Looks like this book haul is going to be perfect for figuring out what drives people to do hard things like writing books. I hadn’t really thought about it before but it seems to have lined up that way. I guess the one answer to finding some passion in my work is to steal it from other people, aka, finding inspiration. While thinking about it this morning, I was reminded of a particular little gem that Stephen King Delivers in ‘On Writing’ while talking about his novel ‘Carrie’ that he initially hated.

“Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”

Someone should dissect his brain when he dies to figure out what exactly is so wrong with the man that he can be so right about things like this. I’ve never heard that idiom before, ‘shovel shit from a sitting position,’ but it’s so apt it kinda hurts. He has a million of these little aphorisms throughout the book. I should really go and write all of them down at some point. His ability to make analogies like this one is exactly what I was trying my best to achieve in my post on abstract connections. I get the sense that King may be the master of this type of one line aphorism. Each one does the work of ten lines of straight prose. In fact, don’t think you could really describe a situation as effectively at all when it comes to shoveling shit from a sitting position.

His writing flows so well that it seems like the idea must just come to him in the moment, but I can’t see how that’s possible. Whenever I try this it comes out as a cliché, like trying to find diamonds in the rough, or digging for worms. But then if I have something original it fails to match up to the tried and true idioms we all know already. It’s just so hard to find them in the first place. Feels like pulling barbed wire from my brain … no that doesn’t work, too gruesome. Pulling a leg out of quicksand? Lame. Shucking oysters without a knife? Wait, is that even difficult? Sigh. Do you see what I mean?

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley