Clearly.
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Stephen’s Kings books and stories about writing are probably my favourite of his. The Dark Half is also excellent. I even remember the George Romero adaptation of it being very well done (something that didn’t happen often with mid-90s King movies).
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That’s another one, thanks for the reminder.
I guess Lissey Story counts, as well, not mention Bag of Bones.
Sadly, many screen adaptations of King’s horror novels from any period are not all that good. Notable works like Carrie and the Dark Half are the exceptions…
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Oh, you!
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Didn’t it take him like 17 years to get published?
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Six months ago I took the biggest leap of my life…
I wanted to find myself here, through a combination of nature and art. But now, day after day, I have nothing interesting to say about nature, and I feel terrified that there is no me to find.
Look, I’m sorry, but this is bananas. It’s only been six months, the adjustment period has barely begun.
How could anybody realistically determine whether it’s going to work out after such a short amount of time has passed? I wouldn’t even think about self-reflection on this endeavor until probably two years have passed. She’s giving up way too soon. If you’re going to pursue your dream, you best not be in a hurry.
Let’s see… my family vacation spot growing up was a remote cabin in northern michigan (on a small private island, no electricity, hand-pumped water, outhouse manned by spiders who take the poop money, a mile by small boat to ‘the mainland’).
I also write as a hobby.
I actually really got my modern writing hobby going back in 2003, as I bashed out all sorts of stuff on a specialized word processor keyboard doohickey whose model name I forget at the moment but was basically an 8088-powered DOS computer with a special word processor app, formed into a keyboard and un-backlit character LCD screen powered by AA batteries. Going up to that cabin basically meant I either did work all day taking care of it with my parents, lounged around and swam or went for boat rides or fished or ran around the rather dangerous rocky island, or read books. Or wrote. And it worked. Faced with only myself and the lack of modern world, my brain went crazy and I really kicked off a hobby.
Would I go and do that again right now to try and write more? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Why?
Because I call this ‘cargo-cult mentality’. If I do this thing, then I’ll want to do this other thing/become this person/etc. If I go to a writing retreat, I’ll become a writer! If i buy music equipment and set up a studio, I’ll want to do music! If I buy art supplies, I’ll want to become an artist!
It’s kind of the opposite of ‘fake it until you make it’ - where you get all the stuff ready to do the thing, and instead, you do nothing or the complete opposite.
why did it work back then? Well, mostly because I really wanted to write and just happened to have that set of technology available to me while I was on summer vacation.
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My plan for my new life was simple, or so I thought. I’d rise each morning, drink herbal tea, walk on the same trail, watch wildlife, and write down my meditations about the natural world. Then I would come home to my little cabin and have the whole afternoon to work on my book: a combination of memoir and reflection on nature.
This got me thinking of Annie Dillard and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She really was there, but I read somewhere that when she wrote it she was chain smoking cigarettes in a booth at the library.
(This is perhaps my favorite book of all time. Also, I met someone who had Annie Dillard as a teacher in college. I was soooo envious. As if having her as a teacher would have given me talent . . . )
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Worked for Henry David Thoreau I guess. Though his cabin was far less “remote” than one might have assumed given how much his time at Walden was romanticized.
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Sign me up, because that looks amazing!
Bars are for writing poetry, especially mid-afternoon at the kind of place that has old regulars, at least, that’s my favorite for bar writing. Then again, I’ve never tried the place with the human soup bowl.
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Yeah, his cabin was just one mile from the center of downtown Concord and less than that to his parents’ house where he had his laundry done.
One thing that surprised me when I visited his cabin site was that the train tracks adjacent to the pond (and only about 1200 feet from his cabin) had already been there for a decade when he moved there in the 1840s. In some ways the area was even less wild than it is now- the whole area was covered with charred mounds used for charcoal making to feed the railway and the local smelters. Plus the woods had been ravaged to use the trees as fuel. It’s almost certainly a much nicer place to visit today than in his time.
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AND THEY COOKED HIS MEALS.
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Thank you for articulating why coffee shops work for me too. I’ve even found that the occasional interruption from a stranger–I affectionately call them people from Porlock–can change my perspective in positive ways.
I recommend Ariel Rubinstein’s Atlas of Cafes where one can think although I’m sorry to say that I know at least one place listed there, JJ’s in Nashville, Tennessee, closed at the end of 2018. It’s a shame too. I don’t know of any other place that had specialty coffees named after James Brown and Schopenhauer.
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See, that’s where that Into the Wild guy messed up. He took inspiration from Thoreau but neglected to note that all-important detail before setting off on his Alaskan adventure.
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Truthfully, Idris was for you. The thumb was just extra.
(*For everyone else’s enlightenment, I got a paper cut on my thumb last week…
that became infected very rapidly and swelled to huge proportions before it finally burst open.*)
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Did Alan Wake teach people nothing?
Even Alice’s Restaurant was a half a mile from the railroad track.
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