FOREWORD
Most of what writers write about their work is ill-informed bullshit.I That is why you have never seen a book entitled One Hundred Great Introductions of Western Civilization or Best-Loved Forewords of the American People. This is a judgment call on my part, of course, but after writing at least fifty introductions and forewords—not to mention an entire book about the craft of fiction—I think it’s one I have a right to make. And I think you can take me seriously when I tell you this might be one of those rare occasions upon which I actually have something worth saying.
A few years ago, I created some furor among my readers by offering a revised and expanded version of my novel The Stand. I was justifiably nervous about that book, because The Stand has always been the novel my readers have loved the best (as far as the most passionate of the “Stand-fans” are concerned, I could have died in 1980 without making the world a noticeably poorer place).
If there is a story that rivals The Stand in the imagination of King readers, it’s probably the tale of Roland Deschain and his search for the Dark Tower. And now—goddamn!—I’ve gone and done the same thing again.
Except I haven’t, not really, and I want you to know it. I also want you to know what I have done, and why. It may not be important to you, but it’s very important to me, and thus this foreword is exempt (I hope) from King’s Bullshit Rule.
First, please be reminded that The Stand sustained deep cuts in manuscript not for editorial reasons but for financial ones. (There were binding limitations, too, but I don’t even want to go there.) What I re-instated in the late eighties were revised sections of pre-existing manuscript. I also revised the work as a whole, mostly to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic, which blossomed (if that is the word) between the first issue of The Stand and the publication of the revised version eight or nine years later. The result was a volume about 100,000 words longer than the original.
In the case of The Gunslinger, the original volume was slim, and the added material in this version amounts to a mere thirty-five pages, or about nine thousand words. If you have read The Gunslinger before, you’ll only find two or three totally new scenes here. Dark Tower purists (of which there are a surprising number—just check the Web) will want to read the book again, of course, and most of them are apt to do so with a mixture of curiosity and irritation. I sympathize, but must say I’m less concerned with them than with readers who have never encountered Roland and his ka-tet.II
In spite of its fervent followers, the tale of the Tower is far less known by my readers than is The Stand. Sometimes, when I do readings, I’ll ask those present to raise their hands if they’ve read one or more of my novels. Since they’ve bothered to come at all—sometimes going to the added inconvenience of hiring a baby-sitter and incurring the added expense of gassing up the old sedan—it comes as no surprise that most of them raise their hands. Then I’ll ask them to keep their hands up if they’ve read one or more of the Dark Tower stories. When I do that, at least half the hands in the hall invariably go down. The conclusion is clear enough: although I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time writing these books in the thirty-three years between 1970 and 2003, comparatively few people have read them. Yet those who have are passionate about them, and I’m fairly passionate myself—enough so, in any case, that I was never able to let Roland creep away into that exile which is the unhappy home of unfulfilled characters (think of Chaucer’s pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, or the people who populate Charles Dickens’s unfinished final
novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood).
I think that I’d always assumed (somewhere in the back of my mind, for I cannot ever remember thinking about this consciously) that there would be time to finish, that perhaps God would even send me a singing telegram at the appointed hour: “Deedle-dum, deedle-dower/Get back to work, Stephen,/Finish the Tower.” And in a way, something like that really did happen, although it wasn’t a singing telegram but a close encounter with a Plymouth minivan that got me going again. If the vehicle that struck me that day had been a little bigger, or if the hit had been just a little squarer, it would have been a case of mourners please omit flowers, the King family thanks you for your sympathy. And Roland’s quest would have remained forever unfinished, at least by me.
In any case, in 2001—by which time I’d begun to feel more myself again—I decided the time had come to finish Roland’s story. I pushed everything else aside and set to work on the final three books. As always, I did this not so much for the readers who demanded it as for myself.
Although the revisions of the last two volumes still remain to be done as I write this in the winter of 2003, the books themselves were finished last summer. And, in the hiatus between the editorial work on Volume Five (Wolves of the Calla) and Volume Six (Song of Susannah), I decided the time had come to go back to the beginning and start the final overall revisions. Why? Because these seven volumes were never really separate stories at all, but sections of a single long novel called The Dark Tower, and the beginning was out of sync with the ending.
My approach to revision hasn’t changed much over the years. I know there are writers who do it as they go along, but my method of attack has always been to plunge in and go as fast as I can, keeping the edge of my narrative blade as sharp as possible by constant use, and trying to outrun the novelist’s most insidious enemy, which is doubt. Looking back prompts too many questions: How believable are my characters? How interesting is my story? How good is this, really? Will anyone care? Do I care myself?
When my first draft of a novel is done, I put it away, warts and all, to mellow. Some period of time later—six months, a year, two years, it doesn’t really matter—I can come back to it with a cooler (but still loving) eye, and begin the task of revising. And although each book of the Tower series was revised as a separate entity, I never really looked at the work as a whole until I’d finished Volume Seven, ...
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