Stephen King is one of those rare writers who is popular and is still a darned good storyteller. The fact that so many of his books translate into good movies, even when the adaptations stray focus away from what was central to the book, speaks for his commitment to character and craft skills.He’s dubbed as a writer of horror and science fiction, but it’s worthwhile to note that the horror elements aren’t what make his books remarkable. [break]There are plenty of books on blood and gore, but not as many that also make for good reading or translate into good films. It’s King’s compassionate handling of people and his impatience for style that calls attention to itself. He is, first and foremost, a storyteller. And when a good story is taken and adapted into a film by a writer and director who are as committed to the story, it often makes for films that ultimately stay with the audience a long time.
Take The Green Mile for instance, written by King and adapted for the screen by Frank Darabont, who also adapted King’s Shawshank Redemption and The Mist. As Darabont once said in his interview, “if you focus on the human story, everything else is gravy.” Even though readers approach films of books they love with trepidation, The Green Mile doesn’t disappoint.
And what’s fascinating about the book itself is that it was an experiment in serialized form for King.
Serialized fiction enjoyed its golden age in the days of Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Since then, with the rise of the novel, it came back in fits and spurts, never making its way to the widely-read installments of the 19th Century.
But if you wait long enough, everything comes back in style. Maybe not everything does in the literary world, but the serialized form is certainly making its comeback in fiction, and in a big way.
In November, Amazon announced its Kindle Serial, launching works of serialized fiction delivered straight to Kindles, the list of which includes Kurt Vonnegut’s previously unpublished Sucker’s Portfolio.
And then, there’s the Wattpad, where many young writers and readers have found meeting grounds, and publishers have found new talents.
But it’s not just young writers going on Wattpad anymore. Margaret Atwood, the well-known Canadian novelist, who also wrote the serialized online novel Choke Collar on Byliner, is co-writing a zombie novel in installments on the Wattpad app.
But let’s go back to Stephen King’s The Green Mile, collected and available in paperback, one of those rare contemporary successes in serialized fiction.
The book takes off with an introduction King wrote, in which he traces how the idea for The Green Mile took hold of him and how it found a home in the installment fiction format.
But for a writer who had so far been working in solitude, who believes in “write with your doors closed, rewrite with your doors open (On Writing, Stephen King), the ‘writing in installments’ format was one where you couldn’t stop midway, change the situation or your character upon revision, and not finish what you had started. It was writing with your door wide open.
As he writes, “I wrote like a madman, trying to keep up with the crazy publishing schedule and at the same time trying to craft the book so that each part would have its own mini-climax, hoping that everything would fit, and knowing that I’d be hung if it didn’t.”
When working in connected serialized pieces, there are two ways in which to refresh the reader’s memory. One is to block out a part and recount, as are done in serialized TV episodes. However, this often comes off as clumsy in writing.
King took up Charles Dickens’ style of weaving in the previous episode into the new one, sort of the way J.K. Rowling builds in the language of wizardry and Harry Potter’s past into each new installment. It makes the transition seamless, bringing new readers up to date while refreshing the loyal readers’ memory.
There was rudimentary planning done, and King, who is never coy when talking about his writing process, talks about how the main character and the situation changed before the idea went to paper. And then he named the man who compels the narrator to tell the story, John Coffey, as a reference to William Faulkner’s Joe Christmas, and Jesus Christ, all sharing the same initials, J.C.
John Coffey, like Jesus Christ, is a healer who can see men’s hearts, who is condemned by the government for things he hasn’t done. Both their executioners acknowledge their innocence but are forced to execute them against their principles.
The executioner in The Green Mile is Paul Edgecombe who is an “essentially decent voice; low-key, honest, perhaps a little wide-eyed, he is a Stephen King narrator if ever there was one.” And it’s in this framework of an old man recounting his days as the head supervisor in the death row of Cold Mountain Penitentiary that the characters call ‘The Green Mile’ that the story is set.
Darabont’s screenplay adaptation of the book with stills and an introduction by Stephen King is also available in paperback. King also has a foreword and afterword in the novel format.
In 1996, when he wrote the afterword, he stated, “I don’t think I’d want to do another serial novel (if only because the critics get to kick your ass six times instead of just once.)”
But who knows, with the renaissance of serialized fiction, we may yet have another installments of King’s story in the coming years.
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