Jackhammer

From Stuart Moore's A Thousand Flowers column, a quote within a quote:

...approaching the question of plot vs. ideas. The two are related, but not identical. Stephen King, whose own work is very character- and mood-oriented, cautions against too much reliance on plot. In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he describes the process of crafting a story in terms of excavating a fossil from the ground with various tools:

"No matter how good you are, no matter how much experience you have, it's probably impossible to get the entire fossil out of the ground without a few breaks and losses. To get even most of it, the shovel must give way to more delicate tools: airhose, palm-pick, perhaps even a toothbrush. Plot is a far bigger tool, the writer's jackhammer. You can liberate a fossil from hard ground with a jackhammer, no argument there, but you know as well as I do that the jackhammer is going to break almost as much stuff as it liberates. It's clumsy, mechanical, anticreative."

Posted by karl at March 24, 2004 01:58 PM