Stephen King and getting reckless with the written word

The most oppressive fact of life is that we must proceed with caution.

To conduct oneself recklessly is to put one’s career, relationships, even one’s life in peril.

Then there is the written word, the one place we can misbehave or be outright reckless with absolute impunity (provided it’s not our final draft). Most of us never do, of course. Instead, we proceed with caution, which is why writing so often lacks the excitement and creativity we aspire to.

It’s why Stephen King is quoted as saying, “A writer is someone who has trained his mind to misbehave.”

It’s also why Brenda Ueland, author of If You Want to Write, urges us to be reckless when we write. Be a pirate, she says. Be a lion.

I exhort my business writing clients to do exactly that when we’re working on free writing exercises. Anger, profanity, passion, sexual content, effusion, joy, sensuality are all inbounds and encouraged.

When talking about writing with reckless intent I often invoke the name and tactics of Carol Mueller, an abstract painter whose work I came to admire while living in Charlotte, N.C.

“Where do you get your ideas?” I asked her one day.

Mueller said she would sometimes approach the canvas with a pencil rather than a paintbrush, and would start writing whatever came to mind. This included a wide range of subject matter, from sports and art to religion and politics and beyond. Even profanity would sometimes come off the tip of her pencil.

By letting loose, by opening her mind to any and every possibility, Mueller also opened her mental window to the kinds of vivid images and color combinations she is known for.

As writers, when we allow ourselves to misbehave, to be reckless, the uncensored results are a lot of copy that we cannot use, as well as the kind of inspired and creative writing that we can use, the very kind of writing we aspire to but so often seems beyond the scope of our imagination.

It’s there. It’s accessible. It doesn’t reveal itself to the timid, the conservative, the fretful.

It’s there for the swashbuckling pirate or the fearless lion.

 

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