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stina-is-a-punk-rocker · 4 years ago

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stephen king’s ‘it’: a rant-review

Alternatively titled: an almost verbatim account of the 12-page rant I wrote in my diary after being driven to a catatonic rage by the 1100+ page monstrosity that was IT.

WARNINGS: spoilers, blood and gore, violence and general icky stuff, death, suicide, demeaning descriptions of women, both adults and underage, mentions of child pornography, my two brain cells trying to make me sense of this damn book

I fell in hate with IT the way you fall asleep; slowly, then all at once. The beginning reeled me in- it was great, that perfect first sentence all writers strive for- it’s got a compelling start, and it gradually gathers momentum onwards. The writing’s good, nice diction, nice use of words, a bit too much exposition, but what’s a few hundred more pages of ultimately worthless crap if it keeps you engaged?

And then it starts to go downhill.

The book’s too long. I got really, really bored by around page 800, because the book was dragging on for way too long and there was no sign of it ending anytime soon. There’s so much extra crap you could’ve straight up cut out from the story and it wouldn’t’ve made any difference to the final outcome.

The back-and-forth between the past (1957) and the present (1985) was pretty interesting- I much preferred the past accounts to the present ones, admittedly.

There’s a fuckload of characters the book could’ve done without. Way too many people my lizard brain couldn’t keep track of; yeah, sure, you can include the people Pennywise made a meal of by name- but you could easily lop off a few pages’ worth descriptions of characters that don’t play a bigger role than becoming clown chow in the course of the story.

The Losers are pretty much your everyday group of misfits: you’ve got the ringleader William ‘Stuttering Bill’ Denbrough, Stan Uris, Richie Tozier, Ben Hanscom, Eddie Kaspbrak, Beverly Marsh and Mike Hanlon- alias the self-insert, the Jew, the guy who makes offensive jokes but gets away with it because ‘that’s just the way he is!’, one of the few characters in this entire book that I don’t want to punch the living daylights out of, the hypochondriac, the tiddies and the black guy.

It’s painfully obvious that Bill’s a self-insert. Everyone and their grandma know that the moment there’s a character in a book who’s an author, they’re going to be the self-insert. Middle-aged cis het white male author? Now, whoever could that possibly be based upon, Mr. King?

And hey, despite all my mediocrity, I’m guilty of doing the same. I’ll write a story about someone who likes to write, and then suddenly the character’s a woman with dark hair and brown eyes and horrible myopia.

And yet, there’s something about Bill that makes it impossible for me to like him. I liked him well enough as a kid; he had a very Peter Pan role with the rest of the lost boys + person with boobs, and everything he did was a bit too perfect (because Big Bill- yes, they really called him that- had ALL the answers) for me, but I’m willing to let that slide.

(I’m not, I’m really not. Please give me flawed characters, not Characters with One Singular Flaw Who Do Everything Else Perfectly.)

I don’t think calling Bill a Mary Sue would be too far of a stretch. Also, he cheated on his wife with Beverly- big surprise there, I called it way before it happened- and characters who cheat will never be redeemable for me.

And then we have Stanley Uris. It’s been a couple of months since I last read IT and I’ve already forgotten what greater purpose Stan served for the story. I might be wrong- remember, lizard brain, goldfish memory- but I honest to god cannot, for the life of me, remember what Stan meant for the plot. Except, well, to die a couple pages in.

(According to my quick Google search, his suicide was sacrificial. As a wise woman once said, “Wait… what.”)

Richie’s actually not a character I hate, despite what I said about him. He’s comic relief for the most part at the beginning, and there are loads of things he says that would immediately cause #RichieTozierIsOverParty to trend on Twitter had he existed in 2020, but he’s an interesting character all the same. He’s got some amount of depth to him, more personality outside of being just another kid who encountered Pennywise.

I have a soft spot for Ben, I’ll admit. I’ve been the Designated Ugly Fat Friend of every friend group I’ve been in, so maybe I’m a bit biased, but I find him a lot more likable than a lot of the other characters I encountered in the book.

About Eddie, I’m not actually sure what there is to write. I remember more about him than I do about poor Stan, but aside from Eddie marrying a woman who’s a caricature of his overprotective mother, there’s not much that comes to mind. I’ve heard that Eddie and Richie had some #moments- my dumbass didn’t notice while reading, I’ve read IT only once and I’m awful at reading between the lines- though the boys more or less ogled Beverly all the damn time (poor girl couldn’t even wear a pair of shorts, but I’ll get to her later) so I hadn’t really considered the possibility of them being anything other than Raging Heterosexuals.

Beverly is straight out of r/menwritingwomen- if I took a shot every time her breasts were brought up, I’d have passed out midway through the book. I find it interesting (no, I don’t, I find it demeaning) how every time there’s a female lead with ‘flaming red hair’ in a group with mostly men, she’s described as this fierce, bold, brave Bad Bitch whose actual Badness doesn’t get half as much as screen time as her boobs. And I get that Beverly’s attractive, you don’t have to constantly remind us that BEVERLY MARSH IS FUCKING HOT OKAY GET THAT IN YOUR HEAD SHE’S A GODDAMN SEX SYMBOL WITH HER FIERY HAIR AND VIRIDESCENT ORBS AND GIGANTIC ASS AND BOOBS SO BIG THEY MIGHT AS WELL BE CALLED UDDERS SHE’S THE HOTTEST WOMAN YOU CAN IMAGINE ONLY LIKE A GAZILLION TIMES HOTTER DON’T YOU DARE FORGET THAT BEVERLY MARSH IS HOT (DON’T FORGET THE GIGANTIC BOOBS).

I think we got that the first time around.

And the constant sexualization isn’t just adult Beverly. As if every man in her vicinity staring at her wasn’t enough to drive the point home, we are treated to delights the likes of eleven-year-old (!) Beverly’s ‘budding breasts’; ‘milky white skin of her flat stomach’; ‘her long, coltish legs’; ‘shorts barely long enough to cover her panties’ (which were yellow, in case you were wondering about the underwear choice of a literal child); amongst other lovely descriptions of someone who literally just passed the fifth grade. She’s sexualized by her own father, and I know those things happen in the real world, but what with all the sexualization we already have of Beverly, it doesn’t sit right with me. I think it’s just creepy and unnecessary.

Also, cis woman to cis woman out here, but those ‘sweet pains of womanhood’, am I right?

Mike’s the final one in the trinity of Losers I don’t hate with burning passion/completely forgot about. The fact that he has such a big role in the story but we don’t meet him properly until we’re hundreds of pages in confused me, but he’s an okay enough guy. He didn’t seem like too much of a Token to me, but maybe I missed it. His backstory’s pretty interesting, too. I would’ve preferred him as a main character- his interludes, though unnecessary and adding more weight to an already obese book, were intriguing- and I liked him better than Bill, sue me.

And then we have the Big Bad, Pennywise the Dancing Clown, It, whatever the fuck it is. After all the terror, the Teenage Werewolf, the Crawling Eye, finding out that ‘It’ was essentially a pregnant, mutant Aragog… I can’t be the only one who went, “That’s it? That’s It?”

After Pennywise being Its most common form, it was jaunting, but in a bad way, to find out that It was just some Daddy (Mommy?) Long Legs who was Fucking Shit Up. An invertebrate, a measly invertebrate, was Its ‘Earth Form’? Was there some symbolism, some subtext there that I missed before Pennywise embodied the spirit of the Other Mother from fucking Coraline?

Apparently not, according to yet another one of my quick Google searches. I tried to see if there was any sort of hidden meaning behind the cosmic clusterfuck in IT, but came up short. Maybe I watched too much BEN 10 in my Youth for aliens to scare me.

I’m gonna get really nitpicky here, but: judging by the huge fern forests the kids saw during the arrival of It, It must have arrived at some point in the Paleozoic Era. To my understanding, It is essentially a Boggart-Dementor hybrid; It manifests into your fears and feeds on that. But humans didn’t appear until the Cenozoic Era, if my memory serves me correct. How did It survive until then? Does It have the ability to feed off of animals and their fears? So many questions, Mr. King, and so little answers.

Pennywise was sinister enough as a killer clown. Giving It a completely different ‘final form’ was unnecessary. No one cares, Mr. King, just finish the damn book. Some ideas are best left unwritten.

Henry Bowers was genuinely one of the best-written antagonists I’ve ever read about. He evoked a visceral rage within me, but I was also downright terrified whenever he popped up, because that motherfucker was unhinged. He was even better of a villain than It, because It killed to survive. Henry was insane.

Also, Mr. King, too much blood. He really dumped it in bucketloads- the first few times were scary, but afterwards, whenever ‘dripping blood’, ‘pools of blood’, etc. came up, it felt contrived and like a tacky fairground horror house.

The Losers’ final battles with It (both as children and as adults) confused me. Maybe I’m too much of a simple-minded fool because some of that cosmic galactic science-fiction bullshit went right over my head. And I don’t mean grazing the top of my hair, I mean several thousand miles above it.

I won’t go too deep into it because I’m still not sure what happened exactly, but it came off like a last-minute addition to the book, because it just doesn’t fit in with the mood of the rest of the story. At most, I expected some contrived demonic exorcist bullshit on par with The Conjuring films- instead, I got some weird outer space (?) opera. I’m confused too, dude, but let’s just roll with it.

I didn’t get the metaphorical tongue-biting; I could only imagine a repulsive French kiss. Who the fuck was the turtle? Why did it choke on its own vomit? What were the deadlights? What the fuck went on in those last few scenes? Am I just stupid- don’t answer that.

And then we have The Scene. The biggest fucking yikes I’ve ever yiked. I’ve read my fair share of fanfiction with scenes of questionable morality, but this was just… ugh.

It’s child pornography, that’s all there is to it. I refuse to believe that Stephen King ‘didn’t think too much of it’ while writing, and I’m disgusted by people who say, ‘it’s just one scene, it’s not a big deal’. That’s easily the worst thing I’ve ever read in a published book, and it amazes me I the worst kind of way when I see people who think it’s excusable. It’s not, it’s really not.

For the people I’ve seen arguing that ‘it’s just a couple of paragraphs’… that doesn’t erase the fact that it happened. You might argue that it has some deep metaphorical connotations about ‘the Losers growing up’ and ‘Beverly taking her sexuality into her own hands’… they’re eleven, you cunt. They’re literal fucking children. Sure, they’ve been through crap no one, not even adults, have been through. And that sucks. But how does that justify an orgy between ELEVEN YEAR OLDS?

And we get a nice little tidbit about the boys’ dick sizes; thank you, Mr. King, I really wanted to know which fifth grader had the biggest penis. The constant sexualization of child-Beverly was bad enough without that scene- that was just the nail in the coffin.

To sum it up: the writing’s good, the pacing’s geriatric, the characters are horrible, the story’s meh, and I’ll probably never read it unless I’m at gunpoint. On second thought, maybe not even then. Stephen King can suck my dick.

#book review #books #horror books #it #stephen king #stephen king it #it 1986 #it 2017 #it spoilers #pennywise #horror #horror literature #horror lit

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patchouliandrose · 4 years ago

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I’ve started reading the Book of Judges, because of a book I read recently entitle Ready to Rise by Jo Saxton. I may have mentioned the book in my previous post. It’s a wonderful book and I highly recommend it to women, especially women leaders – whether in the home, in small groups or large organizations – it’s a fabulous resource. When I bought it, I had no idea it was faith-based, so that was a pleasant surprise to me. I read it because I felt compelled to buy it based on the fact that I felt like God was urging me to lead.

Let me be clear on this. I don’t know that God wants me to lead on a large scale. I used to think that and I tried to force things to happen and when things didn’t happen, I got discouraged and gave up, but God has never relented in his urging me to lead.

The thing is though, he seems to be urging me to lead in my family and to lead in small groups. I’m no longer worried about a large following (which is why I deleted my old Instagram account that had nearly 1000 followers, which I know is not huge, but who am I? I’m just somebody’s mother), nor am I worried about who supports the cause, because it’s not MY cause. It’s God’s and God keeps sending me to women in the Bible who led by supporting their families and their own homes.

Which brings me once again to the message I received in my early twenties: Set your house in order and wait on the Will of Heaven.

God has never stopped telling me that.

Recently, with all that’s going on in the world, I began to lose hope. I went to bed early one evening and cried myself to sleep, cussing at God and telling Him about my hopelessness and my anger and my sorrow for all that’s going on. I told Him everything. I wanted to give up on the idea of a ministry (which is what He’s been pressing on my heart for the last year) and I told him I really didn’t want to do it, but if he wants me to, then He better get to showing me what on earth He wants of me, because I was losing hope.

That night, I woke up with Seeds of Hope and Seeds of Change in my mind. I wrote them down. The day before, my mother said she received a message of Seeds of Prayer. That morning, I awoke with a strange sense of peace over me and I realized finally, what I needed to do and that is why Seeds of Hope was started.

What I love most about it is it’s small. It’s a small group of kind-hearted people who want to make a change in the lives of children who are impacted by poverty and/or homelessness. Since it started, we have donated $800 to City Gospel Mission, and we’re set to give 25 nature-inspired kits to local businesses and a church to give out to children, and we have a collection of books and quilts/blankets to give to SAFY, for children in foster care in Kentucky. We are also putting together a free seed exchange so that we can help to increase food diversity in our country.

It’s not much, but it’s something. I’m learning that big change rarely happens suddenly. It happens through small, daily actions and through grassroots movements.

I think this is what God had been trying to tell me all these years, except I was too hard-headed and proud to listen. I wanted to be recognized. I wanted to be noticed. I made it all about me, not Him and because of that, I failed.

What I’m learning about in the Book of Judges was how Deborah and Jael did things on a very personal level to bring freedom to the people. Deborah spoke with Barack and encouraged him through her faith in God’s word, to fight against Sisera and even then, Barack was not willing to do it unless she went with him. Then, it was Jael being underestimated by Sisera himself that she was able to go through her duties as a woman – providing him with drink and rest – that she was able to slay him and thus free Israel. When I think of this, I wonder, what would have happened if either woman decided to go against what she was called to do? What if Deborah spoke publicly to the people herself rather than speaking with her husband privately? Or what if she had blown off God’s voice completely and said nothing? What if Jael had turned Sisero away instead of welcoming him and being a good hostess as women were expected to be then?

God is teaching me that His work is large no matter how small it seems when we’re doing it. Everything we do can be to His glory and therefore very big and important, even if to us it’s just sweeping out the garage and hanging garlic and parsley to dry, as I just finished doing.

I think God is teaching me that family and community are vital in these times and they are two things that have been undermined, while fame and popularity have become the goal. The more followers you have, the more clout you have, the more perceived authority you have and yet we have seen throughout world history that many leaders are not good, nor do they have the best interest of the people in mind. Deborah had discernment and I think we all could use a little more of that. Time to step back, have personal, private conversations and build up our families and our communities.

Because I truly believe that without those things, healing cannot happen in our world. We cannot care about our environment, or our country, or our town, or our own neighborhoods until we care about ourselves. It’s easier to build each other up on a personal level than it is to watch what’s happening in this world and feel so overwhelmed we feel hopeless and helpless.

You can make a difference. One day at a time. One person at a time. That’s all it takes and that’s all it has ever taken. And that’s the only way it is sustainable.

Do you feel a bit uneasy these days? If so, you may be interested in this Bible Reading Schedule that I found recently and plan to follow. If you’d like to join us in our Bible Chat group on Facebook, please visit our Seeds of Hope page in the menu.

Keep sowing seeds of prayer, hope, and change.

God’s Work Is Large, No Matter How Small It Seems I've started reading the Book of Judges, because of a book I read recently entitle Ready to Rise…

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arthur36domingo · 8 years ago

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11 More Experts on How to Write Well This Year

In theory, writing is not hard labor. It’s less backbreaking than laying bricks all day, for instance. And compared to the average herpetologist, most writers’ workplaces involve far fewer smelly rooms full of snakes. For that, we should be grateful.

Still, writing is hard work. And that’s just as true for vaunted authors with numerous books, awards, and honorary degrees to their credit as it is for newcomers who only recently resolved to hammer out more words each week. If any of that sounds like you—if you’re looking to step up that content game—we have help, in the form of recent pointers and perspectives from veteran writers.

1 Read, write, rinse, repeat.

This battle-tested rule stands true whether you’re a longform magazine writer or a horror novelist. Asked how a newcomer can perfect the craft, the National Book Award–winning author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates tweeted this response:

“Reading. Then writing. Rinsing. Repeating. Only way. Not even snarking. It really is.” https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/814949934470483968

Be relentless.

2 Schedule meetings with yourself.

It’s easy to daydream about things you’d like to write, but sometimes harder to carve out time each day to, you know, actually write them. When writing the critically acclaimed Don’t Think Twice, comic Mike Birbiglia says he struggled with procrastination:

I had the movie in my head, but I wasn’t writing it. But I noticed this trend in my life, which was that I was showing up to lunch meetings or business meetings, but I wasn’t showing up to meet myself. So I wrote a note next to my bed — this is so corny, but I wrote, “Mike! You have an appointment at Café Pedlar at 7 a.m. with your mind!” It’s so corny, and I would show up! I never didn’t show up, and I wrote this movie [in] spurts of essentially three hours, like I’d write from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., and the reason why I would do that is because I was essentially barely awake. Because I feel like that moment, at 7 to 10 a.m., you’re not afraid of the world yet.

3 Have a plan.

For John McPhee, the prolific author, octogenarian, and veritable institution at The New Yorker, writing hinges on structure: taking the various puzzle pieces floating around in one’s mind and notes, and figuring out in what order to arrange them. (A puzzle becomes much easier to assemble when you know what it’s a picture of, after all.)

In crafting an outline, McPhee does not save the ending for last. Whether the piece will be five thousand words or five thousand sentences, he decides on his ending almost as soon as he’s settled on a lead sentence. Still, he concedes the work that ensues in between is, alas, rarely simple:

Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins. The narrative wants to move from point to point through time, while topics that have arisen now and again across someone’s life cry out to be collected. They want to draw themselves together in a single body, in the way that salt does underground. But chronology usually dominates. As themes prove inconvenient, you find some way to tuck them in.

We’ll come back to McPhee in a moment.

4 “Don’t be trapped by your limits. Get creative.” —Eric Heisserer

Screenwriter Eric Heisserer spent years slogging through drafts of a script for the film Arrival on spec before finding the right backers. One struggle was depicting how the aliens in his film would communicate; he later recalled of this frustration: “My omnipresent self-critic mocked me for running out of words to describe actual language.”

Then his wife had the brilliant idea to just include rough sketches of alien logograms right in the script—But Heisserer soon discovered no screenwriting software at the time could include graphics. Ultimately he settled on a work-around that involved re-inserting the images each time a revised draft went out. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

5 It’s okay to take breaks.

Not everyone is cut out to write entire chapters in a single sitting. “I think if you work beyond four hours it goes bad,” novelist Zadie Smith recently remarked.

In other words, don’t stress if your entire opus doesn’t come pouring out of your fingertips the moment you sit down at the keyboard. Even just getting to 800 words, Smith says, “feels like a champion day.”

6 Back your work up.

Laptops disappear. Hard drives crash. Buildings sometimes burn—leaving determined writers to charge past firefighters into the blazes to rescue their finished novels.

“THIS IS WHY WE DO CLOUD STORAGE, PEOPLE” https://twitter.com/FutureBoy/status/776531179059093505

It’s worth taking precautions to make sure, whatever else might go wrong, that your work survives intact.

7 Take your lumps, and keep at it.

Long before he was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” novelist Junot Díaz labored over a series of short stories for his peers in a grad-school workshop. His first effort there endured the kind of savage reviews that sometimes compel people to change professions:

Workshop rolls around and I still remember the feeling on my face as I watched my story get gutted. I’d caught beatdowns before, but this one was a graduate workshop beatdown and I felt those lumps for days. Sure, there was some mild praise about the setting and a few of my lines got checkmarks next to them, but the overwhelming reaction was negative.

Díaz stuck with it, inhaling huge volumes of short fiction each day, and persisting even after his second attempt met tepid responses. Battling through it all, Díaz discovered something about himself as a writer—something that stayed with him well through the publication of his first book.

8 Don’t wait for anyone to give you permission.

Anyone can be a writer. But before she was a Pulitzer-winning novelist, most recently grinding out the 736-page Barkskins, this would’ve been a surprise to Annie Proulx, as she once told The Paris Review:

I never thought of myself as a writer. I only backed into it through having to make a living. And then I discovered that I could actually do it. I thought there was some arcane fellowship that you knew at birth that you had to belong to in order to be a writer.

Don’t wait. Start now.

9 Be good to yourself.

Even wildly popular novelists who start working before 6 a.m. (looking at you, J.K. Rowling) aren’t above writing from the comfort of bed:

“Wake up, drag the laptop into bed and get to work. There’s really no need for formal attire.” https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/811579300021489664

Taking care of yourself doesn’t just mean finding the coziest place to operate, though. Daily exercise is a part of the process many writers swear by. From Haruki Murakami to Joyce Carol Oates, many specifically advocate running to help untangle the writerly knots of the mind.

10 Forgive yourself when it doesn’t come easy.

Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert says her latest book, The Sixth Extinction, was at times painful to work on: “I thought it was going to do me in, at points. It just wasn’t coming together.”

That a longtime journalist of Kolbert’s caliber still feels tested by the craft should hearten anyone who’s struggling to keep up with its attendant pressures and deadlines.

While piecing together the story was an arduous, years-long trek that took her everywhere from the Great Barrier Reef to a cloud forest in the Andes, Kolbert’s efforts ultimately paid off. Despite being “way overdue,” when it was finally done, the book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

11 Know when to stop.

A bonus from the aforementioned John McPhee, who plans his endings from the outset: You have to not only finish the piece but also conclude the process around it. Editing, it’s sometimes said, is the art of knowing when to stop tinkering.

People often ask how I know when I’m done—not just when I’ve come to the end, but in all the drafts and revisions and substitutions of one word for another how do I know there is no more to do? When am I done? I just know. I’m lucky that way. What I know is that I can’t do any better; someone else might do better, but that’s all I can do; so I call it done.

With diligence, you can carry your writing goals across the finish line. Grammarly will be there cheering you on.

The post 11 More Experts on How to Write Well This Year appeared first on Grammarly Blog.

from Grammarly Blog https://www.grammarly.com/blog/more-experts-on-writing/

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ber39james · 8 years ago

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11 More Experts on How to Write Well This Year

1 Read, write, rinse, repeat.

“Reading. Then writing. Rinsing. Repeating. Only way. Not even snarking. It really is.” https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/814949934470483968

Be relentless.

2 Schedule meetings with yourself.

3 Have a plan.

We’ll come back to McPhee in a moment.

4 “Don’t be trapped by your limits. Get creative.” —Eric Heisserer

5 It’s okay to take breaks.

Not everyone is cut out to write entire chapters in a single sitting. “I think if you work beyond four hours it goes bad,” novelist Zadie Smith recently remarked.

6 Back your work up.

Laptops disappear. Hard drives crash. Buildings sometimes burn—leaving determined writers to charge past firefighters into the blazes to rescue their finished novels.

“THIS IS WHY WE DO CLOUD STORAGE, PEOPLE” https://twitter.com/FutureBoy/status/776531179059093505

It’s worth taking precautions to make sure, whatever else might go wrong, that your work survives intact.

7 Take your lumps, and keep at it.

8 Don’t wait for anyone to give you permission.

Don’t wait. Start now.

9 Be good to yourself.

Even wildly popular novelists who start working before 6 a.m. (looking at you, J.K. Rowling) aren’t above writing from the comfort of bed:

“Wake up, drag the laptop into bed and get to work. There’s really no need for formal attire.” https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/811579300021489664

10 Forgive yourself when it doesn’t come easy.

Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert says her latest book, The Sixth Extinction, was at times painful to work on: “I thought it was going to do me in, at points. It just wasn’t coming together.”

That a longtime journalist of Kolbert’s caliber still feels tested by the craft should hearten anyone who’s struggling to keep up with its attendant pressures and deadlines.

11 Know when to stop.

With diligence, you can carry your writing goals across the finish line. Grammarly will be there cheering you on.

The post 11 More Experts on How to Write Well This Year appeared first on Grammarly Blog.

from Grammarly Blog https://www.grammarly.com/blog/more-experts-on-writing/

0 notes