Write Like the Masters: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary: Write Like the Masters, #1

By Jack Law and James Anders Banks

From award winner and top 25 bestseller Daren King now writing as James Anders Banks and Jack Law.

 

"An excellent writer. His language moves with great suppleness and easy eloquence."
The Telegraph (UK newspaper)

"A writer with a completely unique voice."
The Independent (UK newspaper)

 

Write Like the Masters: Stephen King's Pet Sematary is not an intellectual critique. This book is more an attempt at reverse-engineering the novel so that other fiction writers can learn from Stephen King's techniques. The phrase "write like" should not be taken literally: I have never encouraged a writer to imitate another writer, aside from on occasion as a jumping off point, a way of developing a style appropriate to the project. Learn the techniques used by the masters of the genre, while developing a style, a voice, that works for you.

 

I have been teaching hands-on writing skills in my work as a mentor since early in 2008—language and voice skills, characterisation techniques, plotting and so on. At the time of writing, ten of my writers have had their books published by conventional print publishers like HarperCollins, Penguin and Scribner. Write Like the Masters: Stephen King's Pet Sematary does not teach lower level skills like how to write a sentence or how to structure a paragraph. The book focuses on story: developing character and theme, conveying mood, inducing emotional responses (such as fear) in the reader, and, perhaps most importantly of all, creating suspense.

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Admission Books
• Release date: Mar 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781838473976

Book preview

admissionbooks.com

WRITE LIKE THE MASTERS

STEPHEN KING’S

PET SEMATARY

Jack Law

James Anders Banks

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Author’s Note

The Four Fears

What kind of a horror novel is Pet Sematary ... and how does it work?

Characters and Setting

Chapters 1-10

Chapters 11-20

Chapters 21-30

Chapters 31-32

Chapter 33

Chapters 34-39

Chapters 40-51

Chapters 52-57

Part Three and Epilogue

The End

After-forward

PREVIEW

BOOKS BY JAMES ANDERS BANKS

LETTER FROM JAMES ANDERS BANKS

AIV: Anders Interactive Video

COPYRIGHT

Introduction

Write Like the Masters: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary is not an intellectual critique. This book is more an attempt at reverse-engineering the novel so that other fiction writers can learn from Stephen King’s techniques. The phrase write like should not be taken literally: I have never encouraged a writer to imitate another writer, aside from on occasion as a jumping off point, a way of developing a style appropriate to the project. Learn the techniques used by the masters of the genre, while developing a style, a voice, that works for you.

I have been teaching hands-on writing skills in my work as a mentor since early in 2008—language and voice skills, characterisation techniques, plotting and so on. At the time of writing, ten of my writers have had their books published by conventional print publishers like HarperCollins, Penguin and Scribner; see the intriguingly-titled After-forward section at the back of this book. Write Like the Masters: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary does not teach lower level skills like how to write a sentence or how to structure a paragraph. The book focuses on story: developing character and theme, conveying mood, inducing emotional responses (such as fear) in the reader, and, perhaps most importantly of all, creating suspense.

Some critics, and even lifelong Stephen King fans, complain that some of King’s novels take too long to get going, or end too abruptly. My take on this is that King has said publicly that he writes suspense fiction—hence he sees no issue with switching from horror fiction to, say, hardboiled crime such as Mr. Mercedes—and suspense fiction is all about the wait. And once the gore hits the fan in a novel like Pet Sematary, there can be little or no suspense, so a suspense novel (in terms of structure and pacing) with a horrific theme and horrific events must be wrapped up as efficiently as a crime novel. It cannot, however, be wrapped up as neatly and logically as a crime novel as there is no real rationale behind the antagonist’s behaviour.

What interests me is how King manages to hold the reader’s attention for so many pages before the novel enters full-on horror territory. It seems to me that it is largely a question of building up a detailed, convincing real world, while sneaking ideas and images into the reader’s head so they feel like they are reading a horror story even when the antagonist, in Pet Sematary a supernatural force, is hiding in the woodwork. This book focuses on the various techniques King uses to achieve this. Though note that I use the word loosely: you can argue amongst yourselves about which of these concepts are really techniques. We’ll also look at other crucial techniques, such as how King encourages the reader to suspend their disbelief and accept the fantastical—and accept that a scientifically-minded character such as Louis Creed can come to accept the fantastical.

Author’s Note

I write superhero and time travel science fiction as James Anders Banks, and crime thrillers as Jack Law, and have written award winning children’s fiction as Daren King. I have worked as a mentor since 2008—you can find out more about my Jack & James mentoring service and my other services for writers at the ja.ckandjam.es website.

My children’s novel Mouse Noses on Toast, published by Faber & Faber under the name Daren King, won the age 6-8 gold medal in the award then known as the Nestlé Children’s Book Prize, and my fiction has been published in print in countries including the UK, Germany, Italy, Russia, Australia, China, Canada and the United States.

If this book is well-received, I will write more books on Stephen King, or on other masters of their genre, so consider leaving a review where you bought the book, even if it’s only a sentence or two, as it encourages online stores to promote a writer’s books to potentially interested readers. And do sign up for my mailing list at the ja.ckandjam.es website.

You will notice that I put certain phrases in italics. These phrases describe or refer to concepts that I will return to repeatedly throughout this book. Note also that I use the phrase trad horror to refer to traditional horror, perhaps horror from before the days of television, or horror that isn’t overly knowing or ironic.

My edition of Pet Sematary is a June 2020 US-published Scribner export edition paperback, with a cover featuring yellow text over an image of a graveyard in silhouette, superimposed over a yellow-eyed grey cat, ISBN 978-1-9821-5077-8. Quotations: note that, for example, (57b-4) means you will find the quoted text in the fourth paragraph of the second scene (scene ‘b’) of chapter 57.

I hope you learn as much from reading this book as I learnt from writing it.

James Anders Banks / Jack Law

March 2022

The Four Fears

I cannot write a book on horror fiction without discussing the four types of fear, and by types of fear I really mean the four stages of fear. A horror novel or movie will typically begin with the first and work through to the last. Pet Sematary is no exception. If you’ve read a bad horror novel or seen a bad horror movie, it probably jumped through the four types of fear too quickly, perhaps skipped the first one or two fear types entirely.

The first fear type is unease. It is the knowledge, or at least a sense, that, while there is no immediate threat, something is not right with the world of the story. In some cases the reader may sense it while the characters do not, as I discuss below—it can work either way.

Pet Sematary opens with the Creed family’s move from Chicago to Maine, the stress of which has wife Rachel and daughter Eileen, Ellie, bursting into tears and cat Winston Churchill, Church, pacing restlessly, and even leaves dependable father Louis feeling a little like crying. (1a-3) When Rachel first sees the house that Louis has chosen on the family’s behalf, Louis feels "terrified", the word italicised for impact (1a-7)—unease is in the air, long before there is any suggestion of horror in the supernatural sense. As it turns out, the family love the house and the surrounding countryside. But chapter 2—chapter 1 is barely four pages long in my edition—opens with Louis losing the house keys and Eileen falling from the tire swing and cutting herself. Two pages into the chapter and Gage is stung by a bee. Something is not right with this world!

Four pages after the bee sting, in the third chapter of Part One, Ellie spots a path leading from the edge of a field by the house, winding up the hill and out of sight. There is nothing intrinsically horrific about this path, but, since the reader knows they are reading a horror novel and knows how horror novels work, King is able to handle the sense of unease here with subtlety. The worst the narrator can say about this path is that it leads out of sight,