I started watching The Long Walk on Prime for two reasons. Stephen King, the master of escape, wrote it. And, surely, he would transport me from the depressing, dreariness of the state of the union. The trailer looked interesting, with young actors, lush countryside, a plot that made me think Lord of the Flies meets the soon-to-be Walking Dead. Sadly, after about fifteen minutes and the verbal assault of innumerable f*** bombs. I turned it off. F*** is as tired and offensive to me as b****, ‘ho, and n*****. I couldn’t believe Stephen King would deface his imaginative prose with such triteness even if modern culture uses f*** to express every and any emotion that has do with anger, disappointment, frustration, and lack of a verbal repertoire. I say “sadly,” because I found the premise provocative. People volunteering for a long walk, almost guaranteeing their demise, in hopes of the prize of getting “anything you want.” What a teaser.
I decided to take The Long Walk out from the library. After a mere two day wait, I picked it up and stuck it at the bottom of my TBR pile. (To Be Read in case you’re not a reader.)
It lingered there less time than it took to get it from the library.
In a sort of depressed mood, I needed a plot driven distraction. I promoted The Long Walk to “active” and began to read, bracing myself to find that my hero, Mr. King, laced his prose with the poisonous f*** bomb. To my great relief, he did not. Thirty pages in and I may have found two or three. His characters piqued my curiosity. I bristled that no females qualified for the one hundred contestant group. The imagery of the Northeastern countryside pulled me right into the smells and textures of the land. The competitive yet connective camaraderie typified young men I had known.
I dog eared a few pages before I remembered Mr. King’s book on the craft of writing. Boy did he lambast adverbs. Why the dog-eared pages? I found an abundance of absurd adverbs.
Homesickly—a character “thought homesickly”
Frozenly—an old lady “stood frozenly”
Perkily—a nuthatch “looked them over perkily”
Satirically, cheerily
Sententiously, resplendently
Screamingly, explosively (both on one page)
You get my drift. There were so many of these reading interrupters, words that made me smile, laugh, shake my head in disbelief after reading Mr. King’s diatribe about adverbs, that forced me to bend a precious corner of a page so I could go back and savor the language of overwriting.
Then, as I do with every novel I read, I found the sentence which I wished I could have written.
p. 104— “A thin, delicate cord of saliva hung from the corner of his mouth, picking up the first tremulous touch of dawn with pearly, beautiful fidelity.”
Whether it’s from a hangover, the flu, contaminated food, a brain injury, or nerves, everyone has seen this image. Masterful.
I stopped dog-earring pages. More provocative than the tale became the question that arose asking why the author did something he advised authors not to do. Was it tongue-in-cheek to offset the darkness of a story in which young people are murdered because they are too slow, too tired, or they just don’t give a f*** anymore? I sit here curiously, curmudgeonly, tenaciously searching for the answer.
A Writer’s Petit Mort
On days when I have no time to write, I feel a vacancy, a black hole in my gut so painful and endless it reminds me of the first time I was in love. His name was Dan. He had a New York accent diluted by years in the Midwest. He avoided the draft because the Army didn’t have combat boots big enough to fit him, and he restrained his hormone saturated body to perfection in a tight slim width of nylon known as a Speedo. I loved him because he admitted I was smarter than he and it didn’t frighten him. We talked every day. And a part of me shriveled and retreated into self-loathing if I didn’t see him or hear from him. I was 17 years old.
I use legal pads and pens or my computer to write. If I don’t sit down and hard copy the words and sentences and dreams that torment me in the early morning hours, I flash back in time and relive the feelings of deprivation I experienced when Dan and I were apart. There is a longing, even a lust to decorate a page with thoughts I don’t want to forget. When I hold a pen, I think about linking my fingers between his. When I smooth a page before decorating it with loops and dots and t-crosses, I return to a time when I ran my fingers through his hair, around his ear, along his jaw. On the computer, the requisite light touch on the keyboard mimics how I teased his lips when he fell asleep in my arms on a bus trip. I knew every nuanced crease of his mouth. When I finish a scene I experience the surprise and awe of our first French kiss, a kiss making heat and tongue and wet the flavor-of-the-month.
I like to think I am mature now, married, secure, consumed by efforts to crush stagnation with generativity. My writing renders my age meaningless. Passion ignites me via a circle of energy passing through and around me. I wrote the last word to my novel and asked my husband what word should end my work. He chose the same one I had moments before in my work room. “Amen.” (So be it.) I made a hard copy of the last chapter, sent the full manuscript to g-mail for storage, and hooted and hollered and danced around the house. I thought of love and the shuddering final ecstasy of the act. I reeled from the concoction of words birthed from me in the form of a book. The French call it the petit mort. I call it writing.