Has art jumped the shark after WWI?

[Faith No More]

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I don't think that's very fair, to be honest. Stephen King has created thousands of characters, and his ability to make them seem like unique individuals, to give them their own personalities and have about the same amount of repetition of characteristics you'd see in a thousand real people, that takes no small amount of creativity.

Whatever his other flaws as a writer, I don't think it's less creative to have a casual style of prose. It takes effort to make even the simple be effective.

If anything, I would look to an example of a writer who does precisely the opposite: Philip Roth. "The Human Stain" is a fantastic story with very interesting and fleshed-out characters. In spite of the criticism that follows, I recommend it highly. That criticism is, it's a read that is difficult for me to swallow because every single character talks using complex, run-on sentences overloaded with emphasis and big-deal vocabulary. Not only does it make every character sound far too similar to each other, but it just doesn't make any sense when you have an illiterate janitor speaking with the sale eloquence and verbosity as the extremely educated university dean with whom she is romantically-involved. Naturally, her brutal and insane ex-husband has dialogue which reads just like this. They don't engage in dialog with one another so much as they engage in an exchange of rants that sometimes go on for so long that, by the time the character stops talking, I didn't even remember what was going on when he started. This self-indulgent style of writing makes the characters seem less real to me, and it's harder to identify with them, because people just don't interact with each other the way they do in this book.

Simple is not inferior.

I don't think any style is better than any other, of art or writing or music. I only care that it is of high quality, good enough to attract my attention, and interesting enough to keep it. I'm not ashamed in the slightest to admit that my favorite style of visual art is most often found on sci-fi and fantasy book covers pre-1980. I don't think Rembrandt is better than Edward Hopper. I don't think Mozart is better than Chad VanGaalen. They all have different styles that I appreciate equally for different reasons.

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I didn't mean there wasn't any creativity to his books. There's a tremendous amount in the stories and characters. I meant there was no creativity to his writing style.

And sure, simple is not necessarily inferior, and complex is certainly not necessarily superior. It depends on different factors like how well an idea is executed. The problem I have with Stephen King's writings is that they are plainly worded, and he uses the exact same plain style for each one. I never really felt that he had much growth in his command of words.

Don't get me wrong. I've actually thouroughly enjoyed some of Stephen King's writings. He's a good storyteller that does an excellent job of character development, but styllistically I felt like I was reading the same piece of work over and over just with a different plot. That's why I stopped reading his stuff, because I just didn't enjoy it anymore. I also think that's why he'll never be considered one of the literary greats.

But I will be the first to admit that I'm a bit of a book snob compared to the average person.