Steven King: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2)
Stephen King
Stephen King on the levels of detail:
Share on FacebookInterviewer: The use of brand names in your novels especially seems to irk some critics.
King: I always knew people would have a problem with that. But I also knew that I was never going to stop doing it, and nobody was ever going to convince me that I was wrong to do it. Because every time I did it, what I felt inside was this little bang! like I nailed it dead square -- like Michael Jordan on a fade-away jump shot. Sometimes the brand name is the perfect word, and it will crystallize a scene for me. When Jack Torrance is pumping down that Excedrin in The Shining, you know just what that is. I always want to ask these critics -- some are novelists, some of them college literature professors -- What the fuck do you do? Open your medicine cabinet and see empty gray bottles? Do you see generic shampoo, generic aspirin? When you go to the store and you get a six-pack, does it just say BEER? When you go down and you open your garage door, what's parked in there? A car? Just a car?
And then I say to myself, I bet they do. Some of these guys, the college professors -- the guy, say, whose idea of literature really stopped with Henry James, but he'll get kind of a frozen smile on his face if you talk about Faulkner or Steinbeck -- they're stupid about American fiction and they've turned their stupidity into a virtue. They don't know who Calder Willingham was. They don't know who Sloan Wilson was. They don't know who Grace Metalious was. they don't know who any of these people are, and they're fucking proud of it. And when they open their medicine cabinet door, I think maybe they do see generic bottles, and that's a failure of observation. And I think one of the things that I'm supposed to do is to say, It's a Pepsi, OK? It's not a soda. It's a Pepsi. It's a specific thing. Say what you mean. Say what you see. Make a photograph, if you can, for the reader.
