Stephen King

Stories with Multiple Timeframes

by Matthew McGuinness on

There’s no doubt that Stephen King’s novel IT, and the various adaptations for cinema and TV, have an almost unique claim to cult status in the horror genre. However, I am strongly of the opinion that this eerie tale of past trauma and present-day striving for redemption is much more than just the world’s favourite scary story. In my view, it’s a work of art with a technical assurance that puts it up there with the best of literary fiction.

The most impressive of Stephen King’s achievements in IT is, without doubt, the double narrative – allowing stories from 1958 and 1985 to run alongside one another and interact in complex ways. For a full account of how he approaches that challenge, you can check out the Popular Fiction Masterclass title Write Like Stephen King. But in this blog post I’m going to cast a fresh light on the technique. I’ll be looking at how other novelists and screen writers make use of double narratives to pursue their own artistic ends.

Let me start by giving a couple of anti-examples. These are stories that illustrate what IT is not. Firstly, IT is not structured around flashbacks. A flashback is a window into the past that is forever anchored in the present – a story about the past is being told by someone in the present. A good example would be the movie The Usual Suspects. Its story is largely told in hindsight by a man being interviewed by the police. The past narrative therefore derives its meaning and pretext entirely from the present-day recollection.

It’s true that there are a number of occasions on which Stephen King’s characters are launched from 1985 back into their own 1958 childhoods by moments of recollection. For example, in Part 2 we see a number of chapter section endings that cut off a sentence in mid-flow as a character is in full reminiscence, then resume it back in 1958 at the start of the next section. But that is by no means always the case. The transition between the years is often unannounced. In fact, by Part 5 it’s intentionally difficult to tell which year we’re meant to be in. This means that the 1958 and 1985 narratives have a separate existence with no dependence and very little anchoring.

It’s interesting to note that, in The Usual Suspects, the flashback is almost the entirety of the movie. As in that great cinematic classic, Citizen Kane, the writer has pushed the flashback structure to its very limit – way beyond the cliché of a shimmering screen followed by a brief, voiced-over episode from the past. And yet, for all that, the past narrative in The Usual Suspects remains anchored in the present. The final moments of the present-day narrative, which reveal the identity of master criminal Keyser Söze, complete the meaning of the flashback scenes.

In IT, the 1958 story could have an independent existence as a novel and it would be a perfectly satisfying read. The presence of a 1985 story adds another dimension to it but doesn’t complete it as such. In that sense, we’re seeing a more elusive and ambitious narrative project.

Now my second anti-example – the movie Donnie Darko. In many ways this account of the events leading up to a devastating accident are exploring territory that’s very similar to IT. Circularity is the defining structural principle of both narratives. Donnie Darko begins with the destruction of a house by an aircraft engine that seems to fall out of nowhere and ends with a depiction of the events that lie behind the aircraft accident. IT is full of circular structures, but the most prominent is the central characters’ exact repetition of their childhood rebellion against a supernatural foe. The difference is that the movie tears up the normal rules of time and space and simply plugs the end of the narrative into the beginning. As such, it arguably sits within the time travel genre. By contrast, the novel restricts its circularity to narrative structures as experienced by the reader rather than life events as experienced by the characters. Stephen King flirts with the idea that the 1985 events are influencing the 1958 events but keeps that firmly within the bounds of metaphor. For example, Mike Hanlon (in 1958) walks past the house where he would live 1985 and (we are conspicuously informed) feels nothing!

Both Donnie Darko and IT are using the idea of circularity to evoke the disturbed inner world of their central characters, but it has to be said that Stephen King’s approach is a much subtler instrument. The sections on narrative in my book Write Like Stephen King fully describe the many variations on the novel’s circularity metaphor.

Let’s move on and look at some examples of writers doing things with double narratives that are very similar to IT.

My first example is a novel that quite clearly falls into the ‘literary fiction’ category: Waterland by Graham Swift. I’m not at all embarrassed to place a bestselling horror novel alongside a modern classic that appears on university reading lists. I believe IT should be seen as part of the same cultural landscape as literary fiction. Waterland has its own double narrative. It takes place in rural Norfolk before the war and London in the 1980s. The central characters are seen undergoing a traumatic coming of age that leaves them unable to have children. In parallel, we are shown the consequences of this sterility – a psychological and marital crisis late in the characters’ lives. One of the defining characteristics of Waterland (and many other novels that are considered ‘postmodern’) is the fact that it uses its narrative structure as a kind of metaphor to express its own thematic meanings. Specifically, the double narrative – alternation between pre-war Norfolk and post-war London – seems to mimic one of the novel’s central images: the idea of circularity and inescapable patterns of behaviour. The story of Waterland is full of images reflecting that idea – eels being the most important one. We hear how these creatures swim all the way to the Sargasso sea to breed, whereupon their young swim all the way back to the waterways of Norfolk. The to-and-fro movement between past and present in the novel powerfully expresses this strange, cyclical behaviour.

This metaphorical use of structure is also seen in IT. In fact, the meaning expressed through that technique is rather similar to the circularity idea in Waterland. Cycles of harmful behaviour (social and psychological) are found everywhere in IT – guilt, alcoholism, inappropriate sexual relationships, and so on. Almost every character and community in the novel seems to be going round in destructive circles, unable to leave their past behind. The novel mimics this in its alternation between past and present. As the 1958 and 1985 stories are narrated in parallel, with the same group of characters undergoing two very similar journeys at 27 years remove, the reader begins to feel the disorienting weirdness of that inability to escape harmful behaviour.

The idea of a double narrative, with one story set in the past and one in the future, has become a very familiar feature of contemporary literature and cinema. The metaphorical possibilities have been recognised by authors both literary and popular, but there are other approaches to the double narrative structure that can be equally powerful.  Let’s now look at a movie example that illustrates a slightly different approach.

The Godfather Part II cuts between the early life of mob boss Vito Corleone – In turn-of-the century Sicily then New York – and the experiences of his son and successor Michael Corleone half a century later. This is no mere flashback fest since there is no dependency between the two narratives. Vito’s early life is not being recalled by someone within Michael’s story, for example. Nor does the 1950s story complete or explain the earlier events in a way that’s similar to The Usual Suspects.

The parallel narration of Vito’s and Michael’s stories does not seem to serve a metaphorical purpose akin to the use of narrative structure in IT. Naturally, it’s no less expressive for that. Its main strength is that it creates a gap across which sparks of meaning can jump. Similar themes surface in both Corleone narratives – family, loyalty, revenge, religion, roots, the responsibility of leadership etc. – and we are able to consider from different perspectives thanks to the differing events of Vito’s and Michael’s lives. For example, Vito returns to Sicily to take revenge on his mother’s killer. By contrast, Michael kills a family member – Fredo, his brother. However, there’s a strange act of mercy in that he waits for his mother to die before ordering the killing. It’s a beautiful and poetic technique, capable of creating an incredibly rich fabric of interconnecting meanings.

This concludes my brief survey of the double narrative structure. It’s now over to you. Can you think of any movies or novels that make use of it? If so, what specific purpose does it serve?

Write Like Stephen King

by Matthew McGuinness on

I hope you all had a great summer. I’ve been hard at work on the next volume in the Popular Fiction Masterclass series. It’s called Write Like Stephen King: A study guide focusing on the novel IT. And the good news is, it should be out within the month. I’ve completed the text and the cover art has been commissioned.

To be notified as soon as the book’s available, you can register at http://popularfictionmasterclass.com (sign up to download the free book ‘Ten Unusual Tips for Writers’).

But to give you a taste of what’s to come, I thought I might post part of the first chapter …

Anxiety

Stephen King’s IT has affected the imaginations of readers and filmgoers to a truly extraordinary degree. Although the book isn’t the origin of that familiar popular-cultural motif ‘the scary clown’, the notion that clowns are dark and threatening characters did take a much stronger hold on the popular consciousness after King’s terrifying creation Pennywise reared his orange-tufted head in 1986. You would have to turn to the novel Dracula or the movie Jaws to find another horror creation that had been so successful in giving people’s fears a new shape. And even then, there’s clearly a reason to be scared of vampires or sharks. But a clown? What gives?

The clown isn’t the only form taken by ‘It’, but it’s certainly the guise that people remember. That’s why publishers of the book and filmmakers responsible for the various adaptations have routinely used clown imagery in their publicity. It’s clearly the most successful ingredient in Stephen King’s recipe for fear, and the reason isn’t difficult to see. People find clowns in general a mildly alarming mix of the anarchic and the pleasant. The unpredictable nature of these colourful, custard-pie-throwing creatures is without doubt unsettling. They’re soppy but destructive, bold but vulnerable, physical but decorative. As a result, they leave children and adults alike with ambivalent feelings. When we’re watching them, we feel the experience could go either way, tipping over into laughter or unpleasantness. It’s that state of instability that makes them great raw material for horror. Naturally, no one runs in terror from a circus tent when they appear in the ring – we all understand that they’re basically a safe and entertaining phenomenon. The point is that underneath the sweetness there’s a potential for unpleasantness. The characterisation of Pennywise simply takes the alarming side and puts it on steroids, making it infinitely crazier and more terrifying than the reality.

This focus on semi-trusted aspects of life – drawing out and enhancing the features that are already slightly threatening – is a standard technique in the horror genre. Think of Hitchcock’s film The Birds, based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, with its terrifying sparrows, crows, seagulls and even chickens. Our feathered friends may not be an obvious source of danger in real life, but in large flocks they display a mysterious group intelligence. Their scaly feet, beady eyes and quick movements are also somewhat unpleasant. The film takes those characteristics and turns up the volume on them until they become truly scary.

Consider, also, the 1976 supernatural thriller movie The Omen, which gradually reveals that Damian, a little boy with a mischievous glint in his eye, is in fact a satanic incarnation. It’s something that one might say jokingly about a naughty child, that he’s the devil incarnate. But in the movie, that slightly negative feeling towards a child is made concrete and larger than life.

Stephen King has deployed the same technique to great effect in a number of his novels. In Cujo, and Pet Sematary, for example, family pets are the source of fear. It’s easy to see how some people develop negative feelings about dogs, for example, if they’ve been bothered by animals that bark and leap up, or if they’ve read a news story about a mauling. But this anxiety is usually something that exists under the surface of more positive feelings. The novels exploit that subterranean fear by dragging it out into the open and exaggerating it. In The Shining, it’s a husband and father who turns into a monster. He displays an exaggerated version of the unpredictability and anger that can shake a child’s trust in an otherwise loving parent.

Anxiety – the idea that our nagging fears will turn out to be completely justified – is a normal and natural reflex, just waiting to be triggered by a skilful writer of horror stories. Originally a survival instinct, anxiety has stayed with us to the present day, manifesting itself in perfectly ordinary circumstances. In fact, most members of the human race experience the same kind anxieties at the same stage of personal development. As toddlers, we’re worried about abandonment by our parents. Child psychologists believe it stems from early experiences of separation from our parents, which instils a fear that protection and care might be withdrawn at any moment. Significantly, toddlers are not usually anxious about the many obvious sources of danger in their lives – things such as crossing the road or the consequences of pushing random items up their noses. If anything, those kinds of experiences have a frisson of excitement. Instead, their nightmares focus on the suspected precariousness of their situation. Older children or teenagers tend to be afraid of things like social rejection at school – the suspicion that their friends will suddenly turn nasty on them if they do something uncool. Once again, it’s not the obvious dangers like climbing trees or experimenting with cigarettes that cause them anxiety. Those things are considered rather exciting. Then, as we enter adult life and start a family, fears for our children predominate – specifically, fears about the people and things we trust to entertain and protect them. The anxiety that something bad will happen as soon as they’re out of sight or left in the charge of carers is universal. And you can add to that the many fears artificially created and fuelled by the media – thoughts that we may be inadvertently harming our children by making the wrong nutritional or educational choices on their behalf.

One factor behind the terrifying effectiveness of Pennywise is that the idea of a child-murdering clown taps into this reservoir of anxiety about child rearing. Stephen King supplies a scattering of details that encourage us to see the character in those terms. When Georgie encounters Pennywise in the drain, he’s reminded of two children’s television characters from the 1950s: Bozo and Clarabell. It’s also noted that Pennywise is wearing ‘white gloves, like the kind Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck always wore.’ So, in the run up to the boy’s grisly murder, we are being reminded of televisual experiences that formed the background to most children’s lives in the Western World for more than half a century. This is not accidental. In an even clearer statement of purpose, Stephen King writes that ‘If George had been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald.’ In its details, the characterisation of Pennywise draws on those aspects of childhood that parents typically feel most ambivalent about: TV, cinema, fast food – trashy popular culture in general.

The horror genre is full of films and novels exploiting the same fears. For example, in the 1982 movie Poltergeist, the television becomes a channel for communication between a little girl and malevolent spirits. The memorable image of the child staring into a hissing TV screen crystallises that anxiety, just like the cartoonish characterisation of Pennywise. The anxiety is then amped up for horrific effect when the child disappears into the dark world behind the screen. It’s an equivalent of Georgie’s murder, which turns up the volume on the same set of parental fears. Interestingly, when the movie was remade in 2015, the publicity images didn’t revolve around the image of a TV, but rather a ‘scary clown’ toy that plays a minor role in the paranormal events of the story. It’s a testament to the power of that particular image to tap into a common set of fears.

Realisms

by Matthew McGuinness on

Every novel is a bargain with the reader – an agreement that says the author is going to package up and deliver certain types of descriptive detail, and in exchange the reader is going to accept it as a real world. It’s what we love more than anything else about the experience of reading fiction – that willing self-immersion in a made-up universe. Given the importance of sealing this literary contract, it’s surprising that readers are so flexible over what they’re willing to accept as ‘real’. By that, I don’t mean they’re willing to accept fantasy worlds as well as more familiar worlds. I mean they’re willing to accept rather vague and undetailed worlds as well as highly specific and detailed worlds. You could, no doubt, come up with numerous examples from your own reading to prove that point. But, allow me to focus on two books: It by Stephen King (the novel I’m currently writing about) and Killing Floor by Lee Child (the last novel I wrote about).

This may sound odd, but Stephen King’s novel, for the most part, comes across as ultra-realistic. You can open it at almost any page and find a passage that would make a very good case study of descriptive technique for a creative writing class. It’s specific but economical. It covers all the senses, but always focuses on the most evocative sense for a particular situation. One of the defining characteristics is the large number of popular cultural references. King gives us everything from TV shows to kids’ insults – the whole fabric of young lives in the 1950s. By contrast, as readers of my book on Killing Floor will know, Lee Child is very sparing with his description. The world of the novel feels thin, like a stage set. While the details are conveyed just as vividly as Stephen King’s, they are nothing like as varied or plentiful.

Don’t misunderstand me. Both writers are equally great. Their respective styles of realism are not indications of superior or inferior skill. They’ve simply made different creative decisions that affect their style of realism.

Those creative decisions are, to a large extent, determined by the genres that the two authors are writing in. In King’s case, he is telling a supernatural thriller story. Like many supernatural thrillers, it  contains elements of wild fantasy – stuff that is totally beyond our real experience. Strangely, that makes it necessary to first establish with absolute clarity, a world that closely resembles our own. If you think for a moment, you’ll realise that the episodes of supernatural horror in It would be much less shocking if they weren’t shattering a fairly humdrum world.

That’s the most obvious reason for King’s ultra-realism. There’s also a slightly less obvious explanation. Basically, King  needs us to empathise strongly with the main characters in order to get worried about them. Worry is an essential part of a good thriller. And one of the best ways of promoting concern for literary characters  is to show us how much we have in common with them. Most readers will see some TV programme or comic mentioned in It that they’re familiar with – even if it’s only the ‘Lone Ranger’. If they were born in the mid-twentieth century, they might even remember using the same kind of playground language as the kids in the novel. With that kind of kinship, it’s inevitable that we’re going to be anxious for them when they’re in peril.

The need to make us empathise as much as possible with each of the various fictional children is particularlyurgent because there is no one ‘hero’ in It. There are lots of characters whose thoughts we enter and follow for a while. Sometimes we barely get to know them before they die horribly. As a result, King does whatever he can to make us rapidly connect with them. That includes providing an in-depth guided tour of their popular cultural preferences as well as their physical and psychological environment.

Lee Child presents us with just one hero – Jack Reacher. Consequently, there’s nothing like as much personal detail supplied. We barely know five facts about his biography by the end of Killing Floor. It’s true that we receive a drip feed of information about his military skills throughout the novel, but those titbits are only ever provided to drive the narrative forward. Contrast that with the waterfall of colourful details that serve no narrative purpose in It. The evocation of Reacher is not only thinner than the description of the kids in It, but also a  less anchored in the real world. He’s not a superhero or a creature of pure fantasy, however. He’s a sort of  hybrid – a filtered, simplified and somewhat enhanced collection of human traits.

The world that Reacher inhabits has a similarly hybrid realism. It references familiar things, but only those things that can be exploited for their for symbolic resonance. The town of Margrave exists to make us reflect on aspects of wealth and power. The description of its semi-real landscape of political statues and posh suburbs is honed to achieve that effect. Lee Child deliberately withholds all detail that doesn’t contribute to it.

As you can see, different types of realism can serve different literary purposes. If you’re working on your own novel, think about the type of realism you’re evoking. Does it help to convey meaning or hinder it? Should you increase or decrease the level of detail? Have you thought about the particular types of detail you should be focusing on?

The No. 1 Obsession of Creative Writing Teachers

by Matthew McGuinness on

If you’ve ever attended a creative writing course of any kind, whether a short workshop or a degree programme, the chances are you’ve encountered a particular idea about ‘good’ writing. Obsession is probably too strong a description of this idea, but it’s not far off. It’s the idea that good writing must have a narrator with consistent viewpoint, and the viewpoint must be very closely associated with the consciousness of a character in the world of the novel – at least for a sizable section of the story.

Sound like gobbledygook? Let me illustrate this commonly taught notion with examples. In 19th-century novels, it was deemed acceptable for the narrator to float above the world of the novel like a god. So, for example, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens famously begins with the following sentence.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the season of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Three things strike one immediately about this.

1) The narrator is located in a specific period, but not the period of the novel’s events.
2) The narrator is very closely aligned with the author. He refers to ‘now’ – presumably the time of the novel’s writing.
3) The narrator adopts a sweeping overview of an entire epoch and an air of magisterial authority.

This kind of writing was all well and good in the Victorian period, say many creative writing teachers – a strongly hierarchical world in which people were willing to accept all sorts of authority figures – but not today.

Now my second example. It’s the first sentence of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel The Remains of the Day.

It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.

Again, three things stand out.
1) The narrator is a character in the novel talking about events that may form part of the story to follow.
2) The narrator is not authoritative. He is speculating that something will probably happen.
3) We are immediately immersed in the character’s consciousness through his distinctive vocabulary and phrasing. It comes across as long-winded and a little pompous.

This, we are told, is the modern conception of ‘good’ writing – writing that is suitable for a period in human history when authorities of all kinds have been thoroughly debunked.

This kind of thinking is so general that you can scarcely find a voice to question it among creative writing teachers – especially in universities. However, outside of the lecture room, authors of popular fiction have been busily getting on with narrating stories in a variety of different styles, selecting the tool that’s most suitable to their particular need.

A third example will illustrate my point – this time it’s the first sentence of It by Stephen King.

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years – if it ever did end – began, so far as I know and can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

Here are my three observations about this third example of an opening sentence.
1) As with Charles Dickens’ narrator, Stephen King’s narrator is located in a specific period beyond the novel’s events, and looks back in order to give a sweeping overview. But, unlike Dickens’ narrator, he or she seems to have lived through the novel’s events.
2) It’s not clear from this sentence, but the narrator of It, like the narrator in A Tale of Two Cities, is not a character in the story. However, he or she is clearly not the author, given point 1 above.
3) Stephen King’s narrator, like Ishiguro’s, is not authoritative. He or she cannot be sure about the truth of the events.

So, what do we take from all this? Firstly, it’s clear that Stephen King is aware of the off-putting nature of authoritative voices for modern readers. He deliberately avoids giving the impression of an all-knowing, god-like persona. This is achieved by making the narrator part of the fiction, and giving them a specific viewpoint that imposes limits on their knowledge. However, in some ways, King’s narrator is highly reminiscent of the one in A Tale of Two Cities and other 19th-century novels. He or she is not in any way involved in the fictional action, and provides a sweeping overview.

Stephen King is clearly giving his narrator precisely the characteristics that best serve his storytelling. He is not afraid of breaking the taboo against narrators with a panoramic overview of the story. Furthermore, he is not afraid to change the narrator’s characteristics as the novel proceeds, if it serves the storytelling. For example, he allows the viewpoint to drift in and out of the characters’ heads (so to speak) with incredible rapidity.

This pragmatism is really only possible in popular fiction, away from the judgmental eyes of creative writing purists. And Stephen King pushes the range of narrative possibilities wider than practically any other author. That is why I have chosen to make It the next novel I’ll be discussing in the Popular Fiction Masterclass series.