This Writer's Goal (At Least, One of Them)

One of my heroes, Stephen King, once wrote something to the effect that a great pleasure of his was having the opportunity to scare the living daylights (I believe he used a slightly less-polite term) out of his readers. Having been a horror movie aficionado from an early age, he surely realized what he wanted to be able to do with his work even when he was just scribbling stories as a kid.

I wrote my first full-length novel in high school. Oh, I had played around with short stories to start with in grade school, tried for an honest-to-God murder mystery in eighth grade that amounted to 40 pages, typed, at one-and-a-half space between lines, with no margins to speak of because I didn’t know any better, but was a whole lot of fun to put down on paper.

And then I decided to try a full-length kids’ novel. I wasn’t influenced by S.E. Hinton, which may have been a good thing. She might have given me a bout of paralysis, having published successfully at such a young age. But I was heavily influenced at the time by John Knowles, Rudyard Kipling, and Alexandre Dumas. I didn’t worry about them – two of them were already gone from the world, and the other was an adult so there would never be any connection between us.

Clearly, I have never been a fast writer. The book took me three years to produce before it spent my senior year of high school being passed around by my classmates until it wound up in someone’s trunk and I had to track it down. I never came up with a proper title for it; still couldn’t even if I tried today. But I learned a lot while working on it. The story revolved around two friends, two boys in high school, and the evolution of these original characters laid the groundwork for my other two guys, Philip Corts and Jake Holdridge.

And I also learned what one of my writing goals was: I wanted to write something good enough, or at least touching enough, to make a reader cry.

And I had success with my first try. That would be my sister, who always read everything I wrote before anyone else. She cried when she read it and, as strange as it may sound, I was thrilled. To put this in perspective, my sister has a very soft heart and will weep at TV ads if they’re done the right way. But I still considered this a big win and I knew from then on, I’d want to be able to write stories that would have that effect on every reader.

I highly doubt that anyone can write a story that will affect every reader the same way, i.e., draw each and every reader’s tears. Well, there’s Bambi. But that aside, I knew what I wanted to be able to do. I wanted that to be my power of the pen: to make readers cry.

And then I had to figure out how to make a reader cry while reading a book about the paranormal, an even trickier goal since I knew I wanted to write ghost stories. But I believed it could be done. And actually, I believe I may have done it at least one or two times. I had someone who was not my sister tell me that Saving Jake made her tear up in at least two different places. I’ve had people tell me that certain scenes out of the Bridgeton Park Cemetery Series have made them shed a few tears. To tell the truth, I’ve even cried a bit while writing some of those scenes. I know you’ve already seen the Robert Frost quote I love, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”

On a related note, the first time I saw the movie "Romancing the Stone," I was struck by the scene where Joan Armstrong (played so well by Kathleen Turner) hands her latest manuscript over to her editor and says “Read it and weep. I always do.” Whoever wrote that part got it absolutely right. I like to think I’m in good company.

Stephen King and I don’t have goals so very different from each other. He wants to scare. I want to draw tears. In the end, we’re both just working to make readers care enough about our characters that we provoke a desired response. I know for sure he’s got it down. I’m still working on it, and I’m okay with that.