In the Beginning... (There was an Introduction)

So the first thing you normally see of a book is the cover, right? This was not in fact the case with my reading of "On Writing- A Memoir of the Craft", because of me reading it on the Kindle, but I googled the cover, so I can still offer my opinion of how it may have affected the reading, or at least the reader's first impression. My search came up with two different covers: a dark photograph of a lone chair in an attic room and a light mostly beige photo of the doors on the side of a house leading to a cellar or basement, accented with bright flowers to the side. It seems to me that the latter is a more suitable cover because it seems to emulate the idea of an introduction more than that dark attic that seems to be more of an ending than a beginning because dark implies night, which is at the end of the day, while the light of the second cover implies the beginning of the day, and give the reader a brighter outlook of the subject of writing. Also, the basement door is fitting for the book because King has his "farseeing place" in the basement.

Then next interesting thing the reader finds in the book are the quotes "Honesty's the best policy" and "Liars prosper," both of which inherently contradict each other. (Hooray for an interesting oxymoron!) This piques the reader's interest, and makes them wonder what relevance the quotes have (and they do have relevance, since they come up later in the book.)

And now to the forward. The first thing that struck me about the forward was that King was also a musician. It seems to me that all art forms are interconnected in some way, and are just different ways of expressing creative tendencies. Few people really seem to connect all of the arts together, but they are connected. For example, if some what says they're an artist, everyone naturally assumes that they draw, or paint, or something like that. They would almost never guess that they wrote, or played music, or even cooked. All of those are arts as well.

Another thing that caught my attention at the beginning of the book was the comment King made about his band. "We found that we liked playing together too much to quit..." It has often occurred to me that artists are interesting and entertaining people, no matter which art they pursue, and the more arts they are interested in, the more interesting they seem to be.

King also wrote the phrase "... when you're standing in front of a group of author-struck fans and pretending you don't put your pants on one leg at a time like everyone else." It occurred to me when I read this that even though some people are considered "masters," like Shakespeare, and Homer, they're still human beings, and still eat and sleep like all us "lesser" people. Just because they seem great and powerful doesn't mean they're divine.

In his "Third Forward" King tells the reader the rule "The editor is always right." This rings with a certain truth, because if this person takes the time and effort to read through what you've written, and give you feedback on it, they probably want to be listened to, and there is probably a good reason they told you this. This also means you're going to want a good editor if you're going to be a writer.

~Cafferty Frattarelli