Stephen King's ingenious scam

(Quick note before we get started: Choppy Water is out! It’s a crime thriller set on a cruise ship. Hope you like it!)

Hello from… my kitchen table!

I know, right?! It feels like a long, long time since I’ve written to you from my actual house in Canberra. Over the last four months I’ve been to Kununurra, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Albury/Wodonga, Balaklava, Adelaide, Sydney again and Melbourne again, and that’s only counting the places I stayed overnight (Darwin airport nearly made the cut). I got to visit Canberra in between all those trips, but it really did feel like visiting, because I was still doing presentations and panels and podcasts while I was here.

As a child, I attended a lecture by Gary Crew, who relayed an argument he’d had with his wife about whether writing a book was harder than having a baby. “You carried your baby for nine months, I carried my baby for three years.”

I don’t know if writing a book is anything like being pregnant, and I don’t know if Gary Crew is still married. But I do think going on tour to promote your new novel is a bit like having a newborn. You’re so excited, and so are your family and friends, and it’s such a privilege because so many people dream about it and not all of them get to do it. But at the same time, you’re so tired. And so worried. So much could go wrong. Your older novels (and your real children) get neglected. Your new novel gets neglected too, because you’re so tired and worried that you forget things. Important things, things the novel was counting on you for, because it’s new and helpless, having only recently been ejected into the cold indifference of the real world. Future novels seem impossible.

Sorry. That last paragraph got away from me. My point is, it’s nice to be home.

For 26 years, Stephen King has been running an ingenious scam.

In the year 2000, he published On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. The book quickly became required reading for aspiring authors. If you’ve done a creative writing course this century, you’ve either read it or it’s been quoted at you:

• “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

• “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”

• “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”

I don’t disagree with any of King’s advice, and you’d be wise to ignore me if I did. He’s Stephen King, and I’m just me. But that’s the scam. He literally wrote the book on writing. A generation of aspiring writers (including me) studied it at university, memorised its rules, and repeated them to other people. Those rules became the yardstick against which all fiction is measured.

And guess who follows all Stephen King’s rules? Stephen King! He’s bootstrapped his way into becoming the world’s most highly regarded writer. Like I said; ingenious.

Well, two can play at that game, Mr King! I’ve created an online course for Novlr Academy called How to Write a Crime Novel. In ten video lessons (with accompanying exercises) I’ve explained how to write a fight, a chase, an interrogation, an autopsy, and various other scenes that crime writers depend on.

The course appeared this morning on novlr.org (it’s included in the free plan).

Now all I need to do is wait for 26 years.

I know I just said my tour was over, but I do have one gig to go.

I’ll be at Chimera Con in Canberra this Sunday, a new convention which celebrates art and writing in the speculative fiction worlds. Novels, comics, manga, film, games—come along and check it out!

Next year I’ll be going to festivals in Manly, Hong Kong, and Orange (often called "the Hong Kong of regional NSW"). More details about all that soon. Stay subscribed!

Well, that's all from me! Thanks to everyone who participated in my mega-tour. You're all just the best.

Cheers,
Jack ❤️

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