In the new(ish)ly added forward to Stephen King’s revised editions of the first 3 Dark Tower novels, he writes:
I think novelists come in two types… Those who are bound for the more literary or ‘serious’ side of the job examine every possible subject in light of this question: ‘What would writing this sort of story mean to me?’ Those whose destiny is to include the writing of popular novels are apt to ask a very different one: ‘What would writing this sort of a story mean to others?’ The ‘serious’ novelist is looking for answers and keys to the self; the ‘popular’ novelist is looking for an audience.
King identifying himself as the latter was somewhat of a revelation to me. It probably shouldn’t have been, but nevertheless it was… Somewhere inside me was a bug that believed that the “popular” novelist was somehow lesser, somehow incomplete. This bug prevented me from actively pursuing a writing career, because I believed (incorrectly) that my ideas were bigger than my talent – that somehow I wouldn’t be able to find the words to do my tale justice.
The reality is: if the story resides in my head, I’m the only one who can tell it. No one else would be able to make the world real, or infuse the characters with the same life that they have deep within only me. I may not be the best-equipped writer, literarily (yeah, I just made up a word), but the story is mine alone to tell, and all I have to do is step into that other place in my mind where the story is real, into that other me, and let it tell itself. Hopefully that guy can at least make it entertaining…
