Stephen King's "IT"

This will be an ongoing post as I read It by Stephen King.

Stephen King has been my inspiration for wanting to be a writer. If you have not read his book, On Writing, then you should. King has some great advice and motivating stories for new writers. The key to writing, surprise surprise, is to read and write every day. You should be reading more than you are writing. King reads approximately 86 books every year. I will get there someday. But instead of living in Maine and being a hermit reading and writing, I will have a full-time job cooking in a restaurant. That is the dream anyway....

Anyway, back to the book...

I am about 180 pages into the book so far. I have not seen the movie, so I am going in with no biases. All i know about the story before reading is that there is a clown who kills people and it is quite gruesome. (I also hear that it is a little sexually disturbing)

Side Note: I first picked up this book to read during an extremely boring summer day. I was pacing my bedroom for about two hours. The book was sitting on the floor. I would look at it every few minutes and think, I can't wait til I start reading that book. The cover was very visually stimulating and there are so many pages I could not wait to conquer it. However, it was not the book I had planned to read next, but it was the only thing that would take my mind off how bored I was at that moment...so I sat and started to read.

I read the first two chapters, about 30 pages, before I found something to do. I was so into the book that I took it with me. The first 50 pages are a lot creepier than the next 200. But I guess the beginning has to be scary if you want to pull people in...mesmerizing.

So I walked around for a whole week talking about not being able to read It before I went to bed because it is too scary and I will get nightmares. It has failed to give me goosebumps since that first read.

I thought the Harry Potter books were nothing but intricate detail... It baffles me that 1000+ pages can successfully be dedicated to a horror/thriller novel. King manages to fill every section and every chapter with so much detail and still make this average plot line a good read. I am not even bored while reading (some books I find myself reading just to get to the end...counting the pages as I go) I am drawn in to every single page. Do I really need a two-page description of the geography of Derry when the same information will be mixed in with the exciting stuff in the next six pages? NO I don't, but it still hasn't deterred my reading.

King is good at writing about people and life, in this book his plot takes a back seat to the scenes he draws with the behavior and thoughts of his characters.

I just finished reading a particularly boring section about Mike Hanlon being stuck in a smokestack with a giant bird attacking him. The whole section describing his childhood is rather boring. The books excitement has slowed down.

I have now been reading for 12 days, page 275.