Czevak to the Dark Tower Came Review

This is from Index Nocturnus, whose review and podcast site can be found here.

"Czevak to the Dark Tower Came by Rob Sanders


A 40k eblurt review by Leon. Published in the 2012 Advent Calendar.

This blurt is based, of course, on Robert Browning's very famous poem, 'Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower' came; as if this poem hasn't had enough milking over the years. Not only has Stephen King had a good go at it, in all sorts of media - including comics - it was also the subject of The Five Doctors Doctor Who 25th anniversary special. Tried to slip one by us, didn't you Rob?

It is a moment in time with the eponymous inquisitor, subject of Sanders' novel Atlas Infernal (see review). Despite the character's existence elsewhere, Sanders includes enough detail so that we begin to know and understand Czevak in a small way, and this blurt works well as a standalone story. Sanders crams the words into this blurt (on my device it registers as being a whole page longer than other blurts, which is a lot when there is only about four pages of content once the licence, bio and book pimping is accounted for). He weaves a rich tapestry from the moment Czevak bursts from the webway into the streets of a 'college' moon at great velocity on the back of a jetbike.

Czevak's harlequin coat and the Atlas Infernal are referenced; always nice to see the iconic devices get a mention. It transpires Czevak spent time studying at the college and has recently learned information about an alien statue that had been on display in the Dark Tower of the title, a repository of 'dangerous' artifacts and information. As he slows his jetbike, Czevak sees that the populace has committed mass suicide. He climbs the Dark Tower and notices signs of bolter fire - his worst fears are confirmed when he comes across a psychic trace of Ahriman, villainous sorcerer of the Thousand Sons and Czevak's arch-nemesis. Ahriman has beaten Czevak to the punch, destroying the statue to see the future, an act which led to a massive psychic backlash that caused visions of despair leading to suicide on a planetary scale. The blurt ends with Czevak dusting himself off and preparing to continue his rivalry with the sorcerer.

Phew, I'm exhausted. Sanders' writing style in his Czevak stories is dense; crafted to be elevated above previous Black Library fare in terms of quality of prose. In a novel form this works, in a blurt form, well, it felt a little much. Coupled with the dark themes of suicide and an Inquisitor being thwarted by his foe, it makes for a surprisingly heavy five pages and something different from the blurts reviewed so far. 4/5"

Bad Sex

Some of you following this blog will know that I have spoken in the past on the merits and issues associated with horror writer Stephen King. He has undoubtedly written some enjoyable and genre-defining novels and deserves his place as the ‘King’ of Horror. I am less appreciative of his writing-by-numbers approach to the creative process - which might be fine for King – but unhelpfully prescriptive for others. I am immediately distrustful of writers who dictate rules for other writers and artists. These rules seem totally ignorant of the literary and cultural developments of the past fifty years: poststructuralism; postmodernism; post-anything. What century did King think he was in when he postulated such unbreakable rules? This is discussed in greater depth here.


Personally, if you’re going to follow anybody’s advice, you might as well follow William Goldman’s famous declaration that ‘nobody knows anything!’ Something that Stephen King seems to know a little about is writing a bad sex scene, apparently. He has been nominated for this year’s ‘Bad Sex in Fiction Award’, awarded to one writer each year in order to (according to The Literary Review) "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it". King has been nominated for his time-travel romance, 11.22.63.

I Am The Law!

I am not a great fan of rules and laws for creative processes (see my previous mauling of Stephen King) but as a frequenter of social media, blogs and forums, I have to accept that there are certain online posting behaviours that are repeated to such an extent that you might as well create laws and observances for them. I was astonished to learn that many already exist, have their own names and everything. Here are a few. While I don’t personally endorse them as hard-and-fast rules in online discussions, you might have observed them in action.

1. Godwin’s Law
Godwin’s Law was created by attorney and writer Mike Godwin in 1990 and states that "As a web discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

2. The Law of Exclamation
This was first invoked on FactCheck.org in 1998 and states, "The more exclamation marks used in a posting, the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters."

3. Pommer’s Law
First proposed by Robert Pommer on rationalwiki.com, the law states: “A person's mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”

4. Skitt’s Law
Skitt’s Law is an online version of Murphy’s Law. Simply put, the law states that "any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself".

5. Danth’s Law
Danth’s Law is named after a user on the role-playing gamers’ forum RPG.net. It instructs that “If you have to insist that you've won an internet argument, you've probably lost badly.”

6. DeMyer’s Law
Ken DeMyer, a moderator on Conservapedia.com, has several ‘laws’ but his Second Law states that “Anyone who posts an argument on the internet which is largely quotations can be very safely ignored, and is deemed to have lost the argument before it has begun.”

7. Cohen’s Law
Created by Brian Cohen in 2007, Cohen’s Law states that: “Whoever resorts to the argument that ‘whoever resorts to the argument that... …has automatically lost the debate’ has automatically lost the debate.”

Everything You Need To Know About Writing Successfully 4

The first of Stephen King’s rules is ‘Be Talented’. He is very careful to strictly define what he considers talent is in order that he doesn’t actually have to investigate the nature of talent. Essentially he passes the judgement onto other people. He states that he equates talent with being paid for your creative work. He tells us that talent has nothing to do with being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but being published. Ultimately agents and publishers around the world get do decide what ‘talent’ is based upon what will sell. If the model Jordan ‘writes’ a book (or has one ghost written for her) then publishers will option it and readers will buy it. Is Jordan a talented writer? According to King she is. In this respect King is little interested in literary worth, narrative or linguistic skill. The soap writer is as talented as the Oscar-winning screenplay writer simply because they both got paid. Perhaps the soap opera writer got paid more. It doesn’t make the soap opera writer more talented. Since the soap opera writer is largely given the A to B plotline and established characters then it might be argued that he/she is a great deal less talented.

For King to begin his rules with ‘Be Talented’ and then not qualify what ‘talent’ is or how one might achieve such a state of being suggests that King doesn’t know. It is a cop out. Why should we listen to King at all? This is slippery of him. Anyone who commits their thoughts to writing in a creative way believes in their inherent talent to one extent or another. Truly modest people who believe they have no talent do not go around claiming that they do. King gets to feed writers’ self-belief without actually offering them anything useful. Imagine being told that by anyone else from whom you are taking professional advice. Qu. ‘How do I succeed at this?’ An. ‘Be talented’. Gee, thanks. Insightful.

Ultimately King’s definition is a poor one. There are many examples of writing that were not recognised as talented at the time of their creation but now are both critically lauded and make lots of money. The ‘multitude’ does not get to determine ‘talent’. It determines popularity. The two are different and King was unwise to use the word ‘talented’ in his rules. He did because he knows that most writers do not want to be popular without being talented and so he simply tells writers what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. If King is right then perhaps all writers and aspiring writers should raise their game. Perhaps real talent should be more exclusive. If you want to be talented, or more than talented according to King’s definition, then you need to do more than fulfil basic expectation and collect your pay check. Schopenhauer is probably closer to the truth when he said, ‘Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits the target no one else can see.’

Everything You Need To Know About Writing Successfully 3

I have been looking at some of the rules laid out in Stephen King’s essay on successful writing. King has a great deal to say on the subject and indicates that there are a number of unbreakable rules that should be observed in order to be a successful writer. I have difficulty with unbreakable rules and have been examining several of his in order to determine whether Stephen King – undoubtedly a successful writer in his own right – can lay down the same rules for everyone else.
















Today is King’s insistence that writers should, “Remove every extraneous word” in their texts. He goes on to say, “You want to get up on a soapbox and preach? Fine. Get one and try your local park. You want to write for money? Get to the point.” I have a problem with this one because, yet again, King seems to be taking fiction writing the way of the screenplay. In screenplays the writer provides the skeletal structure of the narrative – the action and dialogue. Descriptions (and particularly ‘adjectives’) are frowned upon because it is considered someone else’s job in the movie industry to scout a location, choose the colour of a costume, audition an actor etc. There is little point putting that kind of descriptive detail into the script if the location that has been described – using “extraneous” words like adjectives – cannot be found. What would be the point of describing the physical characteristics of a character for which an actor has yet to be cast?

You cannot use this approach with fiction. To do so and to instruct others to do so is stripping-out fiction for parts. It is cutting down prose to its barest essentials. Why would fiction writers need to do this? Are there pressing demands on the time readers have to commit to texts? If that were the case then surely they wouldn’t read the texts at all. King ignores a crucial element in the dynamics of reading, and therefore writing, when he makes such a bold and unhelpful claim. Visualisation. The reader does not have a location scout, costume designer or casting director. They create a picture in their mind of the characters and action unfolding in the story as they read on a millisecond by millisecond basis. Without some “extraneous” words like adjectives, how are they supposed to create the rich fictional worlds in which they like to spend time?

Leaving a certain amount open to interpretation is still a very valuable part of the process, but stripping down language in the way King suggests can create problems for the reader and then the writer. Imagine a tree. What colour are the presents beneath it? Oh, you were thinking about a tree in a forest. Silly me, when I wrote down that word without the support of any other “extraneous” words I didn’t tell you that it was a ‘Christmas’ tree. I am still being economical with language - for instance, you are now imagining the tree in a living room, since that is where most people encounter Christmas trees – but I am using “extraneous” words. King even does this in his own rule by telling us to soapbox in a “local” park. He felt that without that “extraneous” word there might be room for confusion: a person standing in the middle of a national park, for instance, talking to themselves. According to King we would also have to do away with any kind of imagery. Metaphor, simile and personification would all be superfluous to requirement because King suggests that all writers need to “Get to the point”.

On the other hand, the use of one hundred adjectives to describe the tree is probably unhelpful also. There is a balance that needs to be struck – a balance that King seems to ignore in giving such brazen and uncompromising advice. King could, of course, claim that he has been misinterpreted. Perhaps he should have used more “extraneous” words to avoid the confusion that can arise from supplying the reader with too little information. Part of that balance is determined by the individual reader and their personal attention span in respect to the text they are reading. Some modern readers can cope with texts written hundreds of years ago, that seem far less concerned with King’s preoccupation with getting to the “point”or murdering adjectives. Others cannot cope - and probably never will cope if they never choose to extend themselves with such texts. It is too demanding and too complex for them to follow. The result of this is boredom and they move on in turn to something ‘easier’. The continuance of King’s approach leads to a decrease in literary competence among readers as they become conditioned to simpler, stripped out text. This cannot be a good thing. A writer’s skill resides in making these kind of choices. Marrying text as best they can to the myriad of different readers out there. King cannot take that choice away from the writer or the reader. Stephen King is an important writer. He is not, however, more important than the mechanics of the reading process.

Everything You Need To Know About Writing Successfully In Ten Minutes 2

I’m looking at Stephen King’s popular essay on writing, referenced in the post title above. King is an extremely influential writer but I feel that the advice he gives out to writers, and people on the road to being writers, often comes in the form of unbreakable rules. This approach is unhelpful and a kind of literary snobbishness. In doing so, King attempts to establish a kind of hierarchy in which he naturally places himself at the top. He ignores the possibility of a multitude of successful approaches to writing and fails to explain the existence of writers who have had more success than himself without using his rules. Also, sometimes he is just plain wrong. As I believe in the plurality of voices, I should not deny King his own. This is his take on the tools of the writer’s trade: dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopaedia.

Rule 5. Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft
You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopaedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right - and breaking your train of thought and the writer's trance in the bargain - or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don't have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it ... but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

Seems like good advice, delivered with a confidence that selling thousands and thousands of books can lend you. There are problems, however, and I draw attention to these not because I dislike King’s writing or fail to rate him as a writer. King’s advice is oft-quoted on the internet and in the kinds of ‘How To...’ books that many burgeoning writers have consulted at the beginnings of their careers. His advice is then presumably followed by many people who, if they had been allowed to follow their own path, might have generated something unique and exciting. Advice can be over-rated. To quote the Sunscreen song, “Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth”.

One of King’s assertions that I believe to be unnecessarily brutal is the authoritative indication that, “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” (Oops, Jon – that’s you and me gone!) I just do not buy this one at all. It’s like stripping a professional photographer of their lens attachments or a painter of their mixing palette. Use a thesaurus or don’t use a thesaurus – whatever gets the job done for you personally – but you can’t tell writers that they can’t use one: that any word used from one is “the wrong word”. For King, beyond it being “wrong” and there being “no exceptions”, it seems the main problem is the idea that writers may break their “train of thought”, their “writer's trance”, if they have to get up and go a search out a word in a thesaurus or consult a fact in an encyclopaedia. This sounds like it makes sense but it doesn’t take into account the significant consideration of requirements particular to King: the ironic suggestion that King might be a poorer writer than his peers in comparable circumstances. New Historicism is an important branch of literary theory that has received increasing attention over the last thirty years. New Historicists claim that, regardless of the individual talent of the writer, texts are products of the circumstances in which they were written. These circumstances might be broad and influential, like political or social ideas that find a voice in texts written at the same time as their appeal. Examples of this might be the tensions between Protestants and Catholics represented in plays by Shakespeare four hundred years ago to the global economic meltdown represented in fictional form today. ‘Historical’ circumstances don’t have to be so broad: they can be intensely personal. Events occurring in an individual writer’s life can therefore have a huge effect on their writing.

How does this relate to King? He tells us himself that he has to “hunt for”, “look it up” and “go” when doing anything that takes him away from what he defines as the writing process. You can almost see him getting up and rooting around his house, or at least his bookshelf, for his thesaurus. Actual writing for Stephen King is done, “When you sit down”. It suggests that he needs this unbroken concentration to write. This shouldn’t surprise us (from a New Historicist point of view) since it is well known that King wrote his early fiction - Carrie for example - in a caravan, on a manual typewriter.

We can see that King’s insistence on not using a thesaurus might come from two factors. Firstly, his initial writing experiences benefitted from a pattern of behaviour that included a sense of isolation – shutting himself away in a caravan and getting the job done undisturbed. Given what we know about King’s early poverty (making his own personal story all the more appealing) it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that he did not own all of the reference books he cites as belonging in the “wastebasket”. If he started out that way in the 1980s and generated some success from that approach, you can see why he feels he has not needed them subsequently. The second factor is technology. Most writers that came after King do not use manual typewriters. They use word processors and now have the benefit of the internet, where there is very little hunting for reference books required. Modern writers do not need a trip to the library or have to turn over their houses to find an encyclopaedia, to validate a fact or piece of information. Every reference source a writer might ever want (and many they won’t) is there at their fingertips, with very little to break their “train of thought”. Many modern writers have to maintain the “writer’s trance” while carrying out other activities or surrounded by their families in busy households. Many do not have the ‘luxury’ of an isolated caravan or cabin in the woods to retreat to every time they wish to write.


I do not intend to criticise Stephen King. He is undoubtedly a successful writer of clear skill. His advice, on the other hand, can be dangerous when taken out of the context in which it was given. King cannot be considered without bias. What works for King might not work for other writers. What works for other writers might not have worked for King. The biggest danger comes not from writers emulating King’s approach: it is everyone else accepting it unquestioningly. If everyone involved in the process, from the publishing industry to the readers, believe that good writing comes from stripping out texts of anything that might have come been found in a thesaurus - the “wrong” words as King puts it – then all novels will start to sound like screenplays and schematics. It is interesting to note that Stephen King himself has had a long standing interest in such writing – insisting on writing the script adaptations for his own novels. Writers at the beginning of their careers are often warned not to allow their texts to become ‘overgrown’ with adjectives and adverbs etc, the suggested image here being a crowded garden. There is something in this: you can have too much of even a good thing. On the other hand, ‘gardens’ stripped of any descriptive prose and devoid of thesaurus-consultation might be considered concreted over and bare. They are economical and easy to maintain but they are not places people wish to spend their time. They do the job but they lack ambition and beauty. I find it hard to believe that these are the equivalents of ‘good’ writing. The kind of writing, of which Stephen King in the 1980s, might have approved.

Everything You Need To Know About Writing Successfully In Ten Minutes

This is the title of a famous essay on writing by Stephen King. The essay largely takes the form of a list: the dos and do nots of creative writing. I’m not a fan of such lists. Some writers – even professional writers, with many years of experience – swear by them. Like anyone interested in writing, I have read many of these lists. Some are moderately helpful. Some are absurd.

King is undeniably a successful writer, although it is fair to say that his heyday was the 70s and 80s. He has a great deal to say about fiction and is much quoted on the subject of writing. My background is in Literary Theory, so I have a difficult time believing in the fixed, concrete nature of such an approach. It feels very much of a remnant of a bygone age. A postmodernist / poststructuralist approach to King’s writing rules and regulations, immediately undermines his absolute belief in a particular set of rules, since the dominating literary philosophy of the postmodern period prioritises the playfulness of creative approaches, the breaking of rules and the resistance of authority structures. We are doing things in fiction, film and art that ‘creatives’ before us would never have done, for fear of it breaking some kind of unbreakable convention. King’s essay is very much in that model.

There are, even in the essay, hints that King is uncomfortable with such an approach. King claims, as part of his rules regarding How to Evaluate Criticism:
“Show your piece to a number of people - ten, let us say. Listen carefully to what they tell you. Smile and nod a lot. Then review what was said very carefully. If your critics are all telling you the same thing about some facet of your story - a plot twist that doesn't work, a character who rings false, stilted narrative, or half a dozen other possibles - change that facet. It doesn't matter if you really liked that twist of that character; if a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with your piece, it is. If seven or eight of them are hitting on that same thing, I'd still suggest changing it. But if everyone - or even most everyone - is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.”

I have some respect for this facet of King’s insight, but within it are the seeds of the essay’s failure. We could take King’s list and those of many other writers and we would find many different pieces of advice, some even contradictory. This was, of course, always going to be the case. Why write a new list unless there is something different to add. Since, according to King’s own advice, “if everyone - or even most everyone - is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.” This means that we have to ignore King’s own advice: very postmodern.

Regardless of this – or perhaps because of it (King becomes a more interesting prospect when examined in this way) I would like to look at a number of King’s rules in subsequent blog entries. They are widely quoted and regarded as creative writing gospel: I would like to look at aspects I believe to be helpful to writers and those approaches that have clear deficiencies – despite the ardent fashion in which King and many other writers adhere to them.