On June 19 of ’99, Stephen King caught a van. A light blue Dodge van heading South. The resulting impact almost snuffed the life out of him. He survived with a “cataclysmically smashed hip” and the region below his right knee was reduced to “so many marbles in a sock”.
The days that followed were as frightening as the rising actions of a horror movie.
It would be five weeks after the nightmare, before he would consider getting back to work, his work: writing. The task was very near impossible because of his hip. All twisted and in a terrible mess. But for a man who has scrawled his way out of the most unlikely situations, spilling his soul on the pages of his notebook, he was willing to take the chance.
His wife, Tabitha, who is also a novelist, set up a new writing spot for him at the back hall of their house. Complete with a laptop and a printer, because his wheel chair wouldn’t fit into his usual writing space. On his initial day, he wrote for barely more than an hour before his hold on his hip slipped.
That first day, hope bulldozed a way down the tunnel of his life as he left his mark on those pages. He would later recall such triumphs in these words,
“For me, the act of writing has been an act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair.”
Despair can hardly wreck a life which exudes passion for his art. It is indeed fact that life can be one sweet affair. And we can always find a pathway in the dark night of the soul through writing. As we go on in pursuit of our craft, we’ll chance that place of release and truly grasp the depth of King’s insight and the transformation that his struggles with a broken hip authored. He did the writing world service by putting it in print so that we can find what took him daunting pressure to discover.
And here’s how he summed it all up,
“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
Eneh
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