It's been forever since I posted, and one of the main reasons besides the usual excuses of why you didn't do something (like work, college, family, friends, housework, writing) is because I've been working on reading It by Stephen King. Normally when I read one of Mr. King's novels it takes me a day, maybe two or three if I start it during the week. But not with It. Oh no, not with It. This book is over a thousand pages, and I've loved every word.
Now, some none readers would say, why in God's name would you want to spend hours reading one story? My better half looked at me like I was a little bit more than bonkers when I told him that I think I've spent 20 hours reading this novel and still have a couple hundred pages to go. That is a lot of time to devote to one story, to one thing that, on the surface, doesn't have any value or purpose other than to entertain me. So why spend that much time in solitude doing something that doesn't immediately help build relationships with other people or better your situation in life? Hell, why don't you just spend three hours watching the movie if you want to be entertained? It takes a fraction of the time to hear the story of Pennywise and you can enjoy the fear and fantasy with someone else. Well, I love reading the book simply because there's something magical about reading.
The technology used in cinema today truly amazes me. Phenomenal 3D movies like Avatar boggle my mind with their touch of realism, with how, especially in 3D, it seems the movie really is jumping out of the screen into your world of reality. The Adventures of Tin-Tin really blew me away. So much of the computer animation in that movie looked so real, the ocean, the boat, the plane, everything. It's truly remarkable what we can do with technology today.
Now, I'm a die-hard movie buff and love everything about cinema. I love all types of movies, from the old black and white silent films to the brand new super technological thrillers, bad movies, good movies, horror movies, funny movies, romance movies, everything. Movies freaking rock. But much as I love them, they're still never as good as a great book by a great writer.
When people read my work they say its like watching a movie, that they can see and hear everything that's going on and it feels as though they're not reading at all but simply watching a great story unfold. I'm always flattered when I hear that, because as a writer nine times out of ten I'm going to assume that what I wrote and revised a half a dozen times is still going to suck. But, what I hope to achieve as a writer is to one day be able to make the reader feel like they're in the story, because this is where the magic of reading really comes out.
Stephen King is my favorite writer. I know there's a lot of people out there who don't like his work and think he's terrible, and that's fine. He just warps my imagination in ways few other writers can, and he does it with almost every story. Oh yeah, he's written a book that I really didn't like and it felt like pulling teeth the whole time I was reading it, but does this mean I wrote him off and thought he'd lost his mind? No. To me he's a master at what he does, and the fact that he's only had one baddie in my opinion is really freaking amazing. He's the master of the craft of fiction because he sucks the reader into the story, and that's when the magic of reading kicks in.
It is a particularly good example of the magic in reading. As I drift off and get happily lost in this story for an hour at a time I feel like I'm one of the kids in Derry, Beverly's sister perhaps. I can smell that damp mugginess after it rains, can hear the mosquitoes buzzing in my ears as the Loser kids trek around the woods. I can feel the cold when it snows, I can feel the terror as the psycho kids chase our heroes. And at times, I can feel the evil clown Pennywise right there in the room with me, lurking in the shadows of my mind, waiting to pounce into my world of the real and take the shape of what scares me most. With this book I sometimes have to put it down because it scares me too much, it seems too real to me. When the world of fiction and the world of the real blur together in a way that confuses the mind so much that it's no longer sure of what is real and what is a story is when the magic of reading comes alive.
I saw the movie It when I was a kid and oh yeah, you bet it scared the crap out of me, but it never scared me in the way it does now that I'm an adult reading the book. When I was a kid, sure I was creeped out after I watched the movie and had a nightmare or two, but movies aren't real. Kids are taught from an early age that movies aren't real, and we carry that with us as we morph into our adult selves until we become people who are difficult to scare because we know what we are watching is nothing more than a farce. But when you're reading something scary? That's when things suddenly become very scary again, and very, very real.
I'm not sure why reading is so very different than watching a movie, but I know there are forces at work within the mind that simply aren't there when you're watching a movie; they're only alive within the pages of a book. Perhaps reading makes stories so much more real and terrifying because your mind already has to work a little harder to see this fake world. Your mind has to make an image of a tree in a grassy park with a swing set in it, it has to form features of the characters that are talking, has to put clothes on the characters, has to set the pitches of their voices. Your mind must create the majority of the story when you're reading, and really reality is nothing more than your mind's perception of the world. So therefore when you're reading and your mind is creating the majority of the world, it makes sense that it all seems so real, more real than watching someone else's version of reality on a screen.
For me the magic of reading is that a story no longer becomes a work of fiction, it becomes another world that you're apart of, somewhere you belong. I once watched an author who asked the audience, "how many lives can you live?" That's what reading and writing is, living another life for a few minutes to a few hours. With reading we could live a thousand lives in fifty years if we wanted to. How much more magical can you get than that?
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