Re-reading Stephen King’s account of his long, painful healing process after the infamous hit-and-run accident that nearly killed him really makes the self-pity evaporate (if you want to skip to that part, it’s in the postscript, which is titled “On Living,” but then go back and read the whole thing). His lower leg was broken in nine places; his hip was fractured, and so was his femur; a gash in his scalp required twenty or thirty stitches. Here’s a passage about his recovery after surgery:

“A large steel and carbon-fiber apparatus called an external fixator was clamped to my leg. Eight large steel pegs called Schanz pins run through the fixator and into the bones above and below my knee. Five smaller steel rods radiate out from the knee. These look sort of like a child’s drawing of sunrays. The knee itself was locked in place. Three times a day, nurses would unwrap the smaller pins and the much larger Schanz pins and swab the holes out with hydrogen peroxide. I’ve never had my leg dipped in kerosene and then lit on fire, but if that ever happens, I’m sure it will feel quite a bit like daily pin-care.”

King was still in a wheelchair and recovering from the accident when he wrote the last half of On Writing.

“The first writing session lasted an hour and forty minutes, by far the longest period I’d spent sitting upright since being struck by Smith’s van. When it was over, I was dripping with sweat and almost too exhausted to sit up straight in my wheelchair. The pain in my hip was just short of apocalyptic. And the first five hundred words were uniquely terrifying–it was as if I’d never written anything before them in my life. All my old tricks seemed to have deserted me. I stepped from one word to the next like a very old man finding his way across a stream on a zigzag line of wet stones. There was no inspiration that first afternoon, only a kind of stubborn determination and the hope that things would get better if I kept at it.”

Then a bit later: “There was no sense of exhilaration, no buzz–not that day–but there was a sense of accomplishment that was almost as good. I’d gotten going, there was that much. The scariest moment is always just before you start…. After that, things can only get better.”

If that seems like a naive pronouncement, read the rest of the book. The writing advice is all solid, and some of it is inspired. Even the advice that seems like it ought to be common sense is not commonly practiced. The parts that stay with me, though, are the object lessons King provides from his own history, from the rusty spike under the eaves on which he impaled…wait for it…his early rejection slips (he’s really a pretty mild-mannered guy; what did you think I was going to say?) to his clear-eyed recollections about his alcoholism and recovery (even less self-pity here than in the postscript). Writers have to be uniquely courageous to do what they do, as King illustrates.

This is not just a book for horror writers, or genre writers; it was recommended to me by a successful narrative nonfiction writer with half a dozen respected books to her credit, and has popped up on many others’ bookshelves. (Never mind that the title as it appears on the paperback cover appears to be scrawled in blood on a wall, reminiscent of a certain novel about a haunted resort hotel. Really, it isn’t about how to write horror fiction specifically.)

Find this book at a nearby library or purchase it.

It could have been worse – I could have been re-reading The Standby Stephen King.

All this to say that I spent a good part of yesterday procrastinating on my writing by looking up food storage information and products on the web and internally debating the relative merits of single-burner, dual fuel camp stoves vs. butane or propane setups.

Can you tell I have a writing deadline looming on May 15?