Climbing back (climbing climbing climbing)

I started reading again this weekend. (Yes, I claim to enjoy reading and writing, but sometimes I stop both altogether.) Like so many other times, it's got my writer's wheels spinning.

I picked up the first of Stephen King's Dark Tower books, The Gunslinger. I already own it, but this is the revised/expanded version from a few years back. I waffled for a long time on whether I wanted to get the new version, so while I was at Barnes and Noble Saturday I took a few minutes to read the Introduction and Foreword. King's explanation was that the Dark Tower, to him, is not a series of books, but one large novel. After he finally finished writing it in 2003, he went back to that first installment (The Gunslinger) written at the beginning of the 1980s. Obviously, you can't write a novel (of any length) and not need to do some cleanup and revision to the beginning. This new version is exactly that: King cleaning up the first installment to help fit in better with the rest of the "novel" both in terms of content and style. I was sold.

So now I'm about halfway through the thing, loving it, and revisiting the whole "popular vs. literary" writing debate in my head. In writing classes, both undergrad and grad, the obvious tilt is toward literary writing, and I've always come from that bias. But is that really me? I never really write for myself. I write because I want other people to enjoy it (I realize that's still "for myself" because I'm writing to get satisfaction out of other people enjoying it, but let's just stick with the traditional "for other" and "for self" categories, a'ight?). And even though sometimes I really enjoy writing that moves me and changes how I think, I don't think that's usually my own goal as a writer. I'm ecstatic if a reader says, "Wow, that was fun, I'd like to pick it up and read that again sometime."

I think part of what keeps me from thinking about popular fiction more is that because of sheer numbers, there are a lot of really crappy books out there. That's just the way it is. What I forget is that there are plenty of really good writers writing in every genre. I have to remind myself that talent is talent, skill is skill, and ultimately what will push writing to a higher level is passion. If you're writing the kind of stuff you were inundated with in school because it's familiar and ignoring the stuff that excites you and brings you back to the page, you'll always end up frustrated and in doubt. And by "you" I really mean "me" of course. This is my attempt to re-invigorate (and redirect) my writing life. Go! Go!