The voice of Stephen King, as channeled through his novelist Mike Noonan in Bag of Bones. Stick around, because later tonight I'll be reviewing the novel in full; in the meantime, I just wanted to share a passage that is likely relevant to anyone reading this blog:
From my admittedly prejudiced standpoint, successful novelists--even modestly successful novelists--have got the best gig in the creative arts. It's true that people buy more CDs than books, go to more movies, and watch a lot more TV. But the arc of productivity is longer for novelists, perhaps because readers are a little brighter than fans of the non-written arts, and thus have marginally longer memories. David Soul of Starsky and Hutch is God knows where, same with that peculiar white rapper Vanilla Ice, but in 1994, Herman Wouk, James Michener, and Norman Mailer were all still around; talk about when dinosaurs walked the earth.
Arthur Hailey was writing a new book (that was the rumor, anyways, and it turned out to be true), Thomas Harris could take seven years between Lecters and still produce bestsellers, and although not heard from in almost forty years, J.D. Salinger was still a hot topic in English classes and informal coffee-house literary groups. Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled onto the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.
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