JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 80 из 359The well-drillers located their rig, that big red gadget that looked so much like somechild's Erector Set vision of a praying mantis, within three feet of where the stake had been (and in my mind now I can still hear Mom moaning about the wet clay that was spewed all over our front lawn). They had to go down less than a hundred feet-and as Clayt had said on that Sunday when he and I walked out with the applewood rod, there was plenty of water. We could have drunk it until judgment Day and it still would have kept running.
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I'm working my way back to the main point, this main point being why it is useless to ask any writer what he writes about. You might as well ask the rose why it is red. Talent, like the water Uncle Clayt doused out under our lawn after dinner one Sunday afternoon, is there all along- except, instead of water, it's more like a big rude lump of ore. It can be refined-or honed, to return to an earlier image-and it can be set to work in an infinite number of ways. The honing and the setting-to-work are simple operations, completely under the control of the fledgling writer. Refining talent is merely a matter of exercise. If you work out with weights for fifteen minutes a day over a course of ten years, you're gonna get muscles. If you write for an hour and a half a day for ten years, you're gonna turn into a good writer. *
But what's down there? That's the one great variable, the wild card in the deck. I don't think the writer has any control over that. When you drill a well and get the water, you send a sample to your state's Water Testing Agency and get back a readout-and the mineral content can vary amazingly. All H20 is not created equal. Similarly, while Joyce Carol Oates and Harold Robbins are both writing English, they are really not writing the same language at all.
There is a certain fascination inherent in the discovery of talent (although it is a difficult thing to write well about, and something I will not attempt at all-"Leave it to the poets!" he cried.
"The poets know how to talk about that, or at least they think they do, and it comes to the same; so leave it to the poets!"), that magical moment when the dowsing rod turns downward and you know that it is here, right here .
2
I'm working my way back to the main point, this main point being why it is useless to ask any writer what he writes about. You might as well ask the rose why it is red. Talent, like the water Uncle Clayt doused out under our lawn after dinner one Sunday afternoon, is there all along- except, instead of water, it's more like a big rude lump of ore. It can be refined-or honed, to return to an earlier image-and it can be set to work in an infinite number of ways. The honing and the setting-to-work are simple operations, completely under the control of the fledgling writer. Refining talent is merely a matter of exercise. If you work out with weights for fifteen minutes a day over a course of ten years, you're gonna get muscles. If you write for an hour and a half a day for ten years, you're gonna turn into a good writer. *
But what's down there? That's the one great variable, the wild card in the deck. I don't think the writer has any control over that. When you drill a well and get the water, you send a sample to your state's Water Testing Agency and get back a readout-and the mineral content can vary amazingly. All H20 is not created equal. Similarly, while Joyce Carol Oates and Harold Robbins are both writing English, they are really not writing the same language at all.
There is a certain fascination inherent in the discovery of talent (although it is a difficult thing to write well about, and something I will not attempt at all-"Leave it to the poets!" he cried.
"The poets know how to talk about that, or at least they think they do, and it comes to the same; so leave it to the poets!"), that magical moment when the dowsing rod turns downward and you know that it is here, right here .