The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
These are the first words of Stephen King's epic series of fantasy novels, The Dark Tower. If you've ever tried writing a story I
imagine you've spent some time staring at a blinking cursor, praying that you'll produce the perfect opening line.
Stephen King has done it at least once, because this line is
everything. In one sentence, we're told the protagonist, the antagonist, the protagonist's goal, the antagonist's goal,
and the setting, which is also the main obstacle. It thrusts you right into the central conflict of the story, which is exactly King's
style. In "On Writing," King argues that writers should not obsess over the movements of the plot.
He says, "My books tend to be based on situation, rather than plot."
I want to put a group of characters, perhaps a pair, perhaps even just one, in some sort of predicament,
and then watch them try to work themselves free. Most of his novels start as fairly simple
situations that become more and more tense as the story goes on.
Mom and son trapped in car by feral dog. Mom and son trapped in hotel by Feral father.
Entire town trapped inside a dome. By introducing conflict as soon as possible, he gets his readers
invested from page one. It also means his novels often don't have traditional
beginnings. They start in the middle and look for a way out. But there's even more to this line than that.
So the series is about Roland, a gunslinger who wanders through a post-apocalyptic
landscape, as well as into our reality, in search of The Dark Tower, a structure that holds all of
existence together. The tower is under assault, and Roland is on a quest to save it. One of the most
distinguishing elements of the novels is how
frequently they reference other pieces of fiction, and there are two big words that are important in how it does this intertextuality, and
metafiction. I'm gonna do another video on the former, because that's a big topic,
but for now, meta fiction is when a story admits it's a story in order to make a statement about the
creation of that fiction. Deadpool: "Big house. It's funny that I only ever see two of you. It's almost like the studio couldn't afford another X-man."
Fiction is used frequently in postmodernist literature. Which is what the dark tower is.
Postmodernism is a movement which began after World War II, and besides having a confusing name
(How can something be post now?
I hear you ask) The movement
experiments with a number of techniques designed to confound the reader, going far beyond the bounds of traditional storytelling.
Works in the movement frequently have unreliable narrators,
sew together multiple genres, and explore ironies and
paradoxes. A common theme is to challenge the idea of what a story is, and questioning
what the relationships are between story, author and audience, which is why metafiction is used so regularly.
So, how is the Dark tower metafictional
Well, in the sixth and seventh books in the series, Stephen King introduces a new character to the story. Himself
and it's not just a Stan Lee
style cameo either, the character of Stephen King plays a prominent role in the story, since the main characters realized that they need to protect
King so that he can write them into existence. Yeah.
So what statement is King making with this? Well, he tells us pretty directly in the afterword to the final novel
He wanted to show "how life influences art and vice versa."
And there is one specific moment in King's life that had a drastic effect on the direction of the series. On June 19th,
1999, while on his usual walk outside his house in Maine,
Stephen King got hit by a car and suffered severe injuries. The accident would motivate king to finish the epic series
He had started decades prior
And he wrote the final three volumes of the series back-to-back-to-back. The accident is a strange
crossroads. If he had been killed, the story would have been left unfinished.
But had he not been hit, he may not have continued it either. The strangeness of the situation clearly weighed on him, as he decided to
dramatize the crash in the final novel. His
characters must save him from the car to ensure that he can finish the story, just as they must make it to the Dark Tower
so that it continues to hold the world together. And by making that connection King draws a
parallel between his characters journey to the tower with his own
quest to write the series. And it is a unique quest. At the very end of the last book, (SPOILER WARNING)
Roland finally reaches the Tower, but before he gets the answers he seeks, the tower
transports him back in time and space, right to the beginning of the story in the desert. Roland's quest is cyclical.
He's on a loop. Forever searching for the tower, and never getting what he came for. It's actually a great twist on
mythic stories. You see myths are also typically cyclical. The character
physically returns to where the story began, arriving a changed person. In the Dark Tower, Roland's growth is erased
He reverts back to who he was on page 1. So just as King's stories
don't really have beginnings per se,
this one doesn't really have an ending either. Now one of the most common things that Stephen King will say about his
own writing is that he isn't the one writing them.
"I wasn't crazy about the ending either, if you want to know the truth.
But it's the right ending, the only ending in fact. You have to remember that I don't make these things up; not exactly. I only
write down what I see.
Now we can debate whether king is really being authentic with these statements. After all he did also say,
"Most of what writers write about their own work is ill-informed bullshit."
But either way the idea further links King to his character.
Just as Roland is powerless on his quest, unable to change the story
he's in, so too is king at the whims of inspiration.
I think it's very unlikely that the movie
adaptations of this series will ever be as meta as the novel's are, but I can't help but feel that the
metafictional strangeness is really what sets the series apart from its more popular fantasy cousins. Even if it makes them less approachable and
thematically it imbues the story with a certain weight it wouldn't otherwise
have, because what defines Roland as a character is his steadfast commitment to his task, and with Kings presence in the story,
we can read this as a literal version of the quest all writers and creators
embark on. To me the Dark Tower is a story for
writers, more than it is a story for readers. King once said I think everybody keeps a Dark Tower in their heart they want to
find. They know it's destructive and will probably mean the end of them,
but there's that urge to make it your own or destroy it,
one or the other. The series ends repeating the first line of the first book, but now we have a new context for it.
What's incredible about that line is that it is dislocated in time. The Man in Black is always fleeing, and the
Gunslinger is always following. You could take that line and put it anywhere in the first book and it would still be true.
But in returning to that line, we realize that the story was never about catching the man in black,
reaching the tower, or finishing the book, but the quest itself. So if you've been staring at that blinking cursor,
wondering where to begin, what Stephen King's series says to me is...
Just start, have faith that the ideas will come, and keep writing.
And as I put the finishing touches on this video essay, I feel like I've reached my own Dark tower. Two years ago
I started making videos here on Youtube with the goal of reaching a hundred thousand subscribers, and this week
we did it guys! A hundred thousand! So I'm renewing my purpose for being here on YouTube.
And that's why I'm launching a patreon account.
So if you find what I do useful, or fun, or anything,
Then I hope you'll take a look at the account and consider supporting this work. Thus far, this channel has been mostly about
writing techniques, but I feel like it can go so much further than that.
There's so much more to talk about when it comes to writing. So I hope you'll take a look and thanks for subscribing.
I'll see you soon.