’d had ideas during my four-year sabbatical; there had been no writer’s block in that regard. One had been really great, the sort of thing which certainly would have become a novel if I’d still been able to write novels. Half a dozen to a dozen were of the sort I’d classify “pretty good,” meaning they’d do in a pinch… or if they happened to unexpectedly grow tall and mysterious overnight, like Jack’s beanstalk. Sometimes they do. Most were glimmers, little “what-ifs” that came and went like shooting stars while I was driving or walking or just lying in bed at night and waiting to go to sleep.
The Red-Shirt &lan was a what-if. One day I saw a man in a bright red shirt washing the show windows of the JCPENNEY store in Derry—this was not long before Penney’s moved out to the mall. A young man and woman walked under his ladder… very bad luck, according to the old superstition. These two didn’t know where they were walking, though—they were holding hands, drinking deeply of each other’s eyes, as completely in love as any two twenty-year-olds in the history of the world. The man was tall, and as I watched, the top of his head came within an ace of clipping the window-washer’s feet. If that had happened, the whole works might have gone over.
The entire incident was history in five seconds. Writing The Red-Shirt &lan took five months. Except in truth, the entire book was done in a what-if second. I imagined a collision instead of a near-miss.
Everything else followed from there. The writing was just secretarial.
The idea I was currently working on wasn’t one of Mike’s Really Great Ideas (Jo’s voice carefully made the capitals), but it wasn’t a what-if, either. Nor was it much like my old gothic suspense yarns; V. C. Andrews with a prick was nowhere in sight this time. But it felt solid, like the real thing, and this morning it had come out as naturally as a breath.
Andy Drake was a private investigator in Key Largo. He was forty years old, divorced, the father of a three-year-old girl. At the open he was in the Key West home of a woman named Regina Whiting. Mrs. Whiting also had a little girl, hers five years old. Mrs. Whiting was married to an extremely rich developer who did not know what Andy Drake knew: that until 1992, Regina Taylor Whiting had been Tiffany Taylor, a high-priced Miami call-girl.
That much I had written before the phone started ringing.