Stephen King's Misery

There's an old piece of writing advice that's been repeated so often, I can't even possibly attribute it to one author. That piece of advice is this: when writing fiction, don't make your main character a writer.

This is of course understandable. Why?--because unless you live a Hemingway-esque lifestyle, full of travel and adventure, the life of a writer is actually quite boring. What we do is dull work in the eyes of "normal" people. We sit at a table, with a computer or notebook in front of us, and we string words together. Watching an antique collect dust is more compelling. 

On a more practical level, there's another reason writers shouldn't write stories about writers. Eventually, within the story, the author will have to provide example of their fictional writer's efforts. What that mandates is that the writer in question has to do double the work. They have to writer their story and also write their fictional writer's stories too. (Though, admittedly, you don't have to finish your fictional writer's work though, which is half the battle of this job.)

However, rules are created for average people. Exceptional people can take a rule like that and turn it on its head. One such example of course is Stephen King's classic novel, Misery.

I've been aware of this book's existence for years, but I'd never actually gotten down to reading it until recently. 

My awareness came, of course, from the existence of the famous movie Misery directed by Rob Reiner, starring Kathy Bates and James Caan, with the screenplay by William Goldman. Since the first time I saw it, I knew it was a great movie. The acting, the directing, the handling of the most macabre moments of the story, were all brilliantly done. 

But film and fiction are two different mediums. I wanted to experience Stephen King's original vision of the story.

As frightening and heart-pounding as the movie is, the book is far more terrifying. I put this down to the difference in medium. Film is, primarily, a visual medium. You see and hear everything and absorb it almost instantly. Fiction, however, is cerebral. Everything in the story goes on inside the theatre of the human mind. Even someone with the most lethargic imagination can create something more gruesome out of abstract language than can be given to them via an image if given the chance. And the situation King places his protagonist, Paul Sheldon, into is horrifyingly claustrophobic when you experience it internally. 

Picture, if you will, being trapped in an Airbnb, which resides in the house of the human being who personifies everything about yourself and life of which you're afraid. Imagine also, that you're crippled (no offense to the differently-abled or handicapable), and totally reliant on this person for your very survival. You can't clean yourself, feed yourself, and you're in relentless amounts of pain. Finally, entertain the idea that this person is abusive, subject to mood swings, and is so particular that if you don't do and act in the exact way they wish you to, they will torture you in every possible way they can imagine--from depriving you of pain meds and food to harming you so much that it will leave you both physically and emotionally scarred for years to come. 

That incredibly long-winded hypothetical is the dynamic between Paul Sheldon and his captor, keeper, and number one fan, Anne Wilkes. 

Those who have seen the movie know (with certain detailed changes that I won't mention here), what happens in the course of the story. William Goldman, in his adapting the novel for the screen, did a remarkable job of keeping the plot intact. However, the delivery system is totally different (again, film versus fiction).

The story as conveyed through the book is told is an incredibly apt claustrophobic manner. We are completely inside the mind of Paul Sheldon. Not only do we got his interior monologue relating the events of what happens to him, but we also get his own commentary on those events. Most of the book, in fact, is not his interactions with his jailer, but his interactions with himself. At various points, all of the prose passages are divided between Paul's third-person narrative voice and his own first-person inner voice, and they banter back and forth between themselves. And, because his own world is so narrow for the duration of 90% of the book, his inner world is all we get most of the time.Thus, you experience his every emotion--his every twinge of anxiety, his every twitch of fear--as he feels it. 

Yet, the book works, and never becomes tedious because we aren't in the mind of just any person. Paul Sheldon is, of course, a writer. 

For Sheldon, his mind, his imagination, is his only refuge away from his bedroom prison cell.

As anyone familiar with either version of the story knows, Wilkes tasks Sheldon with the job of resurrecting her favorite of his creations: the heroine of a series of historical romances, Misery Chastain, who he's killed off in, what he believed to be, the final installment of her story. Initially reluctant to do it--after all, he killed her off so he could do other things--Sheldon eventually embraces the task, if only for the sake of having something else to focus on other than his own misery (ha, ha).

Interlaced through the novel are pieces of Sheldon's work in progress, Misery's Return. His creative outlet, his writing, is his salvation throughout the story. He's not able to escape the misery of his physical situation of his own physical accord, but he's able to escape the psychological situation that could just as easily overwhelm him.

Thus, King not only manages to make a compelling tale about a writer writing, he's also able to commentate on the act of creativity itself. Being creative, practicing an art, can be an act of salvation. It can get you away from all the problems of the world, if you can get lost in the one you're creating. It can provide you with a sanctuary in which to seek refuge when a situation grows dire. Art, even the art of entertainment, can be an escape from one's misery.

Even after Sheldon is able to escape Anne Wilkes' clutches, he's still in the grips of it. He carries not only the physical wounds of her hospitality, but he carries the memories of the trauma. He suffers from withdrawal from the pain medication. He drinks copiously to deaden the memories. But, once he begins writing again, as he does near the end of the story, all that fades away.

He's able to escape the misery of life by retreating into the imaginative fun and joy of art. It's a beautiful message wrapped in one of the world's most terrifying packages.