It constipates the whole process.

Stephen King on Money (The Commonplace Project)

You can find all the posts in The Commonplace Book Project here:

“Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.” — Stephen King, Four Past Midnight

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I decided to go with a Stephen King quote today because I’ve been watching a lot of adaptations of his books lately — and because I wanted to watch Stand By Me tonight.

One of my favorite writing exercises involves making a list of inspirations — not for any particular project, but just inspirations that consistently pop up.

I’m always drawn to friend movies that manage to embody that space between childhood and adolescence to the point that it almost become magical realism. Stand By Me is up there amongst the best of that genre.

I watched another lesson in Neil Gaiman’s MasterClass last night and he asked students to think about inspirations that go beyond just books. It’s easy to find inspiration in our own medium.

Anyway, Stand By Me is always on my inspiration list.

There’s a scene at the end that so perfectly illustrates the almost-magic-realism I want in my stories. These four boys have spent two days walking to find a dead body. They’ll remember those two days forever. A little bit after they get there, a bunch of teenage boys show up. They got there in a car after a twenty-minute drive.

I wish that fourteen-year-old me could have belonged to some kind of secret writing club with Gordo from Stand By Me, Jo March, Anne Shirley, and that kid from Almost Famous.

I’ve also watched Haven and The Dead Zone in the last couple of months. And Misery, because I’m trying to absorb William Goldman’s work this year and he wrote the screenplay.

I realized as I was writing this that I’ve never thought about which Stephen King book I’d recommend to someone who’d never read him before. I think you could do worse than The Body, which is the novella that Stand by Me is based on. And I love The Stand — my dad gave it to me for my thirteenth birthday and it’s always been a favorite — but I think that I’d go with Carrie.

There’s something about reading it, as a writer, that’s like getting King’s origin story.

So I love the quote at the top of this post. At first when I read it I thought — well, yeah. Pretty easy for someone who probably could get an advance for a million dollars for the contents of his bedside scratch pad.

But the more I thought about it, the more I think I started to understand what he meant. If you put the pressure of earning a living on your writing — it suffers. And you suffer.

And, I think, you’re more likely to give up before you get anywhere with the whole thing.

Because if you decide your first novel or short story is supposed to make money — when it doesn’t, it’s so easy to feel like a failure.

Instead, ask your first novel to teach you how to finish. That’s all. Just get all the way through to The End. Then maybe your second novel’s job is to teach you how to write stronger dialogue. Or better action scenes. Or to use fewer adverbs.

And so on and so on.

If you keep doing that, eventually you’ll write something that someone wants to pay you for. But since that part is entirely out of your control, focusing on it will — yep — constipate the whole process.

I think I’ve talked about it before, but as much as I love Stephen King’s books — it’s one of his wife’s that is really mine in a way that’s hard to even articulate. I love Tabitha King’s One on One. So much.

If you’re a writer, you definitely should get your hands on a copy of On Writing. If you can buy one, that’s best. This is one book you want in your library — so you can make notes in it and fold the pages.

At the end of On Writing, King has a book list. I found it online, too.

I thought this was cool — a list of Netflix shows Stephen King has Tweeted about.

I loved this article about the inspiration for The Body.

In 1974, just after finishing Salem’s Lot, King sat down and pounded out a novella called “The Body.” The story was one he had been thinking about writing for years, he said. “For a long time I thought that I would love to be able to find a string to put on a lot of the childhood experiences that I remember — a lot of them were funny and some of them were kind of sad — and the people that I’d known and some of the guys that I hung out with that really weren’t headed anywhere except down blind alleys. Nothing came and nothing came, and what you do when nothing comes is, you don’t push. You just put it aside… The most important things are the hardest to say. You can’t talk about them because once you start, they tarnish.”

There are a ton of King adaptations out there. A ton. And they keep coming. Hulu’s Castle Rock is good. So is 2017’s It, which has a follow-up (the adult part of the book) coming this year. I’m looking forward to Pet Sematary this year, too. But I’m intensely excited for CBS All Access’s 10-episode mini-series of The Stand. I don’t even really know what CBS All Access is, but I’ll figure it out!

The trailer for Pet Sematary is pretty amazing. It looks terrifying.

Today’s Poem:

A Gradual Canticle for Augustine by Tabitha King

The thinnest bear is awakened in the winter by the sleep-laughter of locusts, by the dream-blustering of bees, by the honeyed scent of desert sands that the wind carries in her womb into the distant hills, into the houses of Cedar.

The bear has heard a sure promise. Certain words are edible; they nourish more than snow heaped upon silver plates or I is overflowing golden bowls. Chips of ice from the mouth of a lover are not always better, nor a desert dreaming always a mirage. The rising bear sings a gradual canticle woven of sand that conquers cities by a slow cycle. His praise seduces a passing wind, traveling to the sea wherein a fish, caught in a careful net, here is a bear’s song in the cool-scented snow.

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Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nation and the upcoming novel The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.