stephen king on being 19 essay

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When my wife and I are at our summer house in western Maine, I walk four miles every day unless it’s pouring down rain. Three miles of this walk are on dirt roads that wind through the woods; a mile of it is on Route 5, a two-lane blacktop highway that runs between Bethel and Fryeburg.

The third week in June of 1999 was an extraordinarily happy one for my wife and for me; our three kids, now grown and scattered across the country, were visiting, and it was the first time in nearly six months that we’d all been under the same roof. As an extra bonus, our first grandchild was in the house, three months old and happily jerking at a helium balloon tied to his foot.

On June 19th, I took our younger son to the Portland Jetport, where he caught a flight back to New York. I drove home, had a brief nap, and then set out on my usual walk. We were planning to go en famille to see a movie in nearby North Conway that evening, and I had just enough time to go for my walk before packing everybody up for the trip.

I set out around four o’clock in the afternoon, as well as I can remember. Just before reaching the main road (in western Maine, any road with a white line running down the middle of it is a main road), I stepped into the woods and urinated. Two months would pass before I was able to take another leak standing up.

When I reached the highway, I turned north, walking on the gravel shoulder, against traffic. One car passed me, also headed north. About three-quarters of a mile farther along, I was told later, the woman driving that car noticed a light-blue Dodge van heading south. The van was looping from one side of the road to the other, barely under the driver’s control. When she was safely past the wandering van, the woman turned to her passenger and said, “That was Stephen King walking back there. I sure hope that van doesn’t hit him.”

Most of the sight lines along the mile-long stretch of Route 5 that I walk are good, but there is one place, a short steep hill, where a pedestrian heading north can see very little of what might be coming his way. I was three-quarters of the way up this hill when the van came over the crest. It wasn’t on the road; it was on the shoulder. My shoulder. I had perhaps three-quarters of a second to register this. It was just time enough to think, My God, I’m going to be hit by a school bus, and to start to turn to my left. Then there is a break in my memory. On the other side of it, I’m on the ground, looking at the back of the van, which is now pulled off the road and tilted to one side. This image is clear and sharp, more like a snapshot than like a memory. There is dust around the van’s taillights. The license plate and the back windows are dirty. I register these things with no thought of myself or of my condition. I’m simply not thinking.

There’s another short break in my memory here, and then I am very carefully wiping palmfuls of blood out of my eyes with my left hand. When I can see clearly, I look around and notice a man sitting on a nearby rock. He has a cane resting in his lap. This is Bryan Smith, the forty-two-year-old man who hit me. Smith has got quite the driving record; he has racked up nearly a dozen vehicle-related offenses. He wasn’t watching the road at the moment that our lives collided because his Rottweiler had jumped from the very rear of his van onto the back seat, where there was an Igloo cooler with some meat stored in it. The Rottweiler’s name was Bullet. (Smith had another Rottweiler at home; that one was named Pistol.) Bullet started to nose at the lid of the cooler. Smith turned around and tried to push him away. He was still looking at Bullet and pushing his head away from the cooler when he came over the top of the knoll, still looking and pushing when he struck me. Smith told friends later that he thought he’d hit “a small deer” until he noticed my bloody spectacles lying on the front seat of his van. They were knocked from my face when I tried to get out of Smith’s way. The frames were bent and twisted, but the lenses were unbroken. They are the lenses I’m wearing now, as I write.

Smith sees that I’m awake and tells me that help is on the way. He speaks calmly, even cheerily. His look, as he sits on the rock with his cane across his lap, is one of pleasant commiseration: Ain’t the two of us just had the shittiest luck ? it says. He and Bullet had left the campground where they were staying, he later tells an investigator, because he wanted “some of those Marzes bars they have up to the store.” When I hear this detail some weeks later, it occurs to me that I have nearly been killed by a character out of one of my own novels. It’s almost funny.

Help is on the way, I think, and that’s probably good, because I’ve been in a hell of an accident. I’m lying in the ditch and there’s blood all over my face and my right leg hurts. I look down and see something I don’t like: my lap appears to be on sideways, as if my whole lower body had been wrenched half a turn to the right. I look back up at the man with the cane and say, “Please tell me it’s just dislocated.”

“Nah,” he says. Like his face, his voice is cheery, only mildly interested. He could be watching all this on TV while he noshes on one of those Marzes bars. “It’s broken in five, I’d say, maybe six places.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell him—God knows why—and then I’m gone again for a little while. It isn’t like blacking out; it’s more as if the film of memory had been spliced here and there.

When I come back this time, an orange-and-white van is idling at the side of the road with its flashers going. An emergency medical technician—Paul Fillebrown is his name—is kneeling beside me. He’s doing something. Cutting off my jeans, I think, although that might have come later.

I ask him if I can have a cigarette. He laughs and says, “Not hardly.” I ask him if I’m going to die. He tells me no, I’m not going to die, but I need to go to the hospital, and fast. Which one would I prefer, the one in Norway-South Paris or the one in Bridgton? I tell him I want to go to Bridgton, to Northern Cumberland Memorial Hospital, because my youngest child—the one I just took to the airport—was born there twenty-two years ago. I ask again if I’m going to die, and he tells me again that I’m not. Then he asks me whether I can wiggle the toes of my right foot. I wiggle them, thinking of an old rhyme my mother used to recite: “This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home.” I should have stayed home, I think; going for a walk today was a bad idea. Then I remember that sometimes when people are paralyzed they think they’re moving but really aren’t.

“My toes, did they move?” I ask Paul Fillebrown. He says that they did, a good, healthy wiggle. “Do you swear to God?” I ask him, and I think he does. I’m starting to pass out again. Fillebrown asks me, very slowly and loudly, leaning down over my face, if my wife is at the big house on the lake. I can’t remember. I can’t remember where any of my family is, but I’m able to give him the telephone numbers both of our big house and of the cottage on the far side of the lake, where my daughter sometimes stays. Hell, I could give him my Social Security number if he asked. I’ve got all my numbers. It’s everything else that’s gone.

Other people are arriving now. Somewhere, a radio is crackling out police calls. I’m lifted onto a stretcher. It hurts, and I scream. Then I’m put into the back of the E.M.T. truck, and the police calls are closer. The doors shut and someone up front says, “You want to really hammer it.”

Paul Fillebrown sits down beside me. He has a pair of clippers, and he tells me that he’s going to have to cut the ring off the third finger of my right hand—it’s a wedding ring my wife gave me in 1983, twelve years after we were actually married. I try to tell Fillebrown that I wear it on my right hand because the real wedding ring is still on the ring finger of my left—the original two-ring set cost me fifteen dollars and ninety-five cents at Day’s Jewelers in Bangor, and I bought it a year and a half after I’d first met my wife, in the summer of 1969. I was working at the University of Maine library at the time. I had a great set of muttonchop sideburns, and I was staying just off campus, at Ed Price’s Rooms (seven bucks a week, one change of sheets included). Men had landed on the moon, and I had landed on the dean’s list. Miracles and wonders abounded. One afternoon, a bunch of us library guys had lunch on the grass behind the university bookstore. Sitting between Paolo Silva and Eddie Marsh was a trim girl with a raucous laugh, red-tinted hair, and the prettiest legs I had ever seen. She was carrying a copy of “Soul on Ice.” I hadn’t run across her in the library, and I didn’t believe that a college student could produce such a wonderful, unafraid laugh. Also, heavy reading or no heavy reading, she swore like a millworker. Her name was Tabitha Spruce. We were married in 1971. We’re still married, and she has never let me forget that the first time I met her I thought she was Eddie Marsh’s townie girlfriend. In fact, we came from similar working-class backgrounds; we both ate meat; we were both political Democrats with typical Yankee suspicions of life outside New England. And the combination has worked. Our marriage has outlasted all of the world’s leaders except Castro.

Some garbled version of the ring story comes out, probably nothing that Paul Fillebrown can actually understand, but he keeps nodding and smiling as he cuts that second, more expensive wedding ring off my swollen right hand. By the time I call Fillebrown to thank him, some two months later, I know that he probably saved my life by administering the correct on-scene medical aid and then getting me to a hospital, at a speed of roughly ninety miles an hour, over patched and bumpy back roads.

Fillebrown suggests that perhaps someone else was watching out for me. “I’ve been doing this for twenty years,” he tells me over the phone, “and when I saw the way you were lying in the ditch, plus the extent of the impact injuries, I didn’t think you’d make it to the hospital. You’re a lucky camper to still be with the program.”

The extent of the impact injuries is such that the doctors at Northern Cumberland Hospital decide they cannot treat me there. Someone summons a LifeFlight helicopter to take me to Central Maine Medical Center, in Lewiston. At this point, Tabby, my older son, and my daughter arrive. The kids are allowed a brief visit; Tabby is allowed to stay longer. The doctors have assured her that I’m banged up but I’ll make it. The lower half of my body has been covered. She isn’t allowed to see the interesting way that my lap has shifted around to the right, but she is allowed to wash the blood off my face and pick some of the glass out of my hair.

There’s a long gash in my scalp, the result of my collision with Bryan Smith’s windshield. This impact came at a point less than two inches from the steel driver’s-side support post. Had I struck that, I would have been killed or rendered permanently comatose. Instead, I was thrown over the van and fourteen feet into the air. If I had landed on the rocks jutting out of the ground beyond the shoulder of Route 5, I would also likely have been killed or permanently paralyzed, but I landed just shy of them. “You must have pivoted to the left just a little at the last second,” I am told later, by the doctor who takes over my case. “If you hadn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

The LifeFlight helicopter arrives in the parking lot, and I am wheeled out to it. The clatter of the helicopter’s rotors is loud. Someone shouts into my ear, “Ever been in a helicopter before, Stephen?” The speaker sounds jolly, excited for me. I try to say yes, I’ve been in a helicopter before—twice, in fact—but I can’t. It’s suddenly very tough to breathe. They load me into the helicopter. I can see one brilliant wedge of blue sky as we lift off, not a cloud in it. There are more radio voices. This is my afternoon for hearing voices, it seems. Meanwhile, it’s getting even harder to breathe. I gesture at someone, or try to, and a face bends upside down into my field of vision.

“Feel like I’m drowning,” I whisper.

Somebody checks something, and someone else says, “His lung has collapsed.”

There’s a rattle of paper as something is unwrapped, and then the second person speaks into my ear, loudly so as to be heard over the rotors: “We’re going to put a chest tube in you, Stephen. You’ll feel some pain, a little pinch. Hold on.”

It’s been my experience that if a medical person tells you that you’re going to feel a little pinch he’s really going to hurt you. This time, it isn’t as bad as I expected, perhaps because I’m full of painkillers, perhaps because I’m on the verge of passing out again. It’s like being thumped on the right side of my chest by someone holding a short sharp object. Then there’s an alarming whistle, as if I’d sprung a leak. In fact, I suppose I have. A moment later, the soft in-out of normal respiration, which I’ve listened to my whole life (mostly without being aware of it, thank God), has been replaced by an unpleasant shloop-shloop-shloop sound. The air I’m taking in is very cold, but it’s air, at least, and I keep breathing it. I don’t want to die, and, as I lie in the helicopter looking out at the bright summer sky, I realize that I am actually lying in death’s doorway. Someone is going to pull me one way or the other pretty soon; it’s mostly out of my hands. All I can do is lie there and listen to my thin, leaky breathing: shloop-shloop-shloop .

Ten minutes later, we set down on the concrete landing pad of the Central Maine Medical Center. To me, it feels as if we’re at the bottom of a concrete well. The blue sky is blotted out, and the whap-whap-whap of the helicopter rotors becomes magnified and echoey, like the clapping of giant hands.

Still breathing in great leaky gulps, I am lifted out of the helicopter. Someone bumps the stretcher, and I scream. “Sorry, sorry, you’re O.K., Stephen,” someone says—when you’re badly hurt, everyone calls you by your first name.

“Tell Tabby I love her very much,” I say as I am first lifted and then wheeled very fast down some sort of descending walkway. I suddenly feel like crying.

“You can tell her that yourself,” the someone says. We go through a door. There is air-conditioning, and lights flow past overhead. Doctors are paged over loudspeakers. It occurs to me, in a muddled sort of way, that just an hour ago I was taking a walk and planning to pick some berries in a field that overlooks Lake Kezar. I wasn’t going to pick for long, though; I’d have to be home by five-thirty because we were going to see “The General’s Daughter,” starring John Travolta. Travolta played the bad guy in the movie version of “Carrie,” my first novel, a long time ago.

“When?” I ask. “When can I tell her?”

“Soon,” the voice says, and then I pass out again. This time, it’s no splice but a great big whack taken out of the memory film; there are a few flashes, confused glimpses of faces and operating rooms and looming X-ray machinery; there are delusions and hallucinations, fed by the morphine and Dilaudid dripping into me; there are echoing voices and hands that reach down to paint my dry lips with swabs that taste of peppermint. Mostly, though, there is darkness.

Bryan Smith’s estimate of my injuries turned out to be conservative. My lower leg was broken in at least nine places. The orthopedic surgeon who put me together again, the formidable David Brown, said that the region below my right knee had been reduced to “so many marbles in a sock.” The extent of those lower-leg injuries necessitated two deep incisions—they’re called medial and lateral fasciotomies—to release the pressure caused by my exploded tibia and also to allow blood to flow back into my lower leg. If I hadn’t had the fasciotomies (or if they had been delayed), it probably would have been necessary to amputate my leg. My right knee was split almost directly down the middle, and I suffered an acetabular fracture of the right hip—a serious derailment, in other words—and an open femoral intertrochanteric fracture in the same area. My spine was chipped in eight places. Four ribs were broken. My right collarbone held, but the flesh above it had been stripped raw. The laceration in my scalp took almost thirty stitches.

Yeah, on the whole I’d say Bryan Smith was a tad conservative.

Mr. Smith’s driving behavior in this case was eventually examined by a grand jury, which indicted him on two counts: driving to endanger (pretty serious) and aggravated assault (very serious, the kind of thing that means jail time). After due consideration, the district attorney responsible for prosecuting such cases in my corner of the world allowed Smith to plead out to the lesser charge of driving to endanger. He received six months of county jail time (sentence suspended) and a year’s suspension of his right to drive. He was also placed on probation for a year, with restrictions on other motor vehicles, such as snowmobiles and A.T.V.s. Bryan Smith could conceivably be back on the road in the fall or winter of 2001.

David Brown put my leg back together in five marathon surgical procedures that left me thin, weak, and nearly at the end of my endurance. They also left me with at least a fighting chance to walk again. A large steel and carbon-fibre apparatus called an external fixator was clamped to my leg. Eight large steel pegs called Schanz pins ran through the fixator and into the bones above and below my knee. Five smaller steel rods radiated out from the knee. These looked sort of like a child’s drawing of sunrays. The knee itself was locked in place. Three times a day, nurses unwrapped the smaller pins and the much larger Schanz pins and swabbed the holes 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.

I entered the hospital on June 19th. Around the thirtieth, I got up for the first time, staggering three steps to a commode, where I sat with my hospital johnny in my lap and my head down, trying not to weep and failing. I told myself that I had been lucky, incredibly lucky, and usually that worked, because it was true. Sometimes it didn’t work, that’s all—and then I cried.

A day or two after those initial steps, I started physical therapy. During my first session, I managed ten steps in a downstairs corridor, lurching along with the help of a walker. One other patient was learning to walk again at the same time as me, a wispy eighty-year-old woman named Alice, who was recovering from a stroke. We cheered each other on when we had enough breath to do so. On our third day in the hall, I told Alice that her slip was showing.

“Your ass is showing, sonny boy,” she wheezed, and kept going.

By July 4th, I was able to sit up in a wheelchair long enough to go out to the loading dock behind the hospital and watch the fireworks. It was a fiercely hot night, the streets filled with people eating snacks, drinking beer and soda, watching the sky. Tabby stood next to me, holding my hand, as the sky lit up red and green, blue and yellow. She was staying in a condo apartment across the street from the hospital, and each morning she brought me poached eggs and tea. I could use the nourishment, it seemed. In 1997, I weighed two hundred and sixteen pounds. On the day that I was released from Central Maine Medical Center, I weighed a hundred and sixty-five.

I came home to Bangor on July 9th, after a hospital stay of three weeks, and began a daily-rehabilitation program that included stretching, bending, and crutch-walking. I tried to keep my courage and my spirits up. On August 4th, I went back to C.M.M.C. for another operation. When I woke up this time, the Schanz pins in my upper thigh were gone. Dr. Brown pronounced my recovery “on course” and sent me home for more rehab and physical therapy. (Those of us undergoing P.T. know that the letters actually stand for Pain and Torture.) And in the midst of all this something else happened.

On July 24th, five weeks after Bryan Smith hit me with his Dodge van, I began to write again.

I didn’t want to go back to work. I was in a lot of pain, unable to bend my right knee. I couldn’t imagine sitting behind a desk for long, even in a wheelchair. Because of my cataclysmically smashed hip, sitting was torture after forty minutes or so, impossible after an hour and a quarter. How was I supposed to write when the most pressing thing in my world was how long until the next dose of Percocet?

Yet, at the same time, I felt that I was all out of choices. I had been in terrible situations before, and writing had helped me get over them—had helped me to forget myself, at least for a little while. Perhaps it would help me again. It seemed ridiculous to think it might be so, given the level of my pain and physical incapacitation, but there was that voice in the back of my mind, patient and implacable, telling me that, in the words of the Chambers Brothers, the “time has come today.” It was possible for me to disobey that voice but very difficult not to believe it.

In the end, it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments. The former Tabitha Spruce is the person in my life who’s most likely to say that I’m working too hard, that it’s time to slow down, but she also knows that sometimes it’s the work that bails me out. For me, there have been times when the act of writing has been an act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair. Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life. When I told Tabby on that July morning that I thought I’d better go back to work, I expected a lecture. Instead, she asked me where I wanted to set up. I told her I didn’t know, hadn’t even thought about it.

For years after we were married, I had dreamed of having the sort of massive oak-slab desk that would dominate a room—no more child’s desk in a trailer closet, no more cramped kneehole in a rented house. In 1981, I had found that desk and placed it in a spacious, skylighted study in a converted stable loft at the rear of our new house. For six years, I had sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship’s captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere. Then, a year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of it and put in a living-room suite where it had been. In the early nineties, before my kids had moved on to their own lives, they sometimes came up there in the evening to watch a basketball game or a movie and eat a pizza. They usually left a boxful of crusts behind, but I didn’t care. I got another desk—handmade, beautiful, and half the size of my original T. rex—and I put it at the far-west end of the office, in a corner under the eave. Now, in my wheelchair, I had no way to get to it.

Tabby thought about it for a moment and then said, “I can rig a table for you in the back hall, outside the pantry. There are plenty of outlets—you can have your Mac, the little printer, and a fan.” The fan was a must—it had been a terrifically hot summer, and on the day I went back to work the temperature outside was ninety-five. It wasn’t much cooler in the back hall.

Tabby spent a couple of hours putting things together, and that afternoon she rolled me out through the kitchen and down the newly installed wheelchair ramp into the back hall. She had made me a wonderful little nest there: laptop and printer connected side by side, table lamp, manuscript (with my notes from the month before placed neatly on top), pens, and reference materials. On the corner of the desk was a framed picture of our younger son, which she had taken earlier that summer.

“Is it all right?” she asked.

“It’s gorgeous,” I said.

She got me positioned at the table, kissed me on the temple, and then left me there to find out if I had anything left to say. It turned out I did, a little. That first session lasted an hour and forty minutes, by far the longest period I’d spent 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 in my life. 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.

Tabby brought me a Pepsi—cold and sweet and good—and as I drank it I looked around and had to laugh despite the pain. I’d written “Carrie” and “Salem’s Lot” in the laundry room of a rented trailer. The back hall of our house resembled it enough to make me feel as if I’d come full circle.

There was no miraculous breakthrough that afternoon, unless it was the ordinary miracle that comes with any attempt to create something. All I know is that the words started coming a little faster after a while, then a little faster still. My hip still hurt, my back still hurt, my leg, too, but those hurts began to seem a little farther away. I’d got going; there was that much. After that, things could only get better.

Things have continued to get better. I’ve had two more operations on my leg since that first sweltering afternoon in the back hall. I’ve also had a fairly serious bout of infection, and I still take roughly a hundred pills a day, but the external fixator is now gone and I continue to write. On some days, that writing is a pretty grim slog. On others—more and more of them, as my mind reaccustoms itself to its old routine—I feel that buzz of happiness, that sense of having found the right words and put them in a line. It’s like lifting off in an airplane: you’re on the ground, on the ground, on the ground . . . and then you’re up, riding on a cushion of air and the prince of all you survey. I still don’t have much strength—I can do a little less than half of what I used to be able to do in a day—but I have enough. Writing did not save my life, but it is doing what it has always done: it makes my life a brighter and more pleasant place. ♦

Lucy A. Snyder

Author • editor • writing instructor, on being nineteen.

March 20, 2018 Lucy A. Snyder dark fantasy , horror 0

When I started reading Stephen King’s  Dark Tower  novels , one of the things that resonated with me is his introduction, “On Being Nineteen”, which is included in each book in the series (at least the editions I’ve been reading).

In his essay, King covers his motivations for starting   The Gunslinger  way back when he was just a teenager and details the book’s pop culture influences: Tolkien’s epic fantasy trilogy  The Lord of the Rings  and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Western  The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly .

(B)efore the film was even half over, I realized that what I wanted to write was a novel that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic but set against Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop.

This line particularly struck me because I realized I had a very similar kind of motivation for writing  The Girl With The Star-Stained Soul . My goals for my novel are to take the kind of epic, chilling cosmic horror Lovecraft worked with and set it against my take on a classic Southern gothic setting. And, in doing so, tackle the racism in Lovecraft’s work (which was largely also my own white Southern ancestors’ racism) head on.

Which ties in with remarks King makes a bit earlier in his introduction:

I think novelists come in two types, and that includes the sort of fledgling novelist I was by 1970. Those who are bound for the more literary or “serious” side of the job examine every possible subject in light of this question: What would writing this sort of story mean to me? Those whose destiny (or ka, if you like) is to include the writing of popular novels are apt to ask a very different one: What would writing this sort of story mean to others? The “serious” novelist is looking for answers and keys to the self; the “popular” novelist is looking for an audience.

This is something I wrestle with. I don’t think that being a “serious” author and a popular one need to be mutually exclusive. But there’s a balance to be struck there, for sure. I know full well that many teenaged readers won’t give a toss about Lovecraft or his racism; I have to offer them a compelling, entertaining story. I have to be concerned with my audience and what my story will mean to them. Because, ultimately, if my book fails to find an audience, it won’t be read, and it will limit the opportunities for anything else I write.

But at the same time, I am still using the narrative to seek answers for myself; if I were solely interested in fiction writing as commerce, I could pick a topic far more marketable than this one. I am seeking those keys King mentioned. My novel’s function in this regard might be riding in the back seat, but it’s still there and part of the journey. This novel is in some aspects a dialog I can never have with long-dead relatives whom I have little in common with besides a few mysterious twists of DNA. Or perhaps it will simply function as a condemnation of and angry epitaph for a Southern culture that is receiving a well-deserved burial; I’ve never been especially good at speaking with my living relatives, much less the dead ones.

King wrote “On Being Nineteen” shortly before the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. And that award marked him as the kind of author he claimed to not be. May we all experience such irony in our writing careers!

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Stephen King Wiki

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On Being Nineteen (and a Few Other Things)

" On Being Nineteen (and a Few Other Things) " is a three-part introductory essay written by Stephen King , dated 25 January 2003, and included in his rereleased edition of the Gunslinger .

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On Being 19 - printed standalone?

Has anyone ever heard of King's On Being 19 essay being printed and published on its own? I have a step-daughter who will be turning 19 soon, and I thought this would be a nice gift.

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Stephen king , the art of fiction no. 189, issue 178, fall 2006.

Stephen King began this interview in the summer of 2001, two years after he was struck by a minivan while walking near his home in Center Lovell, Maine. He was lucky to have survived the accident, in which he suffered scalp lacerations, a collapsed right lung, and multiple fractures of his right hip and leg. Six pounds of metal that had been implanted in King’s body during the initial surgery were removed shortly before the author spoke to  The Paris Review , and he was still in constant pain. “The orthopedist found all this infected tissue and outraged flesh,” said King. “The bursas were sticking right out, like little eyes.” The interview was held in Boston, where King, an avid Red Sox fan, had taken up temporary residence to watch his team make its pennant run. Although he was still frail, he was back to writing every day, and by night he would take his manuscript to Fenway Park so that he could edit between innings and during pitching changes.

A second interview session with King was conducted early this year at his winter home in Florida, which happens to be within easy driving distance of the Red Sox’s spring training compound in Fort Myers. The house lies at the end of a sandy key, and looks—by virtue of a high vaulted ceiling—something like an overturned sailboat. It was a hot, sunny morning and King sat on his front steps in blue jeans, white sneakers, and a Tabasco hot sauce T-shirt, reading the local newspaper. The day before, the same paper had printed his home address in its business section, and fans had been driving by all morning to get a peek at the world-famous author. “People forget,” he said, “I’m a real person.”

King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. His father abandoned his family when King was very young, and his mother moved around the country before settling back in Maine—this time in the small inland town of Durham. King’s first published story, “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber,” appeared in 1965 in a fan magazine called  Comics Review . Around that time he received a scholarship to attend the University of Maine in Orono, where he met his wife, Tabitha, a novelist with whom he has three children and to whom he is still married. For several years he struggled to support his young family by washing motel linens at a laundry, teaching high-school English, and occasionally selling short stories to men’s magazines. Then, in 1973, he sold his novel  Carrie , which quickly became a best seller. Since then, King has sold over three hundred million books.

In addition to forty-three novels, King has written eight collections of short stories, eleven screenplays, and two books on the craft of writing, and he is a co-author with Stewart O’Nan of  Faithful , a day-by-day account of the Red Sox’s 2004 championship season. Virtually all of his novels and most of his short stories have been adapted for film or television. Although he was dismissed by critics for much of his career—one  New York Times  review called King “a writer of fairly engaging and preposterous claptrap”—his writing has received greater recognition in recent years, and in 2003 he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. King has also been honored for his devoted efforts to support and promote the work of other authors. In 1997 he received the Writers for Writers Award from  Poets & Writers  magazine, and he was recently selected to edit the 2007 edition of Best American Short Stories.

In person, King has a gracious, funny, sincere manner and speaks with great enthusiasm and candor. He is also a generous host. Halfway through the interview he served lunch: a roasted chicken—which he proceeded to hack at with a frighteningly sharp knife—potato salad, coleslaw, macaroni salad, and, for dessert, key lime pie. When asked what he was currently working on, he stood up and led the way to the beach that runs along his property. He explained that two other houses once stood at the end of the key. One of them collapsed during a storm five years earlier, and bits of wall, furniture, and personal effects still wash ashore at high tide. King is setting his next novel in the other house. It is still standing, though it is abandoned and, undoubtedly, haunted.

INTERVIEWER

How old were you when you started writing?

STEPHEN KING

Believe it or not, I was about six or seven, just copying panels out of comic books and then making up my own stories. I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time. Film was also a major influence. I loved the movies from the start. I can remember my mother taking me to Radio City Music Hall to see  Bambi . Whoa, the size of the place, and the forest fire in the movie—it made a big impression. So when I started to write, I had a tendency to write in images because that was all I knew at the time.

When did you begin reading adult fiction?

In 1959 probably, after we had moved back to Maine. I would have been twelve, and I was going to this little one-room schoolhouse just up the street from my house. All the grades were in one room, and there was a shithouse out back, which stank. There was no library in town, but every week the state sent a big green van called the bookmobile. You could get three books from the bookmobile and they didn’t care which ones—you didn’t have to take out kid books. Up until then what I had been reading was Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and things like that. The first books I picked out were these Ed McBain 87th Precinct novels. In the one I read first, the cops go up to question a woman in this tenement apartment and she is standing there in her slip. The cops tell her to put some clothes on, and she grabs her breast through her slip and squeezes it at them and says, “In your eye, cop!” And I went, Shit! Immediately something clicked in my head. I thought, That’s real, that could really happen. That was the end of the Hardy Boys. That was the end of all juvenile fiction for me. It was like, See ya!

But you didn’t read popular fiction exclusively.

I didn’t know what popular fiction was, and nobody told me at the time. I read a wide range of books. I read  The Call of the Wild  and  The Sea-Wolf  one week, and then  Peyton Place  the next week, and then a week later  The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit . Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read. When I read  The Sea-Wolf , I didn’t understand that it was Jack London’s critique of Nietzsche, and when I read  McTeague , I didn’t know that was naturalism, that it was Frank Norris saying, You can never win, the system always beats you. But I did understand them on another level. When I read  Tess of the d’Urbervilles , I said to myself two things. Number one, if she didn’t wake up when that guy fucked her, she must have really been asleep. And number two, a woman couldn’t catch a break at that time. That was my introduction to women’s lit. I loved that book, so I read a whole bunch of Hardy. But when I read  Jude the Obscure , that was the end of my Hardy phase. I thought, This is fucking ridiculous. Nobody’s life is this bad. Give me a break, you know?

In  On Writing , you mention how the idea for your first novel,  Carrie , came to you when you connected two unrelated subjects: adolescent cruelty and telekinesis. Are such unlikely connections often a starting point for you?

Yes, that’s happened a lot. When I wrote  Cujo —about a rabid dog—I was having trouble with my motorcycle, and I heard about a place I could get it fixed. We were living in Bridgton, Maine, which is a resort-type town—a lake community in the western part of the state—but over in the northern part of Bridgton, it’s really rough country. There are a lot of farmers just making their own way in the old style. The mechanic had a farmhouse and an auto shop across the road. So I took my motorcycle up there, and when I got it into the yard, it quit entirely. And the biggest Saint Bernard I ever saw in my life came out of that garage, and it came toward me. 

Those dogs look horrible anyway, particularly in summer. They’ve got the dewlaps, and they’ve got the runny eyes. They don’t look like they’re well. He started growling at me, way down in his throat: arrrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhh. At that time I weighed about two hundred and twenty pounds, so I outweighed the dog by maybe ten pounds. The mechanic came out of the garage and said to me, Oh, that’s Bowser, or whatever the dog’s name was. It wasn’t Cujo. He said, Don’t worry about him. He does that to everybody. So I put my hand out to the dog, and the dog went for my hand. The guy had one of those socket wrenches in his hand, and he brought it down on the dog’s hindquarters. A steel wrench. It sounded like a rug beater hitting a rug. The dog just yelped once and sat down. And the guy said something to me like, Bowser usually doesn’t do this, he must not have liked your face. Right away it’s my fault.

I remember how scared I was because there was no place to hide. I was on my bike but it was dead, and I couldn’t outrun him. If the man wasn’t there with the wrench and the dog decided to attack . . . But that was not a story, it was just a piece of something. A couple of weeks later I was thinking about this Ford Pinto that my wife and I had. It was the first new car we ever owned. We bought it with the Doubleday advance for  Carrie , twenty-five hundred dollars. We had problems with it right away because there was something wrong with the needle valve in the carburetor. It would stick, the carburetor would flood, and the car wouldn’t start. I was worried about my wife getting stuck in that Pinto, and I thought, What if she took that car to get fixed like I did my motorcycle and the needle valve stuck and she couldn’t get it going—but instead of the dog just being a mean dog, what if the dog was really crazy?

Then I thought, Maybe it’s rabid. That’s when something really fired over in my mind. Once you’ve got that much, you start to see all the ramifications of the story. You say to yourself, Well, why didn’t somebody come and rescue her? People live there. It’s a farmhouse. Where are they? Well, you say, I don’t know, that’s the story. Where is her husband? Why didn’t her husband come rescue her? I don’t know, that’s part of the story. What happens if she gets bitten by this dog? And that was going to be part of the story. What if she starts to get rabid? After I got about seventy or eighty pages into the book I found out the incubation period for rabies was too long, so her becoming rabid ceased to be a factor. That’s one of the places where the real world intruded on the story. But it’s always that way. You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

Are there other sources for your material besides experience?

Sometimes it’s other stories. A few years ago I was listening to a book on tape by John Toland called The  Dillinger Days . One of the stories is about John Dillinger and his friends Homer Van Meter and Jack Hamilton fleeing Little Bohemia, and Jack Hamilton being shot in the back by a cop after crossing the Mississippi River. Then all this other stuff happens to him that Toland doesn’t really go into. And I thought, I don’t need Toland to tell me what happens, and I don’t need to be tied to the truth. These people have legitimately entered the area of American mythology. I’ll make up my own shit. So I wrote a story called “The Death of Jack Hamilton.”

Or sometimes I’ll use film. In  Wolves of the Calla , one of the seven books in the Dark Tower series, I decided to see if I couldn’t retell  Seven Samura i, that Kurosawa film, and  The Magnificent Seven . The story is the same, of course, in both cases. It’s about these farmers who hire gunslingers to defend their town against bandits, who keep coming to steal their crops. But I wanted to up the ante a little bit. So in my version, instead of crops, the bandits steal children.

What happens when the real world intrudes, as with the incubation period of rabies in  Cujo ? Do you go back?

You can never bend reality to serve the fiction. You have to bend the fiction to serve reality when you find those things out.

Cujo  is unusual in that the entire novel is a single chapter. Did you plan that from the start?

No,  Cujo  was a standard novel in chapters when it was created. But I can remember thinking that I wanted the book to feel like a brick that was heaved through your window at you. I’ve always thought that the sort of book that I do—and I’ve got enough ego to think that every novelist should do this—should be a kind of personal assault. It ought to be somebody lunging right across the table and grabbing you and messing you up. It should get in your face. It should upset you, disturb you. And not just because you get grossed out. I mean, if I get a letter from somebody saying, I couldn’t eat my dinner, my attitude is, Terrific!

What do you think it is that we’re afraid of?

I don’t think there’s anything that I’m not afraid of, on some level. But if you mean, What are  we  afraid of, as humans? Chaos. The outsider. We’re afraid of change. We’re afraid of disruption, and that is what I’m interested in. I mean, there are a lot of people whose writing I really love—one of them is the American poet Philip Booth—who write about ordinary life straight up, but I just can’t do that.

I once wrote a short novel called “The Mist.” It’s about this mist that rolls in and covers a town, and the story follows a number of people who are trapped in a supermarket. There’s a woman in the checkout line who’s got this box of mushrooms. When she walks to the window to see the mist coming in, the manager takes them from her. And she tells him, “Give me back my mushies.”

We’re terrified of disruption. We’re afraid that somebody’s going to steal our mushrooms in the checkout line.

Would you say then that this fear is the main subject of your fiction?

I’d say that what I do is like a crack in the mirror. If you go back over the books from  Carrie  on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class American life as it’s lived at the time that particular book was written. In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that’s inexplicable to you, whether it’s the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we’re still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts.

In  On Writing , that’s how you define popular fiction: fiction in which readers recognize aspects of their own experience—behavior, place, relationships, and speech. In your work, do you consciously set out to capture a specific moment in time?

No, but I don’t try to avoid it. Take  Cell . The idea came about this way: I came out of a hotel in New York and I saw this woman talking on her cell phone. And I thought to myself, What if she got a message over the cell phone that she couldn’t resist, and she had to kill people until somebody killed her? All the possible ramifications started bouncing around in my head like pinballs. If everybody got the same message, then everybody who had a cell phone would go crazy. Normal people would see this, and the first thing they would do would be to call their friends and families on their cell phones. So the epidemic would spread like poison ivy. Then, later, I was walking down the street and I see some guy who is apparently a crazy person yelling to himself. And I want to cross the street to get away from him. Except he’s not a bum; he’s dressed in a suit. Then I see he’s got one of these plugs in his ear and he’s talking into his cell phone. And I thought to myself, I really want to write this story.

It was an instant concept. Then I read a lot about the cell-phone business and started to look at the cell-phone towers. So it’s a very current book, but it came out of a concern about the way we talk to each other today.

Do you think  Cell , because of its timeliness, might look dated in ten years?

It might. I’m sure other books, like  Firestarter  for instance, look antique now. But that doesn’t bother me. One hopes that the stories and the characters stand out. And even the antique things have a certain value.

Do you think about which of your books will last? 

It’s a crapshoot. You never know who’s going to be popular in fifty years. Who is going to be in, in a literary sense, and who’s not. If I had to predict which of my books people will pick up a hundred years from now, if they pick up any, I’d begin with  The Stand  and  The Shining . And  ’Salem’s Lot —because people like vampire stories, and its premise is the classic vampire story. It doesn’t have any particular bells or whistles. It’s not fancy, it’s just scary. So I think people will pick that up for a while.

When you look back on your novels, do you group them in any way?

I do two different kinds of books. I think of books like  The Stand ,  Desperation , and the Dark Tower series as books that go out. Then there are books like  Pet Sematary ,  Misery ,  The Shining , and  Dolores Claiborne  that go in. Fans usually will either like the outies or they’ll like the innies. But they won’t like both.

But even in the more supernatural books the horror is psychological, right? It’s not just the bogeyman jumping out from behind a corner. So couldn’t they all be characterized as innies?

Well, my categorization is also about character, and the number of characters. Innies tend to be about one person and go deeper and deeper into a single character.  Lisey’s Story , my new novel, is an innie, for instance, because it’s a long book and there are only a few characters, but a book like  Cell  is an outie because there are a lot of people and it’s about friendship and it’s kind of a road story.  Gerald’s Game  is the innie-est of all the innie books. It’s about only one person, Jessie, who’s been handcuffed naked to her bed. The little things all get so big—the glass of water, and her trying to get the shelf above the bed to tip up so she can escape. Going into that book, I remember thinking that Jessie would have been some sort of gymnast at school, and at the end of it she would simply put her feet back over her head, over the bedstead, and wind up standing up. About forty pages into writing it, I said to myself, I’d better see if this works. So I got my son—I think it was Joe because he’s the more limber of the two boys—and I took him into our bedroom. I tied him with scarves to the bedposts. My wife came in and said, What are you doing? And I said, I’m doing an experiment, never mind.

Joe tried to do it, but he couldn’t. He said, My joints don’t work that way. And again, it’s what I was talking about with the rabies in  Cujo . I’m saying, Jesus Christ! This isn’t going to work! And the only thing you can do at that point is say, Well, I could make her double-jointed. Then you go, Yeah, right, that’s not fair.

Misery  was just two characters in a bedroom, but  Gerald’s Game  goes that one better—one character in a bedroom. I was thinking that eventually there’s going to be another book that will just be called “Bedroom.” There won’t be any characters at all.

Mark Singer wrote in  The New Yorker  that you lost part of your audience with  Cujo  and  Pet Sematary  and  Gerald’s Game  because those novels were too painful for readers to bear. Do you think that’s actually the case?

I think that I lost some readers at various points. It was just a natural process of attrition, that’s all. People go on, they find other things. Though I also think that I have changed as a writer over the years, in the sense that I’m not providing exactly the same level of escape that  ’Salem’s Lot ,  The Shining , or even  The Stand  does. There are people out there who would have been perfectly happy had I died in 1978, the people who come to me and say, Oh, you never wrote a book as good as  The Stand . I usually tell them how depressing it is to hear them say that something you wrote twenty-eight years ago was your best book. Dylan probably hears the same thing about  Blonde on Blonde . But you try to grow as a writer and not just do the same thing over and over again, because there’s absolutely no point to that.

And I can afford to lose fans. That sounds totally conceited, but I don’t mean it that way: I can lose half of my fan base and still have enough to live on very comfortably. I’ve had the freedom to follow my own course, which is great. I might have lost some fans, but I might’ve gained some too.

You have written a lot about children. Why is that? 

I wrote a lot about children for a couple of reasons. I was fortunate to sell my writing fairly young, and I married young and had children young. Naomi was born in 1971, Joe was born in 1972, and Owen was born in 1977—a six-year spread between three kids. So I had a chance to observe them at a time when a lot of my contemporaries were out dancing to KC and the Sunshine Band. I feel that I got the better part of that deal. Raising the kids was a lot more rewarding than pop culture in the seventies. 

So I didn’t know KC and the Sunshine Band, but I did know my kids inside out. I was in touch with the anger and exhaustion that you can feel. And those things went into the books because they were what I knew at that time. What has found its way into a lot of the recent books is pain, and people who have injuries, because that’s what I know right now. Ten years from now maybe it will be something else, if I’m still around.

Bad things happen to children in  Pet Sematary . Where did that come from?

That book was pretty personal. Everything in it—up to the point where the little boy is killed in the road—everything is true. We moved into that house by the road. It was Orrington instead of Ludlow, but the big trucks did go by, and the old guy across the street did say, You just want to watch ’em around the road. We did go out in the field. We flew kites. We did go up and look at the pet cemetery. I did find my daughter’s cat, Smucky, dead in the road, run over. We buried him up in the pet cemetery, and I did hear Naomi out in the garage the night after we buried him. I heard all these popping noises—she was jumping up and down on packing material. She was crying and saying, Give me my cat back! Let God have his own cat! I just dumped that right into the book. And Owen really did go charging for the road. He was this little guy, probably two years old. I’m yelling, Don’t do that! And of course he runs faster and laughs, because that’s what they do at that age. I ran after him and gave him a flying tackle and pulled him down on the shoulder of the road, and a truck just thundered by him. So all of that went into the book. 

And then you say to yourself, You have to go a little bit further. If you’re going to take on this grieving process—what happens when you lose a kid—you ought to go all the way through it. And I did. I’m proud of that because I followed it all the way through, but it was so gruesome by the end of it, and so awful. I mean, there’s no hope for anybody at the end of that book. Usually I give my drafts to my wife Tabby to read, but I didn’t give it to her. When I finished I put it in the desk and just left it there. I worked on  Christine , which I liked a lot better, and which was published before  Pet Sematary .

Was  The Shining  also based on personal experience? Did you ever stay in that hotel?

Yes, the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. My wife and I went up there in October. It was their last weekend of the season, so the hotel was almost completely empty. They asked me if I could pay cash because they were taking the credit card receipts back down to Denver. I went past the first sign that said, Roads may be closed after November 1, and I said, Jeez, there’s a story up here.

What did you think of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the book?

Too cold. No sense of emotional investment in the family whatsoever on his part. I felt that the treatment of Shelley Duvall as Wendy—I mean, talk about insulting to women. She’s basically a scream machine. There’s no sense of her involvement in the family dynamic at all. And Kubrick didn’t seem to have any idea that Jack Nicholson was playing the same motorcycle psycho that he played in all those biker films he did— Hells Angels on Wheels ,  The Wild Ride ,  The Rebel Rousers , and  Easy Rider . The guy is crazy. So where is the tragedy if the guy shows up for his job interview and he’s already bonkers? No, I hated what Kubrick did with that.

Did you work with him on the movie?

No. My screenplay for  The Shining  became the basis for the television miniseries later on. But I doubt Kubrick ever read it before making his film. He knew what he wanted to do with the story, and he hired the novelist Diane Johnson to write a draft of the screenplay based on what he wanted to emphasize. Then he redid it himself. I was really disappointed.

It’s certainly beautiful to look at: gorgeous sets, all those Steadicam shots. I used to call it a Cadillac with no engine in it. You can’t do anything with it except admire it as sculpture. You’ve taken away its primary purpose, which is to tell a story. The basic difference that tells you all you need to know is the ending. Near the end of the novel, Jack Torrance tells his son that he loves him, and then he blows up with the hotel. It’s a very passionate climax. In Kubrick’s movie, he freezes to death.

Many of your earlier books ended with explosions, which allowed you to tie various plot strands together. But in recent stories and novels, like “Riding the Bullet” and  Cell , you seem to have moved away from this. Your endings leave many questions unanswered.

There is a pretty big bang at the end of  Cell . But it’s true, I get a lot of angry letters from readers about it. They want to know what happens next. My response now is to tell people, You guys sound like Teddy and Vern in  Stand by Me , after Gordie tells them the story about Lardass and the pie-eating contest and how it was the best revenge a kid ever had. Teddy says, “Then what happened?” And Gordie says, “What do you mean, what happened? That’s the end.” And Teddy says, “Why don’t you make it so that Lardass goes and he shoots his father, then he runs away and he joins the Texas Rangers?” Gordie says, “Ah, I don’t know.” So with  Cell , the end is the end. But so many people wrote me about it that I finally had to write on my Web site, “It seems pretty obvious to me that things turned out well for Clay’s son, Johnny.” Actually, it never crossed my mind that Johnny wouldn’t be OK.

Really? I wasn’t sure the kid was OK.

Yeah, I actually believe that, man. I’m a fucking optimist!

It’s amazing that, in the introduction or afterword to many of your books, you regularly solicit feedback from your readers. Why do you ask for more letters?

I’m always interested in what my readers think, and I’m aware that many of them want to participate in the story. I don’t have a problem with that, just so long as they understand that what they think isn’t necessarily going to change what I do. That is, I’m never going to say, I’ve got this story, here it is. Now here’s a poll. How do you think I should end it?

How important are your surroundings when you write?

It’s nice to have a desk, a comfortable chair so you’re not shifting around all the time, and enough light. Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination. I mean, if I were near a window, I’d be OK for a while, but then I’d be checking out the girls on the street and who’s getting in and out of the cars and, you know, just the little street-side stories that are going on all the time: what’s this one up to, what’s that one selling?

My study is basically just a room where I work. I have a filing system. It’s very complex, very orderly. With “Duma Key”—the novel I’m working on now—I’ve actually codified the notes to make sure I remember the different plot strands. I write down birth dates to figure out how old characters are at certain times. Remember to put a rose tattoo on this one’s breast, remember to give Edgar a big workbench by the end of February. Because if I do something wrong now, it becomes such a pain in the ass to fix later.

You mentioned wanting your study to feel like a refuge, but don’t you also like to listen to loud music when you work?

Not anymore. When I sit down to write, my job is to move the story. If there is such a thing as pace in writing, and if people read me because they’re getting a story that’s paced a certain way, it’s because they sense I want to get to where I’m going. I don’t want to dawdle around and look at the scenery. To achieve that pace I used to listen to music. But I was younger then, and frankly my brains used to work better than they do now. Now I’ll only listen to music at the end of a day’s work, when I roll back to the beginning of what I did that day and go over it on the screen. A lot of times the music will drive my wife crazy because it will be the same thing over and over and over again. I used to have a dance mix of that song “Mambo No. 5,” by Lou Bega, that goes, “A little bit of Monica in my life, a little bit of Erica”—deega, deega, deega. It’s a cheerful, calypso kind of thing, and my wife came upstairs one day and said, Steve, one more time . . . you die! So I’m not really listening to the music—it’s just something there in the background.

But even more than place, I think it’s important to try to work every day that you possibly can.

Did you write this morning?

I did. I wrote four pages. That’s what it’s come to. I used to write two thousand words a day and sometimes even more. But now it’s just a paltry thousand words a day.

You use a computer?

Yes, but I’ve occasionally gone back to longhand—with  Dreamcatcher  and with  Bag of Bones —because I wanted to see what would happen. It changed some things. Most of all, it made me slow down because it takes a long time. Every time I started to write something, some guy up here, some lazybones is saying, Aw, do we have to do that? I’ve still got a little bit of that scholar’s bump on my finger from doing all that longhand. But it made the rewriting process a lot more felicitous. It seemed to me that my first draft was more polished, just because it wasn’t possible to go so fast. You can only drive your hand along at a certain speed. It felt like the difference between, say, rolling along in a powered scooter and actually hiking the countryside.

What do you do once you finish a first draft?

It’s good to give the thing at least six weeks to sit and breathe. But I don’t always have that luxury. I didn’t have it with  Cell . The publisher had two manuscripts of mine. One of them was  Lisey’s Story , which I had been working on exclusively for a long time, and the other was  Cell , which I had been thinking about for a long time, and it just sort of announced itself: It’s time, you have to do it now. When that happens, you have to do it or let it go, so  Cell  was like my unplanned pregnancy.

You mean you wrote  Cell  in the middle of writing  Lisey’s Story ?

I was carrying both of them at the same time for a while. I had finished a first draft of  Lisey , so I revised it at night and worked on  Cell during the day. I used to work that way when I was drinking. During the day I would work on whatever was fresh and new, and I was pretty much straight as an arrow. Hung over a lot of the time, but straight. At night I’d be looped, and that’s when I would revise. It was fun, it was great, and it seemed to work for me for a long time, but I can’t sustain that anymore.

I wanted to publish  Lisey  first, but Susan Moldow, Scribner’s publisher, wanted to lead with  Cell  because she thought the attention it would receive would benefit the sale of  Lisey . So they put  Cell  on a fast track, and I had to go right to work on the rewrite. This is one thing publishers can do now, which isn’t always necessarily good for the book.

Can’t you tell them no?

Yes, but in this case it was actually the right thing to do, and it was a huge success.  Cell  was an unusual case though. You know, Graham Greene used to talk about books that were novels and books that were entertainments. Cell was an entertainment. I don’t want to say I didn’t care, because I did—I care about anything that goes out with my name on it. If you’re going to do the work and if someone is going to pay you for it, I think you ought to do the best job that you can. But after I finished the first draft of  Lisey , I gave myself six weeks. When you return to a novel after that amount of time, it seems almost as if a different person wrote it. You’re not quite as wedded to it. You find all sorts of horrible errors, but you also find passages that make you say, Jesus, that’s good!

Do you ever do extensive rewrites?

One of the ways the computer has changed the way I work is that I have a much greater tendency to edit “in the camera”—to make changes on the screen. With  Cell  that’s what I did. I read it over, I had editorial corrections, I was able to make my own corrections, and to me that’s like ice skating. It’s an OK way to do the work, but it isn’t optimal. With  Lisey  I had the copy beside the computer and I created blank documents and retyped the whole thing. To me that’s like swimming, and that’s preferable. It’s like you’re writing the book over again. It is literally a rewriting.

Every book is different each time you revise it. Because when you finish the book, you say to yourself, This isn’t what I meant to write at all. At some point, when you’re actually writing the book, you realize that. But if you try to steer it, you’re like a pitcher trying to steer a fastball, and you screw everything up. As the science-fiction writer Alfred Bester used to say, The book is the boss. You’ve got to let the book go where it wants to go, and you just follow along. If it doesn’t do that, it’s a bad book. And I’ve had bad books. I think  Rose Madder fits in that category, because it never really took off. I felt like I had to force that one.

Who edits your novels, and how much are they edited?

Chuck Verrill has edited a lot of the books, and he can be a very hard editor. At Scribner, Nan Graham edited  Lisey , and she gave me an entirely different look, partially because it’s about a woman, and she’s a woman, and also because she just came to the job fresh. She went over that book heavily. There’s a scene late in the book where Lisey goes to visit her sister, Amanda, at a nuthouse where she’s been committed. Originally there was a long scene in which Lisey stops at Amanda’s house on her way there, and then Lisey ends up coming back later with her sister. Nan said, You need to reconfigure this section, you need to take out this first stop at Amanda’s house because it slows down the narrative and it’s not necessary.

I don’t think it’s me, I don’t think it’s a best-seller thing, I think it’s a writer thing, and it goes across the board—it never changes—but my first thought was, She can’t tell me that. She doesn’t know. She’s not a writer. She doesn’t understand my genius! And then I say, Well, try it. And I say that especially loud, because I’ve reached a point in my career where I can have it any goddamn way I want to, if I want to. If you get popular enough, they give you all the rope you want. You can hang yourself in Times Square if you want to, and I’ve done it. Particularly in the days when I was doping and drinking all the time, I did what I wanted. And that included telling editors to go screw themselves.

So if Cell is an “entertainment,” which of your books would you put in the other category?

They should all be entertainments, you know. That is, in some ways, the nub of the problem. If a novel is not an entertainment, I don’t think it’s a successful book. But if you talk about the novels that work on more than one level, I would say  Misery ,  Dolores Claiborne , and  It . When I started to work on  It , which bounces back and forth between the characters’ lives as children and then as adults, I realized that I was writing about the way we use our imaginations at different points in our lives. I love that book, and it’s one of those books that sells steadily. People really respond to it. I get a lot of letters from people who say, I wish there were more of it. And I say, Oh my God, it’s so long as it is.

I think that  It  is the most Dickensian of my books because of its wide range of characters and intersecting stories. The novel manages a lot of complexity in an effortless way that I often wish I could rediscover.  Lisey’s Story  is that way. It’s very long. It has a number of interlocking stories that seem to be woven together effortlessly. But I’m shy talking about this, because I’m afraid people will laugh and say, Look at that barbarian trying to pretend he belongs in the palace. Whenever this subject comes up, I always cover up.

When you accepted the National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, you gave a speech defending popular fiction, and you listed a number of authors who you felt were underappreciated by the literary establishment. Then Shirley Hazzard, that year’s award winner in fiction, got on stage and dismissed your argument pretty flatly.

What Shirley Hazzard said was, I don’t think we need a reading list from you. If I had a chance to say anything in rebuttal, I would have said, With all due respect, we do. I think that Shirley, in a way, has proven my point. The keepers of the idea of serious literature have a short list of authors who are going to be allowed inside, and too often that list is drawn from people who know people, who go to certain schools, who come up through certain channels of literature. And that’s a very bad idea—it’s constraining for the growth of literature. This is a critical time for American letters because it’s under attack from so many other media: TV, movies, the Internet, and all the different ways we have of getting nonprint input to feed the imagination. Books, that old way of transmitting stories, are under attack. So when someone like Shirley Hazzard says, I don’t need a reading list, the door slams shut on writers like George Pelecanos or Dennis Lehane. And when that happens, when those people are left out in the cold, you are losing a whole area of imagination. Those people—and I’m not talking about James Patterson, we understand that—are doing important work. 

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The Paris Review Podcast returns with a new season, featuring the best interviews, fiction, essays, and poetry from America’s most legendary literary quarterly, brought to life in sound. Join us for intimate conversations with Sharon Olds and Olga Tokarczuk; fiction by Rivers Solomon, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and Zach Williams; poems by Terrance Hayes and Maggie Millner; nonfiction by Robert Glück, Jean Garnett, and Sean Thor Conroe; and performances by George Takei, Lena Waithe, and many others. Catch up on earlier seasons, and listen to the trailer for Season 4 now.

Suggested Reading

Toys in the TV

“This is all an experiment—these are just toys. Rules will be picked up only to be put down again. And again, and again.”

The Art of Editing No. 4

By the time I arrived in New York in the late seventies, Lapham was established in the city’s editorial elite, up there with William Shawn at The New Yorker and Barbara Epstein and Bob Silvers at The New York Review of Books . He was a glamorous fixture at literary parties and a regular at Elaine’s. In 1988, he raised plutocratic hackles by publishing Money and Class in America , a mordant indictment of our obsession with wealth. For a brief but glorious couple of years, he hosted a literary chat show on public TV called Bookmark , trading repartee with guests such as Joyce Carol Oates, Gore Vidal, Alison Lurie, and Edward Said. All the while, a new issue of Harper’s would hit the newsstands every month, with a lead essay by Lapham that couched his erudite observations on American society and politics in Augustan prose.

Today Lapham is the rare surviving eminence from that literary world. But he has managed to keep a handsome bit of it alive—so I observed when I went to interview him last summer in the offices of Lapham’s , a book-filled, crepuscular warren on a high floor of an old building just off Union Square. There he presides over a compact but bustling editorial operation, with an improbably youthful crew of subeditors. One LQ intern, who had also done stints at other magazines, told me that Lapham was singular among top editors for the personal attention he showed to each member of his staff.

Our conversation took place over several sessions, each around ninety minutes. Despite the heat, he was always impeccably attired: well-tailored blue blazer, silk tie, cuff links, and elegant loafers with no socks. He speaks in a relaxed baritone, punctuated by an occasional cough of almost orchestral resonance—a product, perhaps, of the Parliaments he is always dashing outside to smoke. The frequency with which he chuckles attests to a vision of life that is essentially comic, in which the most pervasive evils are folly and pretension.

I was familiar with such aspects of the Lapham persona. But what surprised me was his candid revelation of the struggle and self-doubt that lay behind what I had imagined to be his effortlessness. Those essays, so coolly modulated and intellectually assured, are the outcome of a creative process filled with arduous redrafting, rejiggering, revision, and last-minute amendment in the teeth of the printing press. And it is a creative process that always begins—as it did with his model, Montaigne—not with a dogmatic axiom to be unpacked but in a state of skeptical self-questioning: What do I really know? If there a unifying core to Lapham’s dual career as an editor and an essayist, that may be it.

— Jim Holt

From the Archive, Issue 229

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Stephen King’s Novels

Analysis of Stephen King’s Novels

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 31, 2018 • ( 3 )

Stephen King (born. September 21, 1947) may be known as a horror writer, but he calls himself a “brand name,” describing his style as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s.” His fast-food version of the “plain style” may smell of commercialism, but that may make him the contemporary American storyteller without peer. From the beginning, his dark parables spoke to the anxieties of the late twentieth century. As a surrogate author in The Mist explains King’s mission, “when the technologies fail, when… religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night” is a “cheerful” thought in the context of a “dissolving ozone layer.”

King’s fictions begin with premises accepted by middle Americans of the television generation, opening in suburban or small-town America—Derry, Maine, or Libertyville, Pennsylvania—and have the familiarity of the house next door and the 7-Eleven store. The characters have the trusted two-dimensional reality of kitsch: They originate in clichés such as the high school “nerd” or the wise child. From such premises, they move cinematically through an atmosphere resonant with a popular mythology. King applies naturalistic methods to an environment created by popular culture. This reality, already mediated, is translated easily into preternatural terms, taking on a nightmarish quality.

King’s imagination is above all archetypal: His “pop” familiarity and his campy humor draw on the collective unconscious. In Danse Macabre , a study of the contemporary horror genre that emphasizes the cross-pollination of fiction and film, he divides his subject according to four “monster archetypes”: the ghost, the “thing” (or human-made monster), the vampire, and the werewolf. As with his fiction, his sources are the classic horror films of the 1930’s, inherited by the 1950’s pulp and film industries. He hints at their derivations from the gothic novel, classical myth, Brothers Grimm folktales, and the oral tradition in general. In an anxious era both skeptical of and hungry for myth, horror is fundamentally reassuring and cathartic; the tale-teller combines roles of physician and priest into the witch doctor as “sin eater,” who assumes the guilt and fear of his culture. In the neoprimitivism of the late twentieth century, this ancient role and the old monsters have taken on a new mystique. In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argues that the magic and terrors of fairy tales present existential problems in forms children can understand. King’s paranormal horrors have similar cathartic and educative functions for adults; they externalize the traumas of life, especially those of adolescence.

Stephen King’s first published novel, Carrie , is a parable of adolescence. Sixteen-year-old Carrie White is a lonely ugly duckling, an outcast at home and at school. Her mother, a religious fanatic, associates Carrie with her own “sin”; Carrie’s peers hate her in a mindless way and make her the butt of every joke. Carrie concerns the horrors of high school, a place of “bottomless conservatism and bigotry,” as King explains, where students “are no more allowed to rise ‘above their station’ than a Hindu” above caste. The novel is also about the terrors of passage to womanhood. In the opening scene, in the school shower room, Carrie experiences her first menstrual period; her peers react with abhorrence and ridicule, “stoning” her with sanitary napkins, shouting “Plug it up!” Carrie becomes the scapegoat for a fear of female sexuality as epitomized in the smell and sight of blood. (The blood bath and symbolism of sacrifice will recur at the climax of the novel.) As atonement for her participation in Carrie’s persecution in the shower, Susan Snell persuades her popular boyfriend Tommy Ross to invite Carrie to the Spring Ball. Carrie’s conflict with her mother, who regards her emerging womanhood with loathing, is paralleled by a new plot by the girls against her, led by the rich and spoiled Chris Hargenson. They arrange to have Tommy and Carrie voted king and queen of the ball, only to crown them with a bucket of pig’s blood. Carrie avenges her mock baptism telekinetically, destroying the school and the town, leaving Susan Snell as the only survivor.

As in most folk cultures, initiation is signified by the acquisition of special wisdom or powers. King equates Carrie’s sexual flowering with the maturing of her telekinetic ability. Both cursed and empowered with righteous fury, she becomes at once victim and monster, witch and White Angel of Destruction. As King has explained, Carrie is “Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book.”

Carrie catapulted King into the mass market; in 1976 it was adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by Brian De Palma. The novel touched the right nerves, including feminism. William Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), which was adapted into a powerful and controversial film, had touched on similar social fears during the 1960’s and 1970’s with its subtext of the “generation gap” and the “death of God.” Although Carrie’s destructive power, like that of Regan in The Exorcist , is linked with monstrous adolescent sexuality, the similarity between the two novels ends there. Carrie’s “possession” is the complex effect of her mother’s fanaticism, her peers’ bigotry, and her newly realized, unchecked female power. Like Anne Sexton’s Transformations (1971), a collection of fractured fairy tales in sardonic verse, King’s novel explores the social and cultural roots of evil.

King’s Carrie is a dark modernization of “Cinderella,” with a bad mother, cruel siblings (peers), a prince (Tommy Ross), a godmother (Sue Snell), and a ball. King’s reversal of the happy ending is actually in keeping with the Brothers Grimm; it recalls the tale’s folk originals, which enact revenge in bloody images: The stepsisters’ heels, hands, and noses are sliced off, and a white dove pecks out their eyes. As King knows, blood flows freely in the oral tradition. King represents that oral tradition in a pseudodocumentary form that depicts the points of view of various witnessess and commentaries: newspaper accounts, case studies, court reports, and journals. Pretending to textual authenticity, he alludes to the gothic classics, especially Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). ‘Salem’s Lot , King’s next novel, is a bloody fairy tale in which Dracula comes to Our Town.

‘Salem’s Lot

By the agnostic and sexually liberated 1970’s, the vampire had been demythologized into what King called a “comic book menace.” In a significant departure from tradition, he diminishes the sexual aspects of the vampire. He reinvests the archetype with meaning by basing its attraction on the human desire to surrender identity in the mass. His major innovation, however, was envisioning the mythic small town in American gothic terms and then making it the monster; the vampire’s traditional victim, the populace, becomes the menace as mindless mass, plague, or primal horde. Drawing on Richard Matheson’s grimly naturalistic novel I Am Legend (1954) and Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955), King focused on the issues of fragmentation, reinvesting the vampire with contemporary meaning.

The sociopolitical subtext of ‘Salem’s Lot was the ubiquitous disillusionment of the Watergate era, King has explained. Like rumor and disease, vampirism spreads secretly at night, from neighbor to neighbor, infecting men and women, the mad and the senile, the responsible citizen and the infant alike, absorbing into its zombielike horde the human population. King is especially skillful at suggesting how small-town conservatism can become inverted on itself, the harbored suspicions and open secrets gradually dividing and isolating. This picture is reinforced by the town’s name, ‘Salem’s Lot , a degenerated form of Jerusalem’s Lot, which suggests the city of the chosen reverted to a culture of dark rites in images of spreading menace.

King’s other innovation was, paradoxically, a reiteration. He made his “king vampire,” Barlow, an obvious reincarnation of Stoker’s Dracula that functions somewhere between cliché and archetype. King uses the mythology of vampires to ask how civilization is to exist without faith in traditional authority symbols. His answer is pessimistic, turning on the abdication of Father Callahan, whose strength is undermined by secret alcoholism and a superficial adherence to form. The two survivors, Ben Mears and Mark Petrie, must partly seek, partly create their talismans and rituals, drawing on the compendium of vampire lore—the alternative, in a culture-wide crisis of faith, to conventional systems. (At one point, Mears holds off a vampire with a crucifix made with two tongue depressors.) The paraphernalia, they find, will work only if the handler has faith.

It is significant that the two survivors are, respectively, a “wise child” (Petrie) and a novelist (Mears); only they have the necessary resources. Even Susan Norton, Mears’s lover and the gothic heroine, succumbs. As in The Shining , The Dead Zone, and Firestarter , the child (or childlike adult) has powers that may be used for good or for evil. Mears is the imaginative, nostalgic adult, haunted by the past. The child and the man share a naïveté, a gothic iconography, and a belief in evil. Twelve-year-old Mark worships at a shrinelike tableau of Aurora monsters that glow “green in the dark, just like the plastic Jesus” he was given in Sunday School for learning Psalm 119. Mears has returned to the town of his childhood to revive an image of the Marsten House lurking in his mythical mind’s eye. Spiritual father and son, they create a community of two out of the “pop” remnants of American culture.

As in fairy tales and Dickens’s novels, King’s protagonists are orphans searching for their true parents, for community. His fiction may reenact his search for the father who disappeared and left behind a box of Weird Tales . The yearned-for bond of parent and child, a relationship signifying a unity of being, appears throughout his fiction. The weakness or treachery of a trusted parent is correspondingly the ultimate fear. Hence, the vampire Barlow is the devouring father who consumes an entire town.

The Shining

In The Shining , King domesticated his approach to the theme of parent-child relationships, focusing on the threat to the family that comes from a trusted figure within it. Jack Torrance, a writer, arranges to oversee a mountain resort during the winter months, when it is closed due to snow. He moves his family with him to the Overlook Hotel, where he expects to break a streak of bad luck and personal problems (he is an alcoholic) by writing a play. He is also an abused child who, assuming his father’s aggression, in turn becomes the abusing father. The much beloved “bad” father is the novel’s monster: The environment of the Overlook Hotel traps him, as he in turn calls its power forth. As Jack metamorphoses from abusive father and husband into violent monster, King brilliantly expands the haunted-house archetype into a symbol of the accumulated sin of all fathers.

In Christine, the setting is Libertyville, Pennsylvania, during the late 1970’s. The monster is the American Dream as embodied in the automobile. King gives Christine all the attributes of a fairy tale for “postliterate” adolescents. Christine is another fractured “Cinderella” story, Carrie for boys. Arnie Cunningham, a nearsighted, acne-scarred loser, falls “in love with” a car, a passionate (red and white) Plymouth Fury, “one of the long ones with the big fins,” that he names Christine. An automotive godmother, she brings Arnie, in fairy-tale succession, freedom, success, power, and love: a home away from overprotective parents, a cure for acne, hit-andrun revenge on bullies, and a beautiful girl, Leigh Cabot. Soon, however, the familiar triangle emerges, of boy, girl, and car, and Christine is revealed as a femme fatale— driven by the spirit of her former owner, a malcontent named Roland LeBay. Christine is the medium for his death wish on the world, for his all-devouring, “everlasting Fury.” LeBay’s aggression possesses Arnie, who reverts into an older, tougher self, then into the “mythic teenaged hood” that King has called the prototype of 1950’s werewolf films, and finally into “some ancient carrion eater,” or primal self.

As automotive monster, Christine comes from a variety of sources, including the folk tradition of the “death car” and a venerable techno-horror premise, as seen in King’s “Trucks” and Maximum Overdrive . King’s main focus, however, is the mobile youth culture that has come down from the 1950’s by way of advertising, popular songs, film, and national pastimes. Christine is the car as a projection of the cultural self, Anima for the modern American Adam. To Arnie’s late 1970’s-style imagination, the Plymouth Fury, in 1958 a mid-priced family car, is an American Dream. Her sweeping, befinned chassis and engine re-create a fantasy of the golden age of the automobile: the horizonless future imagined as an expanding network of superhighways and unlimited fuel. Christine recovers for Arnie a prelapsarian vitality and manifest destiny.

Christine’s odometer runs backward and she regenerates parts. The immortality she offers, however—and by implication, the American Dream—is really arrested development in the form of a Happy Days rerun and by way of her radio, which sticks on the golden oldies station. Indeed, Christine is a recapitulatory rock musical framed fatalistically in sections titled “Teenage Car-Songs,” “Teenage Love-Songs,” and “Teenage Death-Songs.” Fragments of rock-and-roll songs introduce each chapter. Christine’s burden, an undead 1950’s youth culture, means that most of Arnie’s travels are in and out of time, a deadly nostalgia trip. As Douglas Winter explains, Christine reenacts “the death,” during the 1970’s, “of the American romance with the automobile.”

The epilogue from four years later presents the fairy-tale consolation in a burnedout monotone. Arnie and his parents are buried, Christine is scrap metal, and the true Americans, Leigh and Dennis, are survivors, but Dennis, the “knight of Darnell’s Ga Rage ,” does not woo “the lady fair”; he is a limping, lackluster junior high teacher, and they have drifted apart, grown old in their prime. Dennis narrates the story in order to file it away, all the while perceiving himself and his peers in terms of icons from the late 1950’s. In his nightmares, Christine appears wearing a black vanity plate inscribed with a skull and the words, “ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE.” From Dennis’s haunted perspective, Christine simultaneously examines and is a symptom of a cultural phenomenon: a new American gothic species of anachronism or déjà vu, which continued after Christine ’s publication in films such as Back to the Future (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), and Blue Velvet (1986). The 1980’s and the 1950’s blur into a seamless illusion, the nightmare side of which is the prospect of living an infinite replay.

The subtext of King’s adolescent fairy tale is another coming of age, from the opposite end and the broader perspective of American culture. Written by a fortyish King in the final years of the twentieth century, Christine diagnoses a cultural midlife crisis and marks a turning point in King’s career, a critical examination of mass culture. The dual time frame reflects his awareness of a dual audience, of writing for adolescents who look back to a mythical 1950’s and also for his own generation as it relives its undead youth culture in its children. The baby boomers, King explains, “were obsessive” about childhood. “We went on playing for a long time, almost feverishly. I write for that buried child in us, but I’m writing for the grown-up too. I want grownups to look at the child long enough to be able to give him up. The child should be buried.”

Pet Sematary

In Pet Sematary , King unearthed the buried child, which is the novel’s monster. Pet Sematary is about the “real cemetery,” he told Winter. The focus is on the “one great fear” all fears “add up to,” “the body under the sheet. It’s our body.” The fairy-tale subtext is the magic kingdom of our protracted American childhood, the Disney empire as mass culture—and, by implication, the comparable multimedia phenomenon represented by King himself. The grimmer, truer text-within-the-text is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein ( 1818).

The novel, which King once considered “too horrible to be published,” is also his own dark night of the soul. Louis Creed, a university doctor, moves with his wife, Rachel, and their two children (five-year-old Ellie and two-year-old Gage) to Maine to work at King’s alma mater; a neighbor takes the family on an outing to a pet cemetery created by the neighborhood children, their confrontation with mortality. Additionally the “sematary,” whose “Druidic” rings allude to Stonehenge, is the outer circle of a Native American burial ground that sends back the dead in a state of soulless half life. Louis succumbs to temptation when the family cat, Church, is killed on the highway; he buries him on the sacred old Native American burial grounds. “Frankencat” comes back with his “purr-box broken.” A succession of accidents, heart attacks, strokes, and deaths—of neighbor Norma Crandall, Creed’s son Gage, Norma’s husband Jud, and Creed’s wife Rachel—and resurrections follows.

The turning point is the death of Gage, which Creed cannot accept and that leads to the novel’s analysis of modern medical miracles performed in the name of human decency and love. Louis is the father as baby boomer who cannot relinquish his childhood. The larger philosophical issue is Louis’s rational, bioethical creed; he believes in saving the only life he knows, the material. Transferred into an immoderate love for his son, it is exposed as the narcissistic embodiment of a patriarchal lust for immortality through descendants, expressed first in an agony of sorrow and Rage , then ghoulishly, as he disinters his son’s corpse and makes the estranging discovery that it is like “looking at a badly made doll.” Later, reanimated, Gage appears to have been “terribly hurt and then put back together again by crude, uncaring hands.” Performing his task, Louis feels dehumanized, like “a subhuman character in some cheap comic-book.”

The failure of Louis’s creed is shown in his habit, when under stress, of taking mental trips to Orlando, Florida, where he, Church, and Gage drive a white van as Disney World’s “resurrection crew.” In these waking dreams, which echo the male bond of “wise child” and haunted father from as far back as ‘Salem’s Lot , Louis’s real creed is revealed: Its focus is on Oz the Gweat and Tewwible (a personification of death to Rachel) and Walt Disney, that “gentle faker from Nebraska”—like Louis, two wizards of science fantasy. Louis’s wizardry is reflected in the narrative perspective and structure, which flashes back in part 2 from the funeral to Louis’s fantasy of a heroically “long, flying tackle” that snatches Gage from death’s wheels.

In this modernization of Frankenstein , King demythologizes death and attacks the aspirations toward immortality that typify contemporary American attitudes. King’s soulless Lazaruses are graphic projections of anxieties about life-support systems, artificial hearts, organ transplants—what King has called “mechanistic miracles” that can postpone the physical signs of life almost indefinitely. The novel also indicts the “waste land” of mass culture, alluding in the same trope to George Romero’s “stupid, lurching movie-zombies,” T. S. Eliot’s poem about the hollow men, and The Wizard of Oz: “headpiece full of straw.” Louis worries that Ellie knows more about Ronald McDonald and “the Burger King” than the “ spiritus mundi .” If the novel suggests one source of community and culture, it is the form and ritual of the children’s pet “sematary.” Its concentric circles form a pattern from their “own collective unconsciousness,” one that mimes “the most ancient religious symbol of all,” the spiral.

In It , a group of children create a community and a mythology as a way of confronting their fears, as represented by It , the monster as a serial-murdering, shape-shifting boogey that haunts the sewers of Derry, Maine. In 1958, the seven protagonists, a cross-section of losers, experience the monster differently, for as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), It derives its power through its victim’s isolation and guilt and thus assumes the shape of his or her worst fear. (To Beverly Rogan It appears, in a sequence reminiscent of “Red Riding Hood,” as her abusive father in the guise of the child-eating witch from “Hansel and Gretel.”)

In a scary passage in Pet Sematary , Louis dreams of Walt Disney World, where “by the 1890s train station, Mickey Mouse was shaking hands with the children clustered around him, his big white cartoon gloves swallowing their small, trusting hands.” To all of It’s protagonists, the monster appears in a similar archetypal or communal form, one that suggests a composite of devouring parent and mass-culture demigod, of television commercial and fairy tale, of 1958 and 1985: as Pennywise, the Clown, a cross between Bozo and Ronald McDonald. As in Christine, Pet Sematary, and Thinner , the monster is mass culture itself, the collective devouring parent nurturing its children on “imitations of immortality.” Like Christine, or Louis’s patched-up son, Pennywise is the dead past feeding on the future. Twenty-seven years after its original reign of terror, It resumes its seige, whereupon the protagonists, now professionally successful and, significantly, childless yuppies, must return to Derry to confront as adults their childhood fears. Led by horror writer Bill Denborough (partly based on King’s friend and collaborator Peter Straub), they defeat It once more, individually as a sort of allegory of psychoanalysis and collectively as a rite of passage into adulthood and community.

It was attacked in reviews as pop psychology and by King himself as a “badly constructed novel,” but the puerility was partly intended. The book summarizes King’s previous themes and characters, who themselves look backward and inward, regress and take stock. The last chapter begins with an epigraph from Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-1850) and ends with an allusion to William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” from which King takes his primary theme and narrative device, the look back that enables one to go forward. During the 1970’s, King’s fiction was devoted to building a mythos out of shabby celluloid monsters to fill a cultural void; in the postmodern awareness of the late 1980’s, he began a demystification process. It is a calling forth and ritual unmasking of motley Reagan-era monsters, the exorcism of a generation and a culture.

Other 1980’s Novels

As for King the writer, It was one important rite in what would be a lengthy passage. After It’s extensive exploration of childhood, however, he took up conspicuously more mature characters, themes, and roles. In The Eyes of the Dragon (written for his daughter), he returned to the springs of his fantasy, the fairy tale. He told much the same story as before but assumed the mantle of adulthood. This “pellucid” and “elegant” fairy tale, says Barbara Tritel in The New York Times Book Review (February 22, 1987), has the “intimate goofiness of an extemporaneous story” narrated by “a parent to a child.” In The Tommyknockers , King again seemed to leave familiar territory for science fiction, but the novel more accurately applies technohorror themes to the 1980’s infatuation with technology and televangelism. In The Dark Tower cycles, he combined the gothic with Western and apocalyptic fiction in a manner reminiscent of The Stand . Then with much fanfare in 1990, King returned to that novel to update and enlarge it by some 350 pages.

King and Bachman

The process of recapitulation and summing up was complicated by the disclosure, in 1984, of Richard Bachman, the pseudonym under whose cover King had published five novels over a period of eight years. Invented for business reasons, Bachman soon grew into an identity complete with a biography and photographs (he was a chicken farmer with a cancer-ravaged face), dedications, a narrative voice (of unrelenting pessimism), and if not a genre, a naturalistic mode in which sociopolitical speculation combined or alternated with psychological suspense. In 1985, when the novels (with one exception) were collected in a single volume attributed to King as Bachman, the mortified alter ego seemed buried. Actually Bachman’s publicized demise only raised a haunting question of what “Stephen King” really was.

Misery , which was conceived as Bachman’s book, was King’s first novel to explore the subject of fiction’s dangerous powers. After crashing his car on an isolated road in Colorado, romance writer Paul Sheldon is “rescued,” drugged, and held prisoner by a psychotic nurse named Annie Wilkes, who is also the “Number One Fan” of his heroine Misery Chastain (of whom he has tired and killed off). This “Constant Reader” becomes Sheldon’s terrible “Muse,” forcing him to write (in an edition especially for her) Misery’s return to life. Sheldon is the popular writer imprisoned by genre and cut to fit fan expectations (signified by Annie’s amputations of his foot and thumb). Like Scheherazade, the reader is reminded, Sheldon must publish or literally perish. Annie’s obsession merges with the expectations of the page-turning real reader, who demands and devours each chapter, and as Sheldon struggles (against pain, painkillers, and a manual typewriter that throws keys) for his life, page by page.

Billed ironically on the dust jacket as a love letter to his fans, the novel is a witty satire on what King has called America’s “cannibalistic cult of celebrity”: “[Y]ou set the guy up, and then you eat him.” The monstrous Reader, however, is also the writer’s muse, creation, and alter ego, as Sheldon discovers when he concludes that Misery Returns —not his “serious” novel Fast Cars —was his masterpiece. Just as ironically, Misery was King’s first novel to please most of the critics.

The Dark Half

The Dark Half is an allegory of the writer’s relation to his genius. The young writer-protagonist Thaddeus Beaumont has a series of headaches and seizures, and a surgeon removes from his eleven-year-old brain the incompletely absorbed fragments of a twin—including an eye, two teeth, and some fingernails. Nearly thirty years later, Beaumont is a creative writing professor and moderately successful literary novelist devoted to his family. For twelve years, however, he has been living a secret life through George Stark, the pseudonym under which he emerged from writer’s block as the author of best-selling crime novels. Stark’s purely instinctual genius finds its most vital expression in his protagonist, the ruthless killer Alexis Machine. Beaumont is forced to disclose and destroy his now self-destructive pseudonym, complete with gravesite service and papier mâché headstone. A series of murders (narrated in Stark’s graphic prose style) soon follows. The pseudonym has materialized, risen from its fictional grave literally to take Thad’s wife and children (twins, of course) hostage. What Stark wants is to live in writing, outside of which writers do not exist. However, the writer is also a demon, vampire, and killer in this dark allegory, possessing and devouring the man, his family, friends, community.

Drawing on the motif of the double and the form of the detective story—on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (c. fifth century b.c.e.), as well as Misery and Pet Sematary —King gluts the first half of the book with Stark/Machine’s gruesome rampages. The last half is psychological suspense and metafiction in biological metaphor: the struggle of the decently introspective Beaumont against the rawly instinctual Stark for control of both word and flesh, with the novel taking shape on the page as the true author reclaims the “third eye,” King’s term for both child’s and artist’s inward vision. Once again, the man buries the terrible child in order to possess himself and his art. The book ends in a “scene from some malign fairy tale” as that child and alter ego is borne away by flocks of sparrows to make a last appearance as a black hole in the fabric of the sky.

In dramatizing the tyrannies, perils, powers, and pleasures of reading and writing, Misery and The Dark Half might have been written by metafictionists John Fowles (to whose work King is fond of alluding) or John Barth (on whom he draws directly in It and Misery). Anything but abstract, however, The Dark Half is successful both as the thriller that King’s fans desired and as an allegory of the writer’s situation. Critic George Stade, in his review of the novel for The New York Times Book Review (October 29, 1989), praised King for his tact “in teasing out the implications of his parable.” The Dark Half contains epigraphs instead to the novels of George Stark, Thad Beaumont, and “the late Richard Bachman,” without whom “this novel could not have been written.” Thus reworking the gothic cliché of the double, King allows the mythology of his own life story to speak wittily for itself, lending a subtle level of selfparody to this roman à clef. In this instance, his blunt literalness (“word become flesh, so to speak,” as George Stark puts it), gives vitality to what in other hands might have been a sterile exercise.

Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne

Some have criticized King’s negative depiction of women, which King himself admitted in 1983 was a weakness. A decade later, King would address, and redress, this in his paired novels Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne . Both present a strong but besieged female protagonist, and both feature the total solar eclipse seen in Maine in 1963, during which a moment of telepathy, the books’ only supernaturalism, links the two women.

Gerald’s Game is the story of Jessie Burlingame, a young wife who submits to her husband’s desire for bondage in a deserted cabin, only to have him die when she unexpectedly struggles. Alone and helpless, Jessie confronts memories (including the secret reason she struck out at Gerald), her own fears and limitations, and a ghastly visitor to the cabin who may or may not be real. In a bloody scene—even by King’s standards—Jessie frees herself and escapes, a victory psychological as well as physical. The aptly named Dolores Claiborne is trapped more metaphorically, by poverty and an abusive husband, and her victory too is both violent and a sign of her developing independence and strength.

Initial reaction from critics was sometimes skeptical, especially given the prurient aspect of Jessie’s plight and the trendy theme of incestuous abuse in both novels. However, King examined family dysfunction in works from Carrie and The Shining to It, and he continued his commitment to women’s issues and realistic strong women in Insomnia, Rose Madder , and other novels. Archetypal themes also strengthen the two books: Female power must overcome male dominance, as the moon eclipses the sun; and each woman must find her own identity and strength out of travail, as the darkness gives way to light again. (King uses mythology and gender issues more explicitly in Rose Madder, which evenly incorporates mimetic and supernatural scenes.)

The books are daring departures for King in other ways. In contrast to King’s sprawling It or encyclopedic The Stand , these books, like Misery, tightly focus on one setting, a shorter period of time, and a small cast—here Misery’s duet is replaced by intense monologues. In fact, all of Dolores Claiborne is her first-person narrative, without even chapter breaks, a tour de force few would attempt. Moreover, King challenges our ideas of the genre horror novel, since there is little violence, none of it supernatural and all expected, so that suspense is a function of character, not plot (done previously by King only in short fiction such as “The Body” and “The Last Rung of the Ladder”).

Character and voice have always been essential to King’s books, as Debbie Notkin, Harlan Ellison, and others have pointed out. Dolores Claiborne is especially successful, her speech authentic Mainer, and her character realistic both as the old woman telling her story and as the desperate yet indomitable wife, the past self whose story she tells. In these novels, King reaches beyond childhood and adolescence as themes; child abuse is examined, but only from an adult point of view. Dolores and Jessie—and the elderly protagonists of Insomnia—reveal King, perhaps having reconciled to his own history, exploring new social and psychological areas.

Bag of Bones

Bag of Bones , which King calls a “haunted love story,” opens with narrator Mike Noonan recounting the death of his wife, Jo, who collapses outside the Rite Aid pharmacy from a brain aneurysm. Both are relatively young, and Jo, Mike learns, was pregnant. Because Mike is unable to father children, he begins to question whether Jo was having an affair. As Mike slowly adjusts to life without Jo, he is forced to make another adjustment. Formerly a successful writer of gothic romance fiction, he now finds that he is unable to write even a simple sentence. In an attempt to regain his muse and put Jo’s death behind him, Mike returns to Sarah Laughs (also referred to as “TR-90” or the “TR”), the vacation cabin he and Jo purchased soon after he became successful. As Mike quickly learns, Sarah Laughs is haunted by ghosts, among them the ghost of blues singer Sarah Tidwell.

While at Sarah Laughs, Mike meets Mattie Devore, her daughter Kyra, and Mattie’s father-in-law, Max Devore, a withered old man of incalculable wealth who is accustomed to getting anything he wants. Having rescued Kyra from walking down the middle of Route 68, Mike quickly becomes friends with both Kyra and Mattie. Mattie is the widow of Lance Devore, Max’s stuttering son. Lance had nothing to do with his father after learning that his father had tried to bribe Mattie into not marrying him. After Lance’s death from a freak accident, Max returned to Mattie’s life in an attempt to get acquainted with his granddaughter, Kyra. The truth is, however, that Max wants to gain custody of Kyra and take her away to California; he will do whatever it takes to accomplish that.

To help Mattie fight off Max’s army of high-priced lawyers, Mike uses his own considerable resources to retain a lawyer for Mattie named John Storrow, a young New Yorker unafraid to take on someone of Max Devore’s social stature. As Mike is drawn into Mattie’s custody battle, he is also exposed to the ghosts that haunt the community. As Mike sleeps at night, he comes to realize that there are at least three separate spirits haunting his cabin. One, he is sure, is Jo, and one, he determines, is Sarah Tidwell. The third manifests itself only as a crying child, and Mike cannot tell whether it is Kyra or some other child. Mike and Kyra share a special psychic connection that allows them to share dreams and even to have the same ghosts haunting their homes—ghosts who communicate by rearranging magnetic letters on each of their refrigerator doors.

As Mike becomes further embroiled in the custody battle with Max Devore, his search to determine the truth about Jo’s affair finally leads him to a set of journals Jo was keeping, notes from a research project that was her real reason for sneaking away to Sarah Laughs. Jo’s notes explain how everyone related to the people who murdered Sarah Tidwell and her son have paid for this sin by losing a child of their own. Sarah Tidwell’s ghost is exacting her revenge by murdering the children of those who murdered her own child. Mike, related to one of the people who murdered Sarah’s child, has been drawn into this circle of retribution from the beginning, and the death of his unborn daughter, Kia, was not the accident it seemed to be. Mike also realizes that Kyra, the last descendant of this t Rage dy, is to be the final sacrifice used to put Sarah Tidwell to rest. Mike’s return to the ironically named Sarah Laughs, it seems, has been a carefully orchestrated t Rage dy. Everything is tied to the ghost Sarah Tidwell’s purposes, even Mike’s writer’s block. Mike’s writing abilities return while he is at Sarah Laughs, but by the end of the novel he realizes it was simply to lead him to the information he needed to put Sarah’s spirit to rest. Sarah’s ghost may have destroyed his wife and child, but Jo’s ghost gives him the means to save Kyra.

The usual King trademarks that fans have come to expect are present in Bag of Bones . The novel, moreover, shares much with the southern novel and its themes. Guilt is a predominant theme of many southern works, especially those of William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and Tennessee Williams. Racism, not a theme usually associated with northern writers, has been successfully transplanted by King via the traveling Sarah Tidwell. By the end of the novel the evils of the community have become so entrenched in the soil (another similarity to Faulkner’s fiction) that they begin to affect Mike himself, and he has to fight the urge to kill Kyra. Only by reburying the past—in this case, by literally reburying Sarah Tidwell’s body—can matters finally be put to rest. Mike dissolves Sarah’s body with lye and her spirit finally leaves Sarah Laughs. Jo’s spirit also leaves, and all is quiet once more at the cabin.

By the 1980’s, King had become a mass-media guru who could open an American Express commercial with the rhetorical question “Do you know me?” At first prompted to examine the “wide perceptions that light [children’s] interior lives” (Four Past Midnight) and then the cultural roots of the empire he had created, he proceeded to explore the phenomenon of fiction, the situations of reader and writer. During the 1990’s, King continued to develop as a writer of both supernatural horror and mimetic character-based fiction. His novels after Dolores Claiborne—from Insomnia through Lisey’s Story—all provide supernatural chills while experimenting with character, mythology, and metafiction.

Financially invulnerable, King became almost playful with publishing gambits: The Green Mile was a serial, six slim paperbacks, in emulation of Charles Dickens and as a self-set challenge; Richard Bachman was revived when The Regulators was published in 1996. Although he is still thought of as having no style, actually King maintained his compelling storyteller’s voice (and ability to manipulate his reader emotionally) while maturing in the depth and range of his themes and characters.

King, perhaps more than any other author since Faulkner and his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, also creates a sense of literary history within the later novels that ties them all together. In Bag of Bones , King references several of his other novels, most notably The Dark Half, Needful Things , and Insomnia . For longtime fans, this serves both to update King’s readers concerning their favorite characters and to unify King’s body of work. King’s ironic sense of humor is also evident. When Mike’s literary agent tells him of all the other best-selling novelists who have novels coming out in the fall of 1998, the most notable name missing from the list is that of Stephen King himself.

Major Works Long Fiction : Carrie, 1974; ‘Salem’s Lot , 1975; Rage , 1977 (as Richard Bachman); The Shining , 1977; The Stand , 1978, unabridged version 1990; The Dead Zone , 1979; The Long Walk, 1979 (as Bachman); Firestarter , 1980; Cujo, 1981; Roadwork, 1981 (as Bachman); The Gunslinger, 1982, revised 2003 (illustrated by Michael Whelan; first volume of the Dark Tower series); The Running Man, 1982 (as Bachman); Christine, 1983; Cycle of the Werewolf, 1983 (novella; illustrated by Berni Wrightson); Pet Sematary, 1983; The Eyes of the Dragon, 1984, 1987; The Talisman, 1984 (with Peter Straub); Thinner, 1984 (as Bachman); The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King, 1985 (includes Rage , The Long Walk , Roadwork, and The Running Man); It, 1986; Misery, 1987; The Drawing of the Three, 1987 (illustrated by Phil Hale; second volume of the Dark Tower series); The Tommyknockers, 1987; The Dark Half, 1989; Needful Things, 1991; The Waste Lands, 1991 (illustrated by Ned Dameron; third volume in the Dark Tower series); Gerald’s Game, 1992; Dolores Claiborne, 1993; Insomnia, 1994; Rose Madder, 1995; Desperation, 1996; The Green Mile, 1996 (six-part serialized novel); The Regulators, 1996 (as Bachman); Wizard and Glass, 1997 (illustrated by Dave McKean; fourth volume in the Dark Tower series); Bag of Bones, 1998; Storm of the Century, 1999 (adaptation of his teleplay); The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, 1999; Black House, 2001 (with Straub); Dreamcatcher, 2001; From a Buick Eight, 2002; Wolves of the Calla, 2003 (fifth volume of the Dark Tower series); Song of Susannah, 2004 (sixth volume of the Dark Tower series); The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident, 2004 (written under the pseudonym Eleanor Druse); The Colorado Kid, 2005; Cell, 2006; Lisey’s Story, 2006 Short Fiction : Night Shift, 1978; Different Seasons, 1982; Skeleton Crew, 1985; Dark Visions, 1988 (with Dan Simmons and George R. R. Martin); Four Past Midnight, 1990; Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 1993; Hearts in Atlantis, 1999; Everything’s Eventual: Fourteen Dark Tales, 2002. Screenplays : Creepshow, 1982 (with George Romero; adaptation of his book); Cat’s Eye, 1984; Silver Bullet, 1985 (adaptation of Cycle of the Werewolf); Maximum Overdrive, 1986 (adaptation of his short story “Trucks”); Pet Sematary, 1989; Sleep Walkers, 1992. teleplays: The Stand , 1994 (based on his novel); Storm of the Century, 1999; Rose Red, 2002. Nonfiction : Danse Macabre, 1981; Black Magic and Music: A Novelist’s Perspective on Bangor, 1983; Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, 1988 (Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, editors); On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000; Faithful: Two Diehard Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season, 2004 (with Stewart O’Nan). Children’s literature : The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-up Book, 2004 (text adaptation by Peter Abrahams, illustrated by Alan Dingman). Miscellaneous : Creepshow, 1982 (adaptation of the DC Comics); Nightmares in the Sky, 1988. Source: Notable American Novelists Revised Edition Volume 1 James Agee — Ernest J. Gaines Edited by Carl Rollyson Salem Press, Inc 2008.

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Stephen King’s “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes”

I. the first introduction.

THAT’S RIGHT. I know it sounds like an ad for some sleazy writers’ school, but I really am going to tell you everything you need to pursue a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction, and I really am going to do it in ten minutes, which is exactly how long it took me to learn. It will actually take you twenty minutes or so to read this essay, however, because I have to tell you a story, and then I have to write a second introduction. But these, I argue, should not count in the ten minutes.

II. The Story, or, How Stephen King Learned to Write

When I was a sophomore in high school, I did a sophomoric thing which got me in a pot of fairly hot water, as sophomoric didoes often do. I wrote and published a small satiric newspaper called The Village Vomit. In this little paper I lampooned a number of teachers at Lisbon (Maine) High School, where I was under instruction. These were not very gentle lampoons; they ranged from the scatological to the downright cruel.

Eventually, a copy of this little newspaper found its way into the hands of a faculty member, and since I had been unwise enough to put my name on it (a fault, some critics argue, of which I have still not been entirely cured), I was brought into the office. The sophisticated satirist had by that time reverted to what he really was: a fourteen-year-old kid who was shaking in his boots and wondering if he was going to get a suspension … what we called “a three-day vacation” in those dim days of 1964.

I wasn’t suspended. I was forced to make a number of apologies – they were warranted, but they still tasted like dog-dirt in my mouth – and spent a week in detention hall. And the guidance counselor arranged what he no doubt thought of as a more constructive channel for my talents. This was a job – contingent upon the editor’s approval – writing sports for the Lisbon Enterprise, a twelve-page weekly of the sort with which any small-town resident will be familiar. This editor was the man who taught me everything I know about writing in ten minutes. His name was John Gould – not the famed New England humorist or the novelist who wrote The Greenleaf Fires, but a relative of both, I believe.

He told me he needed a sports writer and we could “try each other out” if I wanted.

I told him I knew more about advanced algebra than I did sports.

Gould nodded and said, “You’ll learn.”

I said I would at least try to learn. Gould gave me a huge roll of yellow paper and promised me a wage of 1/2 cent per word. The first two pieces I wrote had to do with a high school basketball game in which a member of my school team broke the Lisbon High scoring record. One of these pieces was straight reportage. The second was a feature article.

I brought them to Gould the day after the game, so he’d have them for the paper, which came out Fridays. He read the straight piece, made two minor corrections, and spiked it. Then he started in on the feature piece with a large black pen and taught me all I ever needed to know about my craft. I wish I still had the piece – it deserves to be framed, editorial corrections and all – but I can remember pretty well how it looked when he had finished with it. Here’s an example:

(note: this is before the edit marks indicated on King’s original copy)

(after edit marks)

When Gould finished marking up my copy in the manner I have indicated above, he looked up and must have seen something on my face. I think he must have thought it was horror, but it was not: it was revelation.

“I only took out the bad parts, you know,” he said. “Most of it’s pretty good.”

“I know,” I said, meaning both things: yes, most of it was good, and yes, he had only taken out the bad parts. “I won’t do it again.”

“If that’s true,” he said, “you’ll never have to work again. You can do this for a living.” Then he threw back his head and laughed.

And he was right; I am doing this for a living, and as long as I can keep on, I don’t expect ever to have to work again.

III. The Second Introduction

All of what follows has been said before. If you are interested enough in writing to be a purchaser of this magazine, you will have either heard or read all (or almost all) of it before. Thousands of writing courses are taught across the United States each year; seminars are convened; guest lecturers talk, then answer questions, then drink as many gin and tonics as their expense-fees will allow, and it all boils down to what follows.

I am going to tell you these things again because often people will only listen – really listen – to someone who makes a lot of money doing the thing he’s talking about. This is sad but true. And I told you the story above not to make myself sound like a character out of a Horatio Alger novel but to make a point: I saw, I listened, and I learned. Until that day in John Gould’s little office, I had been writing first drafts of stories which might run 2,500 words. The second drafts were apt to run 3,300 words. Following that day, my 2,500-word first drafts became 2,200-word second drafts. And two years after that, I sold the first one.

So here it is, with all the bark stripped off. It’ll take ten minutes to read, and you can apply it right away … if you listen.

IV. Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully

1. Be talented This, of course, is the killer. What is talent? I can hear someone shouting, and here we are, ready to get into a discussion right up there with “what is the meaning of life?” for weighty pronouncements and total uselessness. For the purposes of the beginning writer, talent may as well be defined as eventual success – publication and money. If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented. Now some of you are really hollering. Some of you are calling me one crass money-fixated creep. And some of you are calling me bad names. Are you calling Harold Robbins talented? someone in one of the Great English Departments of America is screeching. V.C. Andrews? Theodore Dreiser? Or what about you, you dyslexic moron?

Nonsense. Worse than nonsense, off the subject. We’re not talking about good or bad here. I’m interested in telling you how to get your stuff published, not in critical judgments of who’s good or bad. As a rule the critical judgments come after the check’s been spent, anyway. I have my own opinions, but most times I keep them to myself. People who are published steadily and are paid for what they are writing may be either saints or trollops, but they are clearly reaching a great many someones who want what they have. Ergo, they are communicating. Ergo, they are talented. The biggest part of writing successfully is being talented, and in the context of marketing, the only bad writer is one who doesn’t get paid. If you’re not talented, you won’t succeed. And if you’re not succeeding, you should know when to quit. When is that? I don’t know. It’s different for each writer. Not after six rejection slips, certainly, nor after sixty. But after six hundred? Maybe. After six thousand? My friend, after six thousand pinks, it’s time you tried painting or computer programming. Further, almost every aspiring writer knows when he is getting warmer – you start getting little jotted notes on your rejection slips, or personal letters . . . maybe a commiserating phone call. It’s lonely out there in the cold, but there are encouraging voices … unless there is nothing in your words which warrants encouragement. I think you owe it to yourself to skip as much of the self-illusion as possible. If your eyes are open, you’ll know which way to go … or when to turn back.

2. Be neat Type. Double-space. Use a nice heavy white paper, never that erasable onion-skin stuff. If you’ve marked up your manuscript a lot, do another draft.

3. Be self-critical If you haven’t marked up your manuscript a lot, you did a lazy job. Only God gets things right the first time. Don’t be a slob.

4. Remove every extraneous word You want to get up on a soapbox and preach? Fine. Get one and try your local park. You want to write for money? Get to the point. And if you remove all the excess garbage and discover you can’t find the point, tear up what you wrote and start all over again . . . or try something new.

5. Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right – and breaking your train of thought and the writer’s trance in the bargain – or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don’t have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it … but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

6. Know the markets Only a dimwit would send a story about giant vampire bats surrounding a high school to McCall’s. Only a dimwit would send a tender story about a mother and daughter making up their differences on Christmas Eve to Playboy … but people do it all the time. I’m not exaggerating; I have seen such stories in the slush piles of the actual magazines. If you write a good story, why send it out in an ignorant fashion? Would you send your kid out in a snowstorm dressed in Bermuda shorts and a tank top? If you like science fiction, read the magazines. If you want to write confession stories, read the magazines. And so on. It isn’t just a matter of knowing what’s right for the present story; you can begin to catch on, after awhile, to overall rhythms, editorial likes and dislikes, a magazine’s entire slant. Sometimes your reading can influence the next story, and create a sale.

7. Write to entertain Does this mean you can’t write “serious fiction”? It does not. Somewhere along the line pernicious critics have invested the American reading and writing public with the idea that entertaining fiction and serious ideas do not overlap. This would have surprised Charles Dickens, not to mention Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Bernard Malamud, and hundreds of others. But your serious ideas must always serve your story, not the other way around. I repeat: if you want to preach, get a soapbox.

8. Ask yourself frequently, “Am I having fun?” The answer needn’t always be yes. But if it’s always no, it’s time for a new project or a new career.

9. How to evaluate criticism Show your piece to a number of people – ten, let us say. Listen carefully to what they tell you. Smile and nod a lot. Then review what was said very carefully. If your critics are all telling you the same thing about some facet of your story – a plot twist that doesn’t work, a character who rings false, stilted narrative, or half a dozen other possibles – change that facet. It doesn’t matter if you really liked that twist of that character; if a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with you piece, it is. If seven or eight of them are hitting on that same thing, I’d still suggest changing it. But if everyone – or even most everyone – is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.

10. Observe all rules for proper submission Return postage, self-addressed envelope, all of that.

11. An agent? Forget it. For now Agents get 10% of monies earned by their clients. 10% of nothing is nothing. Agents also have to pay the rent. Beginning writers do not contribute to that or any other necessity of life. Flog your stories around yourself. If you’ve done a novel, send around query letters to publishers, one by one, and follow up with sample chapters and/or the manuscript complete. And remember Stephen King’s First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don’t need one until you’re making enough for someone to steal … and if you’re making that much, you’ll be able to take your pick of good agents.

12. If it’s bad, kill it When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law.

That’s everything you need to know. And if you listened, you can write everything and anything you want. Now I believe I will wish you a pleasant day and sign off.

My ten minutes are up.

For more advice from Stephen King, check out his Reading List for Writers .

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4 September 2023

Breaking Down the Key Lessons of Stephen King’s On Writing

In On Writing , his seminal work on the craft of creative writing, Stephen King said, “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.”

As King put it, writers are uniquely positioned to leave a lasting impact on people’s lives. Writers combine experience with empathy and imagination to build worlds people can get lost in.

As a craft, writing is simultaneously generous and self-centered. At first, writing might be about scratching an internal itch — to clarify an idea in your mind or find catharsis for a pent-up emotion. But for your inner world to mean something to someone else, you need to learn how to communicate ideas well. In short, you need to learn how to write.

No resource can better teach you the art of the craft than Stephen King’s  On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft . The famous horror author’s memoir is part autobiography, part how-to guide.

King draws from his experiences in the writing industry to provide aspiring writers with practical tips on storytelling, editing, publishing, and life. For fans of his work, he breaks down certain chapters and scenes from his books and explains why he wrote as he did. For instance, he explains his reasoning behind an early chapter of  The Dead Zone , and why he put protagonist Johnny Smith into a carnival backdrop.

There are plenty more pearls of wisdom to find from the king of the genre, and to give you a taste of what the book has to offer, here are some of its key learning points.

Only those with the time to read have the time and tools to write. That’s how King puts it.

It makes sense: Reading expands your knowledge of grammar, sentence structure, storytelling, character development, and more. Additionally, through reading, you’ll discover what you like and don’t like, which can influence how you write.

Refine your writer’s toolbox

To improve your writing, turn to these three main tools: vocabulary, grammar, and style.

Vocabulary refers to your word choices. According to King, it is always best to use the first word that comes to mind. If you force yourself to use words outside of your normal vocabulary, you risk diluting your authentic voice.

Don’t be ashamed of having a simple vocabulary. As King puts it, how you use your words matters more than how big your words are.

Grammar refers to the rules of language. Brush up on things like punctuation, tense, and subject-verb agreement to ensure that your readers understand what you’re trying to say.

Style refers to how you structure your sentences. According to King, the best style resource for writers is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style . It contains many tips for improving the clarity and power of your sentence structure. King, in particular, has two style pet peeves: adverbs and the passive voice. As we mentioned in our article  ‘The Road To Hell Is Paved With Adverbs’ , adverbs can make your writing sound lazy. Instead of showing a reader how an action plays out, adverbs tell the reader how they should perceive the action. Passive voice, on the other hand, can make your sentences sound weak and hard to follow. If you want your readers to have a clearer idea of what’s going on, start with the noun, then the action.

Write with the door closed…

When King said, “Write with the door closed,” he meant, don’t take input from others before completing your first draft.

Why seek criticism for something that isn’t finished? Feedback at this stage of the writing process might interrupt that initial surge of inspiration. Worse, you might end up compromising your authentic voice to earn approval from others.

To keep your work focused, don’t think about anybody else’s opinions when writing your first draft.

…and rewrite with the door open

Only when your first draft has been completed can you seek feedback from others. Because the draft has been completed, the people reviewing your work will have a clearer idea of what you’re trying to accomplish.

Instead of intercepting your message (as they would have if you let them criticize an unfinished draft), they can instead help you find the most effective way to say what you want to say. Outside perspectives can help you identify what is unclear, what is missing, and what is unnecessary. When Stephen King wrote On Writing , he already had about 30 years of experience in the publishing industry. And because he shared his story, readers can learn from three decades’ worth of writing knowledge in a 320-page book!

Note: All purchase links in this post are affiliate links through BookShop.org, and Novlr may earn a small commission – every purchase supports independent bookstores.

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Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories

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By Stephen King

• Nov. 19, 2009

Raymond Carver, surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century, makes an early appearance in Carol Sklenicka’s exhaustive and sometimes exhausting biography as a 3- or 4-year-old on a leash. “Well, of course I had to keep him on a leash,” his mother, Ella Carver, said much later — and seemingly without irony.

Mrs. Carver might have had the right idea. Like the perplexed lower-middle-class juicers who populate his stories, Carver never seemed to know where he was or why he was there. I was constantly reminded of a passage in Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story”: “The man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America’s bottom dogs.”

Born in Oregon in 1938, Carver soon moved with his family to Yakima, Wash. In 1956, the Car­vers relocated to Chester, Calif. A year later, Carver and a couple of friends were carousing in Mexico. After that the moves accelerated: Paradise, Calif.; Chico, Calif.; Iowa City, Sacramento, Palo Alto, Tel Aviv, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Cupertino, Humboldt County . . . and that takes us up only to 1977, the year Carver took his last drink.

Through most of those early years of restless travel, he dragged his two children and his long-suffering wife, Maryann, the mostly unsung heroine of Sklenicka’s tale, behind him like tin cans tied to the bumper of a jalopy that no car dealer in his right mind would take in trade. It’s no wonder that his friends nicknamed him Running Dog. Or that when his mother took him into downtown Yakima, she kept him on a leash.

As brilliant and talented as he was, Ray Carver was also the destructive, ­everything-in-the-pot kind of drinker who hits bottom, then starts burrowing deeper. Longtime A.A.’s know that drunks like Carver are master practitioners of the geographical cure, refusing to recognize that if you put an out-of-control boozer on a plane in California, an out-of-control boozer is going to get off in Chicago. Or Iowa. Or Mexico.

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Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI

One prominent author responds to the revelation that his writing is being used to coach artificial intelligence.

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Self-driving cars. Saucer-shaped vacuum cleaners that skitter hither and yon (only occasionally getting stuck in corners). Phones that tell you where you are and how to get to the next place. We live with all of these things, and in some cases—the smartphone is the best example—can’t live without them, or so we tell ourselves. But can a machine that reads learn to write?

I have said in one of my few forays into nonfiction ( On Writing ) that you can’t learn to write unless you’re a reader, and unless you read a lot. AI programmers have apparently taken this advice to heart. Because the capacity of computer memory is so large—everything I ever wrote could fit on one thumb drive, a fact that never ceases to blow my mind—these programmers can dump thousands of books into state-of-the-art digital blenders. Including, it seems, mine. The real question is whether you get a sum that’s greater than the parts, when you pour back out.

Read: The authors whose pirated books are powering generative AI

So far, the answer is no. AI poems in the style of William Blake or William Carlos Williams (I’ve seen both) are a lot like movie money: good at first glance, not so good upon close inspection. I wrote a scene in a forthcoming book that may illustrate this point. A character creeps up on another character and shoots him in the back of the head with a small revolver. When the shooter rolls the dead man over, he sees a small bulge in the man’s forehead. The bullet did not quite come out, you see. When I sat down that day, I knew the murder was going to happen, and I knew it was going to be murder by gun. I did not know about that bulge, which becomes an image that haunts the shooter going forward. That was a genuine creative moment, one that came from being in the story and seeing what the murderer was seeing. It was a complete surprise.

Could a machine create that bulge? I would argue not, but I must—reluctantly—add this qualifier: Not yet . Creativity can’t happen without sentience, and there are now arguments that some AIs are indeed sentient. If that is true now or in the future, then creativity might be possible. I view this possibility with a certain dreadful fascination. Would I forbid the teaching (if that is the word) of my stories to computers? Not even if I could. I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces.

Does it make me nervous? Do I feel my territory encroached upon? Not yet, probably because I’ve reached a fairly advanced age. But I will tell you that this subject always makes me think of that most prescient novel, Colossus , by D. F. Jones. In it, the world-spanning computer does become sentient and tells its creator, Forbin, that in time, humanity will come to love and respect it. (The way, I suppose, many of us love and respect our phones.) Forbin cries, “Never!” But the narrator has the last word, and a single word is all it takes:

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Writing Resources: Stephen King On Writing

by Melissa Donovan | May 26, 2022 | Writing Resources | 34 comments

Stephen King: On Writing

Today I’m bringing back a post that’s been sitting in the archives for a while. Stephen King’s On Writing is one of the most important books ever written on the craft of writing, one of the few texts that all writers should experience, regardless of your preferred form or genre. This post has been updated to reflect the latest facts. Enjoy!

Elvis was the king of rock and roll. Michael Jackson was the king of pop. And Stephen King is the king of horror.

He’s one of the most successful authors in the world, the recipient of numerous honorable awards, and certainly one of the wealthiest and most recognizable writers alive.

As someone who loves good storytelling, regardless of genre, I can appreciate a good horror story. When it comes to Stephen King, I especially appreciate the creativity and artistic merit that goes into writing good horror fiction.

I’ve read a few of King’s books and enjoyed them, mostly those that fall just outside of horror: The Stand , Hearts in Atlantis , and The Gunslinger . I loved the film Stand by Me , which was based on his short story “The Body” as well the film adaptations of The Green Mile and Misery .

According to Wikipedia as of 2022: “King has published 64 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, and five nonfiction books. He has written approximately two hundred short stories,” and “his books have sold more than 350 million copies.” That’s a lot!

The Buzz On Writing

Years ago, I saw Mr. King’s book, On Writing , on a shelf in my local bookstore. I thought it was good that horror writers now had their own bible, and moseyed downstairs to the used-books basement, where I liked to hunt for old McCaffrey and Bradbury books.

The buzz about King’s book wasn’t immediate, but it was insistent. First one writer, then another, would rave about “Stephen King’s book on writing.” This is a convenient sentence because the book has a convenient (and brilliant) title; It’s called On Writing .

Eventually the buzz became a persistent hum, almost a chant: “You haven’t read it yet?” “Oh, you’ll LOVE it.” “It’s the BEST writing book EVER.”

Here’s the thing about writers: They don’t throw around book recommendations haphazardly, especially books about writing. So when every writer you know is telling you that this is a wonderful book that you simply must experience, you really ought to read it.

A King’s Life

On Writing is part memoir, part instruction on the craft of writing. This is a smart structure, and one that’s rarely seen in books that aim to educate and inform. Doesn’t it make sense that people who aspire to become successful authors would benefit not only from learning writing skills, but also from studying the lives of other authors who have already achieved success?

The first half of the book takes the reader through Mr. King’s writing life from childhood, through young adulthood, and to his ultimate success as an author. Ever wonder what a wildly successful author read as a kid? Which movies he watched? When he started writing? What challenges he faced in getting his work published?

It’s all there, including the nail on little Stevie King’s bedroom wall upon which he impaled his rejection slips — a long nail, which eventually filled up and led to a second nail. But little Stevie King did something most young writers fail to do: he refused to give up. So the rejections piled up, but so did his writing skills. And then one day, his work was published. And then another day, he got a movie deal ( Carrie). Book deals, awards, and legions of fans followed. But buried in all the acclaim and attention is a man who simply loves to write, a man who lives to write.

And Stephen King is a man who has mastered writing.

In the second half of On Writing , Stephen King gets down to the nitty gritty. This is the part of the book that’s just for writers. The first half, being somewhat of a memoir, will delight readers and fans of his books, films, and stories. It will delight writers as well, but we want to know what advice the king has for his loyal subjects, and whether or not you like horror, (indeed, whether or not you like Stephen King’s writing at all), any writer who yearns to carve a career out of the passion that is writing is one of Mr. King’s subjects.

It all starts with the one thing every writer must have: a toolbox. In your toolbox, you’ll put your vocabulary, grammar, and a host of other tools you’ll use to create effective works that resonate and compel. Mr. King talks about plot, characters, where to get ideas, and why The Elements of Style is his favorite writing book.

When I opened this book and started reading, I didn’t know what to expect. I was in the middle of at least four other books (a poetry collection, two novels, and another writing book). I quickly forgot about them all. I could not put this book down, so I devoured it in less than two days. That’s a testament to Stephen King’s writing, because I’m not easily impressed, and it takes damn good writing to keep me turning pages and singing praises.

The value of On Writing  is immeasurable. I find that writing advice is valuable, but when you add personal story and experience to the mix, it becomes priceless. Every year, I buy and read books that promise to help writers. Most of them end up in the discard pile and get hauled off to the used bookstore. Very few make it to the shelves of my library, let alone to the recommendations I make here at Writing Forward, but now, On Writing has become one of my favorite selections.

34 Comments

I agree with just about every thing you said, here. I don’t like horror, either. Not even a little, so that this book on writing is the only Stephen King I’ve ever read … and that it was entirely worth it.

It’s a gem! I feel like it filled in a gap in my writing resources collection, mostly because of the memoir that is included. I love reading, watching, and listening to biographies!

The book is an essential part of my writing library. Whenever rejection gets me down or motivation is lacking I immediately read the key parts.

I especially like his reference as to why one should write – “not to get paid or laid”, but for the joy of it.

If you are serious or want to be buy the book.

It has become an essential book in my library as well. I was especially fascinated with the part describing the nail in the wall upon which he put all the rejection slips. Another part that stood out was when he revised a story and sent it to a publication that had previously rejected the very same story, but this time they accepted it (presumably because he had established a name for himself). There’s a treat on every page!

Not a fan of horror. Isn’t everyday life harsh enough? But I like mysteries and I suppose without all the horror elements King could be considered a kind of mystery writer. I’ll have to think about this book, but at the moment my plate is full.

This book was on my wish list for well over a year before I finally bought it. I feel like I read it when the time was right for me to read it, so if you’re meant to read it, then you will (when the time is right). This book has nothing to do with horror; it’s just about writing and being a writer. Also, Mr. King has written novels and short stories that aren’t in the horror genre at all, such as Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (adapted into the film The Shawshank Redemption ) and The Green Mile .

Melissa, I am SO glad you shared this review. I can relate to every word! I am not a big horror fan at all . And although I have watched a couple of his movies (out of curiosity), I have also walked past his book many times. I even saw it the other day sitting on a shelf– used . It was around $1 or $2. I’m SO kicking myself right now because I almost bought it. *sigh*

I think I will treat myself to a copy sometime soon. And I’ll definitely read it quickly. I’ll let you know my thoughts. 😀

Thanks, Melissa! I value your opinion, so I know I want this book!

After reading this book, I’ve already decided to read more of Stephen King’s work, though I will probably stay away from the hardcore horror. However, first I have a big pile of books to get through, so maybe in a year or two…heheee. By the way, I received my copy of Grammar Girl’s book last week (on your recommendation), and I’m greatly looking forward to reading it and then reviewing it here. Also, I’m loving the Larabars!

If you’re not a horror fan, but want to read more of King’s work, you might try Bag of Bones . He describes it as “a haunted love story.” I liked it, and while it has a little gruesomeness in a couple of places, it has some sweet parts and is much less icky/traumatizing than some of his work.

I’d like to read Bag of Bones as well as The Stand and The Dark Tower series. I’ll be busy for a while…

Hi Melissa – It’s a few years since I read this book and I loved it too. I’m going to have to get myself another copy and re-read.

When you mentioned the nail in the wall, you reminded me of how persistent a writer has to be and I definitely needed reminding again.

The older I get, the more I believe that persistence is the true key to success, and that’s probably why the nail in the wall struck me so much.

I love horror and even if there’s a genre I don’t like, I don’t turn the book away because it’s in that genre. Every book is different and unique no matter what the “genre” is. And if the story is written well enough it doesn’t matter where it’s shelved.

I have not yet read “On Writing” but look forward to it.

I’m the same way, Hannah. I have read some horror novels, and I’m definitely open to reading more in the future. My main problem with horror is that I have a difficult time suspending my disbelief. I don’t know why, because suspending my disbelief is not a problem at all with fantasy and science fiction. It’s strange. In any case, On Writing is excellent, and I do hope you’ll read and enjoy it.

Thank you for this review. My daughter loves Stephen King and has a lot of his books. I do not like horror either, but have heard of this book. I have it but have not read it yet. But I definitely will now.

It’s definitely a great read whether you’re a fan of horror or not. Come back and share your thoughts after you’ve read it!

I used to love King’s books, but never thought of myself as a horror reader. Now I don’t really read any horror at all, but am still a big fan of On Writing . The man has a gift.

Yes, although I’ve read just a little bit of his work, it’s clear that he has mastered many angles: story, plot, characters, craft, mechanics, and more.

Beautiful write up. I know someday I will read it. It sounds too compelling.

Have you tried the Talisman? It’s less horror. I remember reading it one Summer and it was a crazy adventure. Actually, it was more like an experience.

I haven’t tried The Talisman ; in fact, I don’t think I’ve heard of that one. My Stephen King reading list sure is growing! Thanks for your kind words, J.D.

I love this book and just about every King book I have ever read. Horror is one of my all time favorite genre’s and King is definitely a master at it. When ‘On Writing’ came out I ran right out and purchased it and have read it a few times since. Wonderful post on this book and this writer by the way.

Since your not a big fan of horror, one of Kings books you may enjoy is Dolores Claiborne. More mystery than horror and of course a wonderfully written page turner.

Ah yes, I saw the movie, but I don’t remember it very well. I do love everything I’ve read by Mr. King so far, and the only movie I wasn’t crazy about was Pet Sematary. I’ll add Dolores Claiborne to the list (after I finish the Dark Tower series). Thanks for the recommendation, Tiffiny!

You know I love this post! I gotta get this book!

You’ve definitely gotta get it! I inhaled it. Such a good one.

The chant still persistant. I had the book in my list of books to get, but after this great post I think I am going to get it sooner.

Yes, I think any writer should have this one at the top of the to-read list (if it’s not on the already-read list). I highly recommend it, especially for fiction writers.

other then the Dark Tower series, give me stephen king’s top five books…

Since I have not read all of his books, I wouldn’t attempt to list the top five. However, I’m sure you can find reader recommendations online with a simple Google or Amazon search.

I read Stephen King’s “On Writing” in one go too. It was fascinating and highly enjoyable and instructive. But above all it was inspirational. It made me want to write even more. If I ever get stuck I’ll pick it up and have a read and then I just have to go and write. Highly recommended for any writer. Chris

A well crafted book on writing should always inspire! Stephen King hits the spot.

I love Stephen King and his book On Writing! It’s the type of book that stays inspirational no matter how many times you’ve read it. I actually put it at number 1 on my list of top 10 writing books of all time.

On Writing is what it says on the tin. For King’s writer-readers that want to know what his tips are for writing horror specifically, that book is called Danse Macabre.

I wholeheartedly agree. I bought this book shortly after starting writing. It was one of the best buys I’ve ever made. Having said that, another book that should be on every writer’s bookshelf is Mary Deal’s Write it Right. Mary is an excellent writer. I have read several of her books.

Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll have to check that out.

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Stephen King Has Strong Words For Critics Who Didn't Take Him Seriously As A 'Writer's Writer' Early In His Career

Stephen King weighs in on critics who judge his works for their popularity.

All art is naturally subjective… but what does it mean if a particular piece of art finds extreme popularity? Is said popularity a direct result of great quality, or does it suggest a level of accessibility that suggests that the work doesn’t do enough to challenge the audience? It’s a debate that has no real answer and only strong opinions – and this week, legendary author Stephen King threw his two cents in on the matter.

That, however, is only the lead story in this week’s edition of The King Beat , which also includes exciting casting news for an upcoming King adaptation as well as a brand new Recommendation Of The Week. There’s a lot to get into, so let’s dig in!

Stephen King Delivers A Blunt And Funny Response To His Early Critics

After more than 50 years as a published novelist, Stephen King has left an undeniable and indelible impact on the literary world. His books are beloved around the world, and his impact on pop culture at large is incalculable – particularly in the horror genre, but also well beyond it. He is one of the most celebrated writers of all time… but he still has a bone to pick with critics who think that his works can’t be taken “seriously” because of their popularity.

King reflected on his relationship with those critics recently during an interview with PBS News Hour discussing the full breadth of his career and his most recent book, the collection You Like It Darker . The author has known success throughout all five decades that have passed since the arrival of Carrie on bookstore shelves in 1974 (followed two years later by director Brian De Palma’s excellent adaptation), and he recalls not getting proper shrift because of a perception that anything that is properly “good” won’t be widely accepted by the masses. King said,

There was a time when I felt like nobody will ever take me seriously as a writer's writer, just as somebody who makes money. And it did make me angry, because it seemed to me that there was an underlying assumption about popular fiction, that if everybody reads it, it can't be very good. I have never felt that way. I have felt that people can read and enjoy on many different levels.

Of course, Stephen King is not the only creative to deal with this particular struggle. Movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been hit with constant scrutiny as filmmakers like Martin Scorsese have tried to draw a line between “art” and “entertainment,” and there isn’t a single award season that goes by without chatter regarding how the biggest box office hits of the year might or might not fit into the Oscar race. If a work is appreciated to a lot of people, assumptions are made about how it appeals to the lowest common denominator – which patently isn’t fair.

King has long dismissed the idea that the popularity of his books somehow make them “lesser,” but it’s also worth noting that he has had some standout crises with confidence. The most notable example of this is his stretch writing books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman (including Rage , The Running Man , Roadwork , The Long Walk and Thinner ). Part of the reason he started publishing works using the fake name was because he was unsure if all of his best-sellers were based on merit and the quality of the work or because of the reputation that he had earned from his early novels. He eventually made peace with his own success, as noted in his essay “The Importance of Being Bachman.”

Looking at the quote above, one might note from Stephen King’s tense use that he doesn’t take the criticism as harshly anymore, so what happened? The interviewer noted that he “got over worrying about that at some point,” to which King replied,

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I got old. And I think that probably a lot of the critics who didn't like my stuff are now dead, so fuck them!

They say that the best revenge is living well, but I suppose simply living on in general does the trick as well.

The Institute TV Series Adds Two Actors In Key Roles To Join Cast Including Ben Barnes And Mary Louise Parker

If you haven’t already noticed, now happens to be an exceptionally exciting time to be a Stephen King fan – particularly when it comes to upcoming King adaptations. Gary Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot is arriving for those with a Max subscription in October; Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck is premiering at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival; Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey is set for release early next year; Welcome To Derry will be debuting in late 2025 ; Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk started production this summer; and Edgar Wright’s remake of The Running Man is gearing up to begin filming this fall.

That’s a lot of goodness on the way – but not to be forgotten in the mix is the upcoming TV series based on the 2019 novel The Institute , and helping to remind us of that fact is news of two new cast additions this week.

It was announced this past June that MGM+ is developing The Institute from producers Jack Bender ( Mr. Mercedes ) and Benjamin Cavell ( The Stand ), and while the initial report revealed the involvement of Mary Louise-Parker and Ben Barnes , Deadline reported this week that the project has now also added Simone Miller and Jason Diaz in key parts.

In The Institute , gifted 12-year-old Luke Ellis wakes up one day to discover that he has been abducted from his home and brought to a mysterious facility that tests and experiments on children with psychic abilities – be they telekinetic or telepathic. Mary-Louise Parker is set to play Mrs. Sigsby, the horrible director of the titular establishment while Ben Barnes is playing Tim Jamieson, a retired police officer who finds his life intersecting with Luke’s when he moves from his home in Florida to a small town in South Carolina.

While the MGM+ series has not yet announced who will be playing Luke Ellis, Simone Miller is attached to play Kalisha, one of the older kids at The Institute who ends up becoming Luke’s first friend. Hailing from Toronto, Canada, Miller’s first big role was playing Raign Westbrook on the CBC Kids television series Detention Adventure , but she has been more recently playing Mannix in 13 episodes of the show Run The Burbs .

Jason Diaz, meanwhile, will be on the antagonist side of the plot in The Institute , aligned with the horrible Mrs. Sigsby. The actor will be playing Tony – who is an orderly who notably has a bit of a sadism streak in him. An up-and-comer, Diaz played Andre Dragomir in eight episodes of the series Vampire Academy , but he has also had recurring roles on shows including The 100 and the reboot of Charmed .

The only “bad” news to share is that the trade report doesn’t include any information regarding the start of production on the series. That being said, with the cast now starting to come together, it wouldn’t be surprising in the slightest to learn that The Institute is planning to start rolling cameras before the end of 2024. Needless to say, you can be sure that I’ll be keeping a close eye on the project here on CinemaBlend as new developments are announced.

Recommendation Of The Week: “Apt Pupil”

Did you know that it was 42 years ago this week that the incredible Stephen King collection Different Seasons was published? It was a work that started a notable tradition in King’s bibliography (namely the release of omnibuses collecting four distinct novellas instead of a mix of short stories), and each of the entries is independently fascinating. In past King Beat columns, I’ve found myself with opportunities to recommend three of the four tales in the tome – namely “Rita Hayworth And Shawshank Redemption,” “The Body,” and “The Breathing Method.” – but now I’m ready to propose you check out what is unquestionably the most controversial inclusion in the book: “Apt Pupil.”

One of the most disturbing stories that Stephen King has written, “Apt Pupil” is set in mid-1970s Los Angeles and follows troubled teenager Todd Bowden as he starts a relationship with Arthur Denker – an immigrant neighbor whom he’s discovered is actually a Nazi war criminal named Kurt Dussander. Rather than revealing Dussander’s identity to the authorities, Todd blackmails him into telling him dark details about the atrocities that he committed. As the two grow closer, the relationship between them becomes a dangerous, role-switching cat-and-mouse game, and it ends up having a devastating impact on Todd’s mental health. Suffice it to say, it’s not a novella to read before you go to bed.

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of The King Beat, but as always, I’ll be back here on CinemaBlend next Thursday with a brand new column for you recapping the biggest news from the world of Stephen King. And while you wait, you can check out my series Adapting Stephen King , digging into the long history of King’s works being brought to life in film and television.

Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.

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Stephen King reflects on his iconic career and latest release ‘You Like It Darker’

Jeffrey Brown Jeffrey Brown

Anne Azzi Davenport Anne Azzi Davenport

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/stephen-king-reflects-on-his-iconic-career-and-latest-release-you-like-it-darker

Fifty years ago, a 26-year-old rural Maine school teacher wrote the horror novel “Carrie.” That man, Stephen King, has gone on to write more than 60 books and many have been turned into such films as “The Shining” and “Shawshank Redemption.” Jeffrey Brown spoke with King about his latest book, “You Like It Darker,” and the long arc of his career. It's part of our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Read the Full Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Amna Nawaz:

Fifty years ago, a 26-year-old rural Maine schoolteacher wrote a horror novel titled "Carrie."

That man, Stephen King, has gone on to write more than 60 books since. They have sold between 400 million to 500 million copies worldwide and have been turned into films like "The Shining," "Shawshank Redemption," "Stand By Me," and many more.

King invited our senior arts correspondent, Jeffrey Brown, to his main home to talk about his latest book of short stories called "You Like It Darker" and the long arc of his career. It's part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown:

In his new collection, Stephen King writes of the eerie, the unsettling, the otherworldly raising its head in this one.

He calls it "You Like It Darker," and he clearly does.

Stephen King, Author:

Darker means spooky. It means scary. It means let's exercise our unpleasant emotions for a while, because I think that people like the idea of opening the door and saying, I want it darker. Do you want it darker? OK, we're in agreement, and now let's go into the woods together.

Millions of readers have taken that dark walk with King, but we had our own lighter one with the now-76-year-old.

Stephen King:

I feel a little bit like, if I was a car, I'd trade, you know?

Near his woods in Maine, a state where so many of his tales have been set.

I love Maine. I love the country. I'm not much of a city kid. I know the people. And I think that they are stand-ins for people everywhere.

I'm going to write about regular people, ordinary people, in the best way that I know how.

In the best way, even in their dark moments?

I'm interested in what happens when regular people are suddenly confronted with something that's totally out of their wheelhouse, something that's entirely different.

I think that literature in quotation marks is about extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances. And what I do are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

King himself grew up mostly in working-class rural Maine, his mother raising him and his brother after his parents divorced.

He began writing columns for his high school newspaper and then stories and more at the University of Maine, where he met Tabitha, another young writer, now his wife of 53 years. Early on, the young couple took on a variety of jobs to make ends meet.

I just wanted to support my family, to be able to say, I'm doing work. My wife also worked. She worked at Dunkin' Donuts. She would come home smelling like a cruller.

And she looked so cute.

"Carrie," the 1974 horror novel, and two years later, Brian De Palma-directed film changed everything, with Sissy Spacek as a shy, bullied high school girl with telekinetic powers. Unforgettable revenge ensues.

In his 2000 book "On Writing," King tells of battling his own demons, early on with alcohol and drugs, later after a van hit him on one of his local walks, leading to years of pain and physical difficulties felt to this day.

Can one write darker without having a kind of darkness himself?

Basically, I'm a perfectly nice fellow, good family man, good husband, good father, and all of this stuff that's on the dark side, it comes out in the stories.

And so it doesn't have to come out in life. I used to think to myself, I could have been a very bad person, except for the stories that I tell takes off a lot of the pressure.

Maybe that's how his stories work for all of us. Whatever it is, Stephen King is as much a cultural icon as any American writer today.

So we got all these movie posters from your…

Especially when you consider the number of films and series made from his stories, around 100.

My first editor, Bill Thompson, used to say, "Steve has a movie camera in his head."

Oh, really?

And the story…

Like you see the story in — yes.

Yes, the stories are very visual.

I grew up the first generation with movies and TV, and they made a big impression me. So I have a tendency to see things, and that's part of the pleasure, is the seeing.

More pleasure has come at times from rock 'n' roll, the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band King formed in the 90s with other writers, including Dave Barry and Amy Tan.

For all his success, King admits he wasn't always happy with the critical reception he got.

There was a time when I felt like nobody will ever take me seriously as a writer's writer, just as somebody who makes money. And it did make me angry, because it seemed to me that there was an underlying assumption about popular fiction, that if everybody reads it, it can't be very good.

I have never felt that way. I have felt that people can read and enjoy on many different levels.

But you got over worrying about that at some point, clearly.

I got old. And I think that probably a lot of the critics who didn't like my stuff are now dead, so (expletive deleted) them.

Bleep them.

Yes, bleep them.

You also wrote in your book "On Writing," you wrote about not only being the story's creator, but its first reader. You want to feel the suspense of the story yourself?

Not only do I want to feel the suspense of the story, I want to relish the good parts.

You want to enjoy the good parts.

Every now and then, you will say to yourself, I wrote a really good line there. Oh, boy, that's really cool.

But how does he do it and how generate so many ideas?

I can't explain it.

That's the beautiful thing about what I do. It's just like being belted by an idea.

He cites the example of the story "Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream" in the new collection.

I was getting out of bed one day, and I thought to myself, what if an ordinary guy had a psychic vision in a dream about where a body was buried, and actually went out there and found that body? Would anybody believe that he had that vision, or would they think that he did it? And…

All right, but wait a minute. You just woke up thinking that?

Yes. Well, no, I didn't wake up thinking that. I was putting on my pants when I had this idea, you know? And I put them on one leg at a time. And I had one leg in my pants. And I had this idea. And by the time I got the other leg in, I had almost the whole story.

See, and who wouldn't want to do something like that? I mean, that's so trippy, but it is just the way that my mind works.

Trippy, dark and clearly having a hell of a writing life.

I'm very fortunate to be able to do what I do. I love to tell stories. And, in a way, I get paid for something that, in the words of the late John D. MacDonald, I would do for free.

OK, that's good.

Coming soon in the Stephen King universe, several new film and TV adaptations of his work.

From the darker side in Western Maine, I'm Jeffrey Brown for the "PBS News Hour."

And, online, we have more from Stephen King, including what he watches and reads when he's not writing.

That's on our YouTube channel.

Listen to this Segment

Watch the Full Episode

In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists. Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with The New York Times.

Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS News Hour.

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The Accident That Nearly Cost Stephen King His Life

Stephen King is a master of horror. He published his first novel, Carrie , in 1974, and he has been giving readers nightmares ever since with his dark stories and twisted tales of terror. He has published over 61 novels and more than 200 short stories, and countless numbers of his stories have inspired or been adapted into movies and television series.

Now 73 years old, King is still writing — he published If It Bleeds and The Institute just last year. While his literary output is indeed impressive, he's as mortal as the rest of us. And back in 1999, King suffered a near-fatal accident that almost deprived the world of his fantastically depraved and delightful mind.

On Saturday, June 19, 1999, King was out for his daily four-mile stroll, walking north along State Route 5, not far from his quiet and secluded home in North Lovell, Maine, when suddenly he was struck by a 1985 blue Dodge Caravan. King was thrown 14 feet away, into a ditch. Donald Baker, a local who witnessed the accident, told the The Guardian , "I was surprised he was even alive. He was in a tangled-up mess, lying crooked, and had a heck of [a] gash in his head. He kept asking what had happened."

King was unsure if he would ever walk again

The driver of the vehicle, Bryan Smith, was initially unconcerned, believing he had only hit a small deer — that is, until he saw King's bloody eyeglasses, which had somehow ended up on the front seat of Smith's minivan. Later, he would explain that he had been distracted by his dog rummaging through the beer cooler he kept in the back, which caused him to lose control of the car.

The injuries King endured were devastating. The impact had broken his hip and shattered the bones in his right leg. He also suffered a head injury, broken ribs, and a collapsed lung, per ABC News . At first, no one was sure King would even survive his injuries. Then, it was unclear if he would ever regain the ability to walk. Defying the odds, King did both.

As soon as he was well enough, one of the first things King did was purchase the offending Dodge for $1,500, partially because he wanted to prevent it from being sold as a souvenir, and partially because he wanted to smash it with a sledgehammer.

'I'm grateful for everything that I have'

After several weeks in the hospital, King was able to return to his home on July 9. "I have a lot of pain, but there's so much that doesn't hurt, that I'm capable of. To be able to walk around ... I'm grateful for everything that I have, and I try to stay as grateful as I can, because it doesn't matter how much money you've made or how rich you are or whether your book's on the Internet or anything else. If you snap your spine, you're a quad, and mine was chipped in five or six places, almost down to the bare wires in a couple of places, so I'm very lucky," King told The New York Times . Despite his considerable pain from the extensive injuries, after a lengthy rehabilitation process, King made a full recovery.

And he soon resumed the work that he does best, writing and self-publishing a new novel, titled The Plant, just one year after the devastating accident. And as for payback? King wrote Bryan Smith into his   Dark Tower series as a reckless and somewhat dimwitted character. Not a tribute, but certainly a reminder of the man whose careless driving almost cost King his life.

Screen Rant

9 things stephen king has said about stanley kubrick's the shining movie.

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Every Stephen King Movie Franchise, Ranked Worst To Best

Jack reacher sequel tops streaming chart, beating 3 major blockbusters & a netflix original, how did luke skywalker get yoda's lightsaber to offer to grogu.

• Despite being one of the best horror films of all time, Stephen King has consistently expressed his disdain for the adaptation of The Shining.
• King initially had mixed thoughts about the film, praising aspects like its visuals, but has become more critical of it over time.
• King's main criticisms of the film revolve around the lack of character development for Jack Torrance and the portrayal of Wendy Torrance.

The Shining is one of the most celebrated horror films ever made, but Stephen King isn't a fan of the adaptation of his story and has been vocal about it for decades. Stephen King has been writing novels since the 1970s, making 1977's The Shining one of his earliest works. The film was adapted shortly after in 1980 by legendary director Stanley Kubrick. The Shining stars Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall as Jack and Wendy Torrance and is centered around the family's stay at a remote, haunted hotel during the winter in Colorado. As he unearths the hotel's secrets, Jack's sanity deteriorates.

The Shining is almost unanimously considered one of the best horror movies of all time , proving that Kubrick could succeed in any genre. Stephen King has had many of his stories adapted, even offering praise for the poorly received film The Dark Tower . However, he's been consistent with his stance on The Shining since the 1980s, expressing his disdain for the movie on multiple occasions. While his initial comments on the film from the '80s offer some amiable praise, his more recent opinions have been far more critical.

9 "There Are An Awful Lot Of Things About That Movie That I Think Are Flawless And Beautiful."

On The David Letterman Show in 1980, King began his commentary on The Shining with something positive. He said that he had mixed thoughts about the film but that there were things he found flawless and beautiful. Initially asked if he was pleased with Jack Nicholson's performance, King said, " I thought he did a wonderful job in The Shining. I enjoyed it very much." Over time, King has maintained that he thinks the film is visually beautiful, though he's since had some criticism about Nicholson's performance as the lead, Jack Torrance.

8 "I'd Given Stanley Kubrick A Live Grenade And He Heroically Threw His Body On It."

In the same David Letterman interview, Stephen King describes his negative feelings on the film, saying " There are other times when I feel as though I'd given Stanley Kubrick a live grenade, and he heroically threw his body on it," suggesting that Kubrick had taken his story in a different direction than King had anticipated. He went on to speak about the process of selling the rights to his novel and how he hadn't sought out any control over the film. He compared the process of selling a book to a movie studio to sending a child off to school, hoping it would do well.

Stephen King movie franchises are surprisingly rare, though many of them show why the author personally dislikes sequels based on his work.

7 "Jack Torrance Has No Arc In That Movie."

One of Stephen King's loudest critiques of The Shining was the adaptation of Jack Torrance. " The character of Jack Torrance has no arc in that movie. Absolutely no arc at all ," he says, comparing it to his book. He describes Nicholson's Jack Torrance as being crazy from the beginning. " All he does is get crazier. In the book, he’s a guy who’s struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. " (via IndieWire ) He insists that the book version of Jack's descent allows the reader to sympathize with the character better.

6 "It’s Like A Big, Beautiful Cadillac With No Engine Inside It."

Stephen King may have described the visuals of The Shining as beautiful, but he still believed the film lacked substance. He explained his feelings, saying " I think ‘The Shining’ is a beautiful film and it looks terrific and as I’ve said before, it’s like a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it." Many movie lovers would disagree with this opinion on account of the film's ambiguous nature. There are tons of theories about The Shining , as fans have continued discussing it in new ways for decades. The Shining certainly has its nuances, which can be attributed to Kubrick's meticulous attention to detail.

5 "In The Movie, There’s No Tragedy."

Stephen King has written many great horror novels with the ideology that scares work best when viewers care about the characters. He felt that Jack Torrance's arc in the book was a tragedy that viewers would sympathize with. Without that arc, Stephen King believed The Shining lacked the tragic elements of the original novel. The portrayal of Torrance is notably different from the book, with Jack Nicholson having written a scene for The Shining himself.

4 "With Kubrick's The Shining, I Thought It Was Very Cold."

A comparison Stephen King has made multiple times is that he felt that Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining was cold, while his book was warm. " The other real difference is at the end of my book the hotel blows up, and at the end of Kubrick’s movie the hotel freezes. That’s a difference ," he says. In another interview he simply says " I'm not a cold guy. " (via BBC ) He describes his books as being very warm and inviting, wanting to take the reader on a journey with the characters, whereas he felt the film version was like watching people who were " ants in an ant hill. "

3 "One Of The Most Misogynistic Characters Ever Put On Film."

Stephen King agrees with one of The Shining's biggest critiques , saying that the depiction of Wendy Torrance lacked substance. Regarding the matter, King said " Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the misogynistic characters ever put on film. She's basically just there to scream and be stupid, and that's not the woman I wrote about." The film adaptation takes away qualities from Wendy's character in the book, instead focusing primarily on her overwhelming fear in the nightmare situation.

2 "Stanley Kubrick Saw The Haunting As Coming From Jack Torrance."

In Turner Classic Movie's documentary A Night at the Movies: The Horrors of Stephen King , the author discusses his feelings for the film. He recalls a conversation between him and Stanley Kubrick where they exchanged their perceptions of ghost stories and ideas of the afterlife. In King's novel, he wanted to express the idea of malignant spirits haunting good people, whereas Kubrick saw the haunting coming from Jack Torrance. He believes they had a fundamental difference in opinion on the source of the evil in The Shining , which led to their tonally different stories.

1 "I Loved Everything Else The Man Did. I Just Didn't Like That One."

Despite not having much praise for The Shining , Stephen King expresses that he loved Stanley Kubrick's other work. In the IndieWire interview, Kubrick states "H e’s made some of the movies that mean a lot to me, ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ for one and ‘Paths of Glory,’ for another." Kubrick has such a wide variety of films that there's something for everyone to enjoy. It's understandable for Stephen King to have strong feelings about The Shining's book changes , as there are dramatic differences from his original novel.

Sources: BBC , IndieWire

• The Shining