Writer Donn King has learned that creativity and connection are life-giving.
As a caregiver for his disabled daughter, King, who has ADHD and depression, knows what it’s like to lose the “creative spark.”
When his daughter, Hannah, now 22, was about 8, the energy required for her care drained his writing energy. “It wasn’t writer’s block,” he said. “ After a lifetime of meeting deadline, I knew how to counter that.”
This was something more profound: “The well had gone dry.” He came to terms with what he thought was the end of a writing life.
A pandemic conversation changed that. He pitched a writer friend an idea, and the friend told King to write it himself. “Maybe I used to be a writer,” he replied, “but I’m not sure anymore.”
But with the friend’s encouragement, he tried anyway. He remembers that attempt as a revelation: “It felt like the desert blooming after a rain.”
With retirement from teaching, he has more time and flexibility to focus on his first love. These days, he mostly writes business parables, which he ruefully admits doesn’t fit into the Book Industry Standards and Communications categories. Most publishers and booksellers use those BISAC labels to organize and promote books.
King wants to focus on the content, not the category. “The key, for me, is that the story has to work on its own—no cardboard characters or plots thinner than gas station coffee.”
Too many business parables have the story layered on top “as a veneer,” he said. That’s not enough: “A good parable, though, helps people get it.” He added, that a parable “makes abstract principles concrete and memorable, and it’s entertaining to boot.”
King’s “Sparklight Chronicles” began with The Way of the Three-Year-Old Why and continue with Medium Well: The Journey from Believing to Believing In. He is working on two more volumes.
His next book is nonfiction: Creating While Caring: Practical Tips to Keep Creating While Caring for a Loved One. He aims it at creatives who work as caregivers. The book helps them “to keep that creative spark alive when the usual advice (like blocking time on the calendar and telling your family not to disturb you) no longer works.”
King dates his love of writing to childhood, citing the influence of teachers, including his high school English teacher, Mrs. Johnye Fortner, who “lit the initial spark.” The spark became a blaze at age 12, when he “discovered the public library,” he recalled.
“That’s when I realized reading could be fun, when nobody forced you to do it.” Early favorites were classic science fiction, like Heinlein, Ellison, Bradbury, Pournelle and Asimov. He ventured into classics (Twain, Wells, Kipling). He learned that “books that had been drudgery when assigned suddenly became joys when chosen.” He enjoyed humor (Grizzard, Barry, Keillor) and contemporary fiction (Irving, Pearson). He remains a voracious reader.
King’s books are available locally at Southland Books, and online at Bookshop.org.
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