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. ♦

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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 .

• Stephen King

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 has spent half a century scaring us, but his legacy is so much more than horror

It’s a big year for King adaptations, but the movies only tell part of the story.

by Aja Romano

It’s nearly impossible to overstate how influential Stephen King is. For the past four decades, no single writer has dominated the landscape of genre writing like him. To date, he is the only author in history to have had more than 30 books become No. 1 best-sellers. He now has more than 70 published books, many of which have become cultural icons, and his achievements extend so far beyond a single genre at this point that it’s impossible to limit him to one — even though, as the world was reminded last year when the feature film adaptation of It became the highest-grossing horror movie on record, horror is still King’s calling card.

In fact, we’ve been enjoying a cultural resurgence of quality King horror adaptations lately, from small-screen adaptations like Gerald’s Game and Castle Rock to the upcoming remake of Pet Sematary , the first trailer for which looks like a promising continuation of the trend.

That means if you’re a King fan — or looking to become one — there’s no better time to rediscover why he’s such a beloved cultural phenomenon.

After all, without King, we wouldn’t have modern works like Stranger Things , whose adolescent ensemble directly channels the Losers’ Club, King’s ensemble of geeky preteen friends from It . Without The Shining , and Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece film adaptation, “Here’s Johnny!” would be a dead talk show catchphrase and parodies like the Simpsons’ annual Treehouse of Horror would be bereft of much of their material.

Without Carrie , we wouldn’t have the single defining image of the horror of high school: a vat of pig’s blood being dropped on an unsuspecting prom queen. Without King, we wouldn’t have one of the most iconic and recognizable images in cinema history — Andy Dufresne standing in the rain after escaping from Shawshank prison — nor would we have the enduring horror of Pennywise the Clown, Cujo the slavering St. Bernard, or Kathy Bates’s pitch-perfect stalker fan in Misery .

This is but a sampling born from a staggeringly prolific writing career that’s well on its way to spanning five decades. King has effectively been translating America’s private, communal, and cultural fears and serving them up to us on grisly platters for half a century.

King might have remained a struggling English teacher, but for two women: Tabitha King and Carrie White

Born in 1947, King grew up poor in Durham, Maine, the younger son of a single working mother whose husband, a merchant mariner, abandoned his family when King was still a toddler. A lifelong fan of speculative fiction, King began writing seriously while attending the University of Maine Orono. It was there, in 1969, that he met his wife, Tabitha.

By 1973, King was a high school English teacher drawing a meager $6,400 a year. He had married Tabitha in 1971, and the pair lived in a trailer in Hampden, Maine, and each worked additional jobs to make ends meet. King wrote numerous short stories, some of which were published by Playboy and other men’s magazines, but significant writerly success eluded him.

Tabitha, who’d been one of the first to read Stephen’s short stories in colleges, had loaned Stephen her own typewriter and refused to let him take a higher-paying job that would mean less time to write. Tabitha was also the one who discovered draft pages of what would become Carrie tossed in Stephen’s trash can. She retrieved them and ordered him to keep working on the idea. Ever since, King has continued to pay Tabitha’s encouragement forward. He frequently and effusively blurbs books from established as well as new authors, citing a clear wish to leave publishing better than he found it. Meanwhile, Tabitha is a respected author in her own right , as are both of their sons, Joe Hill and Owen King.

Carrie, which King sold for a $2,500 advance, would go on to earn $400,000 for the rights to its paperback run. The story of a troubled girl who develops powers of telekinesis, Carrie is the ultimate “high school is hell” morality tale. Carrie faces ruthless abuse from her religious mother and bullying from high school classmates, and the book introduces us to two of King’s most prominent themes: small Maine towns with dark underbellies, and main characters written with care and empathy despite being deeply flawed and morally gray — in this case Carrie, her mother, and her bully Sue. The complicated bond between protagonist and antagonist is also a recurring motif in King’s writing.

Two years after Carrie ’s publication, Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation grossed $33 million on a $1.8 million budget, largely on the strength of advance critical praise and word-of-mouth reviews. Buoyed by the subsequent success of Carrie ’s paperback sales, King would go on to churn out six novels ( Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Rage, The Stand, The Long Walk, and The Dead Zone ) over the next six years, establishing a prolificacy that would continue through much of his career.

“The movie made the book and the book made me,” King told the New York Times in 1979.

By 1980 , King was the world’s best-selling author.

It’s taken decades for King’s work to be critically appreciated — in particular for its literary qualities

King’s work has appeared in magazines ranging from the New Yorker to Harper’s to Playboy. The author has influenced literary writers like Haruki Murakami and Sherman Alexie along with genre creators like the producers of Lost . And he’s won virtually every major horror, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy award there is. But King also spent decades being written off by both the horror writing community and the literary mainstream.

King once referred to critics perceiving him to be “a rich hack,” a perception that bears out in horror writer David Schow’s offhand 1997 description of him as “comparable to McDonald’s” — intended to characterize King as horror’s pedestrian mainstream. When a 1994 King short story , his first to be published in the New Yorker, won the prestigious O. Henry Award, Publishers Weekly declared it to be “one of the weaker stories in this year’s [O. Henry Award] collection.”

“The price he pays for being Stephen King is not being taken seriously,” one of King’s collaborators told the LA Times in 1995.

The critical disparagement of King often went hand in hand with genre shaming. In a 1997 60 Minutes interview , Lesley Stahl questioned King’s literary tastes, getting him to admit that he’d never read Jane Austen and had only read one Tolstoy novel. In response, King grinned that he had, instead, read every novel Dean Koontz had ever written — Dean Koontz being a notoriously lowbrow writer of thrillers. (That same year, the New York Times would compliment the breadth of King’s literary knowledge even while panning his epic best-seller The Stand. )

“Here you are, one of the best- selling authors in all of history,” Stahl continued, “and the critics cannot find much that they like in your work.”

To this, King replied, “All I can say is — and this is in response to the critics who’ve often said that my work is awkward and sometimes a little bit painful — I know it. I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got.”

While King’s self-deprecation may have been a mark of respect for his critics, those critics were on the cusp of being proven wrong. This was in large part thanks to the sleeping giant that became The Shawshank Redemption, which drew popular attention to the fact that King could do more than “just” write horror, and helped kick-start critical reassessment of him and his work.

The film, written by longtime Stephen King adapter Frank Darabont, is based on one of King’s most literary works, a 1982 novella about an agonizingly slow prison break. Shawshank flopped when it opened in theaters in 1994, but it was nominated for seven Academy Awards — more than any other King adaptation. As indicated by its long reign as the highest-ranked film on IMDB , it has gone on to become one of the most popular and beloved films ever made.

By 1998, under the oversight of a new publisher, King’s books were actively being marketed as literary fiction for the first time. From the mid-’90s through today, King’s critical and cultural reputation has advanced as thoroughly as it stagnated before.

In a 2013 CBS interview , we see the marked difference with which contemporary media has come to view King’s work: “You used to always get slotted in the Horror genre,” interviewer Anthony Mason commented to King. “And I think it was sort of a way of some people, I think, not treating you all that seriously as a writer.”

“I don’t know if I want to be treated seriously per se, because in the end posterity decides whether it’s good work or whether it’s lasting work,” King replied, secure in his position as one of the best-loved authors of the 20th century.

But evolving cultural views on genre fiction aside, King’s writing has always displayed significant literary qualities, particularly ongoing literary themes that have shaped how we understand horror as well as ourselves.

The horror of Stephen King doesn’t lie with the external but with the internal

In his award-winning 1981 collection of essays on horror, Danse Macabre , King names three emotions that belong to the realm of the horror genre: terror, horror, and revulsion. He argues that while all three emotions are of equal value to the creation of horror, the “finest” and most worthy is terror because it rests on the creator’s ability to command audiences’ imaginations. Drawing on numerous writers before him, he posits that never fully revealing the source of the horror is the best way to effect terror upon the mind.

King argues that the art of making us terrified about what lies around the corner is all about getting us to identify with the characters who are experiencing the terror. If we don’t care about the characters, then it won’t matter how many jump scares you fling at the audience — we have to be at least a little invested in their fate.

As such, King spends a great deal of time on characters’ interior lives, often jumping between different point-of-view characters throughout his novels. (For example, Salem’s Lot , It , and The Stand are all stories with large ensemble casts and multiple shifting points of view.) But every characterization, even a minor one, is rich with detail; even if you just met a new character, you can bet that by the time he or she meets a grisly ending a few pages later, you’ll have a deep understanding of who that character is.

King’s novels often contain deeply flawed yet sympathetic central characters surrounded by large ensemble casts full of equally flawed people, each struggling to interact and grapple with larger forces. By framing his stories within an interwoven web of narrative perspectives and juxtaposed character experiences, King is able to generate a feeling of interconnectivity, as well as explore the various literary themes that stretch throughout his multidimensional universe, including but not limited to:

1) Nerdboys to men

King credits his absentee father for bequeathing him a love of horror via a stash of pulp novels King discovered as a boy. But another lasting legacy of this truncated relationship was King’s ongoing preoccupation with relationships between men and boys, the process of attaining manhood, and the bridge between boyhood and adulthood.

We see these bonds take a variety of shapes and meaning throughout his work, ranging from comforting ( Salem’s Lot ) to destructive ( Apt Pupil ) to ambiguous ( The Shining ). King explores male intimacy through these relationships, frequently challenging typical masculine forms of expression. He can do this because his boys and men tend to be nerds and outcasts who already exist outside traditional masculine norms. The bookish nerdy kid was relatively uncommon in mainstream adult fiction before King came along; now we recognize such characters as hallmarks of genre literature.

To King, the social markers that make kids outcasts in school — from being nerdy to being overweight to enduring acne — also make them uniquely outfitted to be conduits for readers’ social anxieties and fears. Because deep down, we’re all reliving the social terrors of school every day of our lives.

2) Creative struggles and struggles with addiction

King frequently writes about the process of creation, often by exploring an artist who’s been prevented from creating in some way. The main characters of Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Misery, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones , 1408, and numerous short stories are all writers who’ve been in some way prevented from writing or thwarted in their creative efforts. Many of these and other artistic characters mirror King’s own real-life experiences; for example, the artist at the center of 2008’s Duma Key reflects his physical struggle to write following a highly publicized 1999 injury that made writing difficult for several years.

King has also been open throughout his career about his struggles with addictions ranging from alcohol to drug abuse to painkillers, and many of his main characters likewise struggle with addiction — either directly, in books like The Shining and Revival , or indirectly: The villain of Misery , Annie Wilkes, is a metaphor for cocaine itself.

3) World building through geography and repeated characters

Most people associate Stephen King with Maine and Maine with Stephen King. This is because King almost exclusively writes and sets his stories there. The town of Derry, for example, where It lives, is based on Bangor, Maine. Numerous fictional King towns, like Derry, Haven (the location of a 2010 TV series based on King’s mystery novel The Colorado Kid ), and Castle Rock, exist in his works alongside real towns.

King uses these locations to increase the verisimilitude of his stories, painting them as all part of the same fictional universe. In stories like It, he borrows liberally from real places and landmarks, highways and scenery, even real street corners. And while Derry is the most famous of King’s fictional towns, Castle Rock is his most frequent destination, showing up over and over in his works.

King doesn’t only reuse places in his stories, however — he also reuses people. One popular villain, a recurring supernatural figure who may or may not be the devil, appears throughout the Stephen King universe in various guises. In The Dark Tower he’s “the Man in Black”; to the lost souls in The Stand, he’s a leader named Randall Flagg. In other stories, he’s a nebulous cast of characters with the initials “R.F.”

Frequently throughout his books, King will signal that his worlds are all connected by having characters meet characters from other books in passing. King characters also are frequently able to travel between narrative landscapes, with or without their awareness ( The Shining, Gerald’s Game, Bag of Bones, Lisey’s Story ). This interconnectivity becomes the central conceit of the Dark Tower , which explicitly links most of King’s stories together in one vast multiverse and explains that there are metaphysical doors between the worlds that allow all this to happen.

King’s work endures not because of its inherent darkness but because of its inherent hope

Part of the reason it may have taken critics so long to reassess King’s work is that “horror” implies the lower rungs of emotion King speaks of in Danse Macabre — the gross-outs and the physical gags that play into our understanding of the genre. But the key to his popularity as a horror novelist, and as a novelist in general, resides not in the darkest moments of his writing, but in his basic belief in humanity’s innate goodness.

He spells out his essentially hopeful, fundamentally romantic worldview in a 1989 interview :

There must be a huge store of good will in the human race. ... If there weren’t this huge store of good will we would have blown ourselves to hell ten years after World War II was over. ... It’s such a common thing, those feelings of love toward your fellow man, that we hardly ever talk about it; we concentrate on the other things. It’s just there; it’s all around us, so I guess we take it for granted ... I believe all those sappy, romantic things: Children are good, good wins out over evil, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I see a lot of the so-called “romantic ideal” at work in the world around us.

It’s this core optimism, more than his ability to scare us, that makes King so beloved by readers. Even in his bleakest works, he retains his ability to empathize deeply with his characters, and to see even his monsters as fundamentally human.

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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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Season 4 trailer.

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.

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The Review’s Review

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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Stephen King on the Creative Process, the State of Fiction, and More

The May 2011 issue of The Atlantic features the short story "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive," by Stephen King. The story's origins are unusual. As part of The Atlantic 's package on "First Drafts," James Parker, The Atlantic 's entertainment columnist, talked to King about how the story came into being, about King's creative process, about the state of short fiction today, and about the relative merits of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest as background music to write to. They spoke on April 1.

James Parker: Would you mind filling our readers in just a little bit on the back story to "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive"?

Stephen King: Every year my son Owen and I have a bet on the NCAA March Madness Tournament, and last year the stakes were that the loser would have to write a story [with a title] the winner gave to him. And I lost. Except I really won, because I got this story that I really like. The title that he gave me for the story was "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive," because he'd just a read a piece saying that the guy was still alive and he's still writing even though he's 95 or 96 years old.

So I thought about it a lot--believe me, I thought about it a lot. The tournament was over by the first of April that year, and I mulled that over in my mind until about July. So there was a period of about four months when I thought, "What am I gonna write, what am I gonna write?" Usually you get an idea yourself and then you write a story -- you don't think of a title and then write a story to go with it. So it was kind of an ass-backwards kind of thing. And my first thought was to write a story about a guy in a mental asylum who believed that he was keeping certain writers alive by brainpower. And it was going to be kind of a funny story, and there was going to be a list of writers that he'd gotten tired of and that he had allowed to die.

SK: Like J. D. Salinger. When he finally decides J. D. Salinger's never going to publish another book, it's kind of like, "Fuck it! Move on!" So I had this idea, and then one day there was a terrible motorcycle crash about a mile from our house and a woman died and about two days later, you know how it is, the crosses started to appear and the flowers and that sort of thing, and I started to think about that, and this ["Herman Wouk is Still Alive"] is the story that came out of it.

JP: Dare I say this to Stephen King, but it's a very Stephen King sort of a setup, isn't it? I mean the bet, and the random title -- if you'd written a story about this happening to a writer, then the story that he wrote would have acquired some sort of prophetic power, or it would have overtaken him in some way. Wouldn't it?

SK: That's not a bad idea, actually. That's not a bad idea at all. I like that.

JP: Well you've written books like that, haven't you?

SK: Yeah, I've written some stuff like that, and I'm actually thinking of something like that right now. I don't want to spill the beans on it. That kind of thing is very liberating, actually, it gives you a chance to stretch out and do something different. So I like it, I like it a lot. It turned out that there was an actual accident on Mother's Day in Maine about seven years ago where a bunch of people, mostly children, were killed. You know how it happens when you write a story or when you start to get an idea, all sorts of different elements kind of pull together. That's the real magic of the job.

JP: And is that sort of suggestibility, or availability to coincidence, and to these pokings and prods that come out of reality and into your imagination -- is that something you cultivate? Or is it something that you have at different levels of intensity at different times? I mean, how does that work for you?

SK: I don't think you can force it. I think that sometimes you have a certain ... Well in this case I had a job to do. We made the bet and I wanted to come through with it, that's the honorable thing to do. So I think that probably my unconscious was looking for something to pitch upon. That's something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals. I'll give you an example. The other day I went out to the mailbox at the end of the road and there was a flyer in there, one of these things where they give you coupons and you get a dollar off mouthwash or makeup or whatever, and on the back there's a number of pictures of children, missing children. It says: "Have you seen me?" It's just a sort of throwaway -- you get it and you don't really look at it. And I was looking at it on the walk back from the mailbox, and I thought: "What if there was a guy who got one of these and one of the pictures started to talk to him and say 'I was killed and I'm buried here in this location or that location, in a gravel pit or stuffed into a culvert ...'"? And I thought: "You know, a guy like that, who could find bodies, would be under a lot of suspicion from the police. And there's a story there."

JP: Yes. Yes!

SK: So that's kind of the way it works.

JP: Are the ideas, or the suggestions, still coming at the same pace?

SK: No. I don't think so. And in a way that's a relief.

JP: I was going to ask that.

SK: In the old days, it would seem like ideas were crammed in like people in an elevator. And my head was sometimes a very noisy place to be. The other thing that happens with that is, say you're working on something and it's going along pretty well, and two or three ideas occur, and they're all yelling "You should write this! You should write this!" It's almost like being married and all of a sudden your life is full of beautiful women. You have to stay faithful to what you're working on. But it can be uncomfortable.

JP: So do you keep them in a different file, or ...?

SK: No. I never write ideas down. Because all you do when you write ideas down is kind of immortalize something that should go away. If they're bad ideas, they go away on their own.

JP: So this awful thing of the writer who goes, "Oh, I had a great idea but I forgot it!" -- you don't really subscribe to that.

SK: No. Because that wasn't a great idea. If you can't remember it, it was a terrible idea.

JP: Well let's go to the story itself, which I read today. It's such a gut-punch of a thing -- it couldn't have been anything other than a short story, right?

SK: Yeah I think it's only a short-story idea. The motorcycle accident made me think of this terrible crash that happened on Mother's Day -- these two women, and they were going upstate with a whole bunch of kids, and there were eight or nine fatalities, and the van was going over a hundred miles an hour, and nobody knows why. Okay? Were they arguing? Were they maybe on a cell phone? There was no alcohol involved. And I think sometimes we write a story to try and figure out what happened, to our own satisfaction.

JP: One of the things that you seem to enjoy is sort of mixing, or actually in this case colliding, different categories of experience.

SK: Walks of life.

JP: Right. I mean, here you have these two poets who've both had these rich, fulfilling lives, even if they're waning a little bit now, and then these stomped-on women ...

SK: What I wanted to do is: You've got two people who are intellectuals, who have made a career out of using language to exalt the human experience. To me that's what poetry does. It takes ordinary life, it takes things that we all see, and concentrates them in this beautiful gem. When the good ones do that, that's what you get. When the Philip Larkins or the James Dickeys do that, you get something that is heightened, that says to us that reality is finer and more beautiful and more mysterious than we could ever possibly express ourselves. Which is why we need poetry. And then on the other hand you've got these women whose lives are the absolute opposite of poetry. Who are living below the margin, below the radar, this kind of desperate life, and it seems to me that when they look at each other, and take this unspoken decision to just end it, not only for themselves but for their children, who are going to have lives that are just the same -- that's almost like a poetic epiphany. That moment. Their deaths are a kind of poem. It's an awful poem, it's an awful decision -- nobody's saying that this suicide is the right thing to do -- but if you read the story and respond to the story, you can say, "Well maybe for them at the time it was the only thing to do ..."

JP: I'll tell you what I responded to. In the last two paragraphs, the tears sort of jumped to my eyes, but I realized that it wasn't the deaths, oddly enough, that I was responding to -- it was the bravery of the old poet, staggering around.

SK: Oh yes. I love that little moment there ... when I thought to myself: Well, these are poets. And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language -- it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives, that these women or their children would speak in their daily lives. And at a moment like this the old lady poet turns and says, "What the fuck does it look like?" Because that's all you can say. Poetry falls apart. In that sense it's not a very cheerful story. The woman is almost saying "There's no language that describes how terrible this is."

JP: But on the other hand, they are still present at the scene, the poets. I mean, they are witnessing to this thing ...

JP: I mean, that was my takeaway -- that in the instant, there are no words for it, but later, perhaps ...

SK: I'm not very good at analyzing my own work, but I would say that probably this is an event that neither one of these people would ever write about in their own poetry, because it's beyond poetry. It almost negates poetry. But I think it's tough to overanalyze a short story, because they don't stand up to it.

JP: I don't know. I think if you drive into a reader that hard, they're going to be left with all sorts of things to think about and process, right?

SK: Yeah, but when fiction works for me it works on an emotional level first and an intellectual level second. If you say that tears jumped to your eyes, even if they were metaphorical tears --

JP: They weren't. They were physical tears.

JP: I sniffed a little bit.

SK: (laughs) That's good. Well, James, it was all made up.

JP: Martin Amis has that line about how the writer dies twice -- first the talent, then the body, or however it goes. This story would seem to deny that. Herman Wouk's still writing!

SK: Undoubtedly. And that's why the poets are old in the story, because I wanted to be able to say: These are people who were young and roistering --

JP: That, I really liked. The fact that he was a broad-shouldered dude, I loved that detail.

SK: Kinda like some of the Beats that came out of San Francisco, I really kind of wanted that, and the idea of the passage of time and now he's this skinny old man and she's had all these lovers. But the thing is, though, they're still working, and Herman Wouk is still working. And you know, I remember very clearly, probably10 or 12 years ago, I was at a bookstore in my hometown in Maine and I walked in and there on the new-novel table was this book A Hole In Texas by Herman Wouk, and I was just... I was slain, James! I thought to myself: "What a hero! He's still working!"

JP: More generally, are you still as pessimistic about the short story as you seemed to be in that New York Times essay that you wrote?

SK: Ah well ...

JP: Or was that like a cranky moment?

SK: Well it wasn't really a cranky moment. I mean, it's a question of who reads them. And I've got a perspective of being a short-story reader going back to when I was 8 or 9 years old. At that time there were magazines all over the place. There were so many magazines publishing short fiction that nobody could keep up with it. They were just this open mouth going "Feed me! Feed me!" The pulps alone, the 15- and 20-cent pulps, published like 400 stories a month, and that's not even counting the so-called "slicks" -- Cosmopolitan , American Mercury . All those magazine published short fiction. And it started to dry up. And now you can number literally on two hands the number of magazines that are not little presses that publish short fiction. And I've always felt like I wanted to write for a wide audience. And I think that that's an honorable thing to want to do and I also think it's an honorable thing to say, "I've got something that will only appeal to a small slice of the audience". And there are little magazines that publish in that sense -- but a lot of the people who read those magazines are only reading them to see what they publish so that they can publish their own stories.

SK: It isn't a general thing. You don't see people on airplanes with their magazines folded open to Part 7 of the new Norman Mailer. He's dead of course, but you know what I mean. And all of these e-books and this computer stuff, it kind of muddies the water and obscures the fact that people just don't read short fiction. And when you fall out of the habit of doing it, you lose the knack, you lose the ability to sit down for 45 minutes like you can with this story and get a little bit of entertainment.

JP: Get a little buzz.

SK: A little buzz! That's great.

JP: It is odd, though, if you think about it, that with all the speeding-up that we're being told about, and the dwindling of the attention span and all that, that people would rather chomp their way through a 400-pager than just get zapped by a little story ...

SK: And so many of the 400-pagers are disposable in themselves. When I see books by some of the suspense writers that are popular now, I think to myself: "These are basically books for people who don't want to read at all." It just kind of passes through the system. It's like some kind of fast-food treat that takes the express right from your mouth to your bowels, without ever stopping to nourish any part of you. I don't want to name names, but we know who we're talking about.

JP: Are you still listening to music when you write?

SK: I listen to music when I rewrite now. I don't listen to music when I compose anymore. I can't. I've lost the ability to multitask that way!

JP: You used to listen to Metallica, right?

SK: Metallica, Anthrax. I still listen to those guys ... There's a band called the Living Things that I like a lot. Very loud group. I never cared for Ozzy very much.

JP: I'm obsessed with Black Sabbath.

SK: No, no. They don't really work for me. "I AM IRON MAN!"

JP: That doesn't do it?

SK: No. Judas Priest, now ...

JP: I love Judas Priest.

SK: Did you ever hear their cover of "Diamonds and Rust"?

JP: Yes. I love it. Now: In your grand maturity ...

SK: (laughs) I don't feel very mature.

JP: ... what is your favorite part of the creative process?

SK: It's still when you sit down and you get a really good day, and something happens that you don't expect and you just take off, you just go off on the material -- I love that, when that happens.

JP: How often does it happen?

SK: I don't knock myself out as often as I used to. But often enough so that you know it when it happens. In the new book, which is called 11/22/63 , I was writing about a high-school variety show and I just went off. Terrific. Lot of fun.

JP: And how does it feel to have an unwritten book inside your brain?

SK: I never started a book that I expected to finish. Because it always feels like a job that's much too big for a little guy like me. Thomas Williams -- do you know his work at all?

JP: No, I don't.

SK: He was a wonderful, wonderful novelist. He wrote a novel called The Hair of Harold Roux , which is one of my favorite books, about a writer named Aaron Benham. Benham says that when he sits down to write a book it's like being on a dark plain with one little tiny fire. And somebody comes and stands by that fire to warm themselves. And then more people come. And those are the characters in your book, and the fire is whatever inspiration you have. And they feed the fire, and it gets big, and eventually it burns out because the book is at an end. It's always felt that way to me. When you start, it's very cold, an impossible task. But then maybe the characters start to take on a little bit of life, or the story takes a turn that you don't expect ... With me that happens a lot because I don't outline, I just have a vague notion. So it's always felt like less of a made thing and more of a found thing. That's exciting. That's a thrill.

JP: And how do you keep your energy up?

SK: I don't know. Eat three meals a day and sleep eight hours a night. I read a lot. I'm still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.

JP: Well with that, we come to the end of my questions.

SK: I'm delighted that The Atlantic is publishing the story. It's a dream, because I can remember sending stories to The Atlantic when I was a teenager, and then in my 20s and getting the rejection slips. So this feels like a real benchmark. It's a great thing.

About the Author

More Stories

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Biography of Stephen King

Stephen King was born in 1947 in Portland, Maine. After his father left, King grew up with his mother and brother. The family moved around and then returned to Maine when King was eleven years old. King graduated from high school in 1966 and went on to get his B.A. in English from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970.

Initially, King supported himself as a high school English teacher; he wrote and published short stories on the side. His first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974 by Doubleday & Co. The success of this novel enabled him to quit his teaching job and dedicate himself to writing full-time. Over the course of his career, King has published over 50 books: novels, collections of short stories, and some nonfiction. King is one of the most prominent authors of horror, suspense, and supernatural fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries. He’s sold an estimated 350 million books worldwide and his name has become synonymous with the genre of horror fiction.

King is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the 2014 National Medal of Arts. In 2000, he published the book On Writing which explores the craft of writing and his own writing career. Many of King’s books and stories have been adapted for film and TV and made their way into popular culture. Some notable adaptations include Carrie, It, The Shining , Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile , and Stand By Me.

Stephen King is married to Tabitha King, who is also a novelist. The couple have three children and four grandchildren. The Kings split their time between Florida and Maine.

Study Guides on Works by Stephen King

11/22/63 stephen king.

On 11/22/63 (2011), Stephen King ventured into a new genre: speculative science fiction. Long known as the master of horror, 11/22/63 tells the story of a high school English teacher named Jake Epping who travels back in time to stop the...

• Study Guide

Carrie Stephen King

Published in 1973, Stephen King's Carrie is an epistolary horror novel that takes the form of collected newspaper clippings, letters and diary entries to tell the tale of how bullied misfit Carrie White uses her telekinetic powers to avenge her...

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Stephen King

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a Stephen King novel published in 1999. King novels can—generally speaking—be divided into two elemental types. Some feature large ensemble casts of characters that eschew any obviously singular perspective or...

The Green Mile Stephen King

Stephen King's The Green Mile was originally published in six monthly installments in 1996. It tells the story of a death-row supervisor named Paul Edgecombe, who one day encounters a prisoner with extraordinary powers named John Coffey....

• Lesson Plan

Holly Stephen King

Stephen King is one of the most prolific authors of all time. His second novel of 2023, simply titled Holly , follows the eponymous private investigator named Holly Gibney, who has appeared in several of King's novels. Holly sees Gibney as she sets...

It Stephen King

It is a horror novel, written by Stephen King, and published in 1986 by Viking Press (now Penguin Random House.) The book tells the story of a mythical creature that takes on the form of one’s worst fears, most typically a clown figure known only...

The Long Walk Stephen King

Talent versus luck: this was a question that plagued Stephen King after his initial success as an author. How much of his success was due to talent, and how much due to the cult following he had amassed, and the fact that people bought his books...

The Mist Stephen King

The Mist is a novella penned by the godfather of horror writing, Stephen King. It tells the story of a mist that suddenly envelops the small town of Bridgton in Maine; the mist is not a natural phenomenon but an evil one, and it hides monsters...

Mr. Harrigan's Phone Stephen King

Mr. Harrigan's Phone is a short story by American horror writer Stephen King. It first appeared in a collection of King's previously unpublished work titled If It Bleeds. The collection was published on April 28th, 2020.

King considers the works...

On Writing Stephen King

It is often said that Stephen King's On Writing is arguably one of the most important books that explores the craft of writing. Over the course of this 291 page book, King writes about his career as a best-selling, award-winning writer and how he...

The Shining (1977 Novel) Stephen King

Over the course of his illustrious career, Stephen King has written more than a dozen bonafide classic novels. In fact, prior to the release of The Shining (his third book), he published two classics in the form of Carrie and 'Salem's Lot . The...

Under the Dome Stephen King

Under The Dome is a science fiction novel by Stephen King. The story is set in and around a small town in Maine and is an intricate, complex story with multiple characters that tell how the town's inhabitants deal with being cut off from the...

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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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19 and its true origins

Been in a kick for spotting 19s. Dedicated Wiki page said that King started the Tower Series at the age of 19 and could be it's origins. But a couple other theories. Crazy as they are.

The Red Sox curse started in 1918. Numbers totalling 19... obvi!

King wrote a book about JFK, and also references the event in several others, and it seemed to influence King or at least serve as a marker in his life. His death was in 1963-you see where I'm going here.

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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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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.