reading to write stephen king essay

Stephen King’s Guide: Reading to Write Effectively

Stephen King , one of the most popular writers of our time, once said, “If you want to be a writer , you must do two things: read a lot and write a lot.” In this section, we will explore how reading can strengthen your writing skills , and how Stephen King , through his unique insights, can help you achieve this goal.

By understanding King’s approach to reading and learning how to cultivate a critical eye when analyzing other authors’ writing techniques , you can develop your own writing style and expand your literary horizons . Incorporating reading into your writing routine can help you overcome writer’s block and spark creativity when you need it most.

Key Takeaways:

• Reading is crucial for writers to improve their craft.
• Stephen King’s personal approach to reading can influence your own writing career.
• Cultivate a critical eye when reading to analyze and learn from other authors’ techniques .
• Diversify your reading choices to broaden your creative horizons.
• Integrating reading into your daily writing routine can enhance your skills and productivity.

Importance of Reading as a Writer

Reading is not only a pastime but also an essential activity for writers. It enables writers to learn from others’ experiences, styles, and techniques , broadening their literary horizons and developing their writing skills . To improve your writing, it is crucial to read.

Reading fosters creativity and imagination, expanding one’s knowledge and understanding of different genres and writing styles . It serves as a source of inspiration and ideas, giving writers a unique perspective that they can integrate into their own writing. Moreover, reading enhances a writer’s vocabulary and grammar, improving their language skills.

To further illustrate the importance of reading for writers, here are a few relevant statistics:

As we can see from the statistics, reading is a vital aspect of a writer’s journey towards success.

Stephen King’s Approach to Reading

Stephen King is widely known for his prolific writing career, as well as his extensive reading habits . King believes that reading is an essential activity for writers and has been a major influence on his own craft. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal , King stated, “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”

King reads voraciously and has a preference for horror and suspense genres. However, his reading choices often extend beyond his preferred genres, as he believes in the importance of diversifying one’s reading choices. King typically reads for several hours a day and sets aside specific times for reading and writing. He views reading as a form of relaxation and enjoyment, as well as a means of improving his writing skills .

“I like to get 10 pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book.”

King also stresses the importance of paying attention to the techniques of other writers. By analyzing the works of other authors, King is able to identify what works and what doesn’t in storytelling. He even offers a suggested reading list for aspiring writers in his memoir, On Writing . In it, he recommends works from a variety of genres, emphasizing the importance of reading widely to expand one’s literary horizons .

King’s approach to reading illustrates how integral it is to the writing process. By making reading a daily habit and analyzing the works of others, writers can hone their craft and develop their own unique styles.

Developing a Critical Eye

Reading extensively is the foundation for developing a critical eye in writing. However, it is not enough to simply read; aspiring writers must learn to analyze and evaluate the techniques and styles employed by experienced authors to improve their own writing.

“Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out.” – William Faulkner

One way to analyze writing critically is to practice identifying the author’s intent and how it is conveyed through their choice of words, sentence structure, and literary devices. The goal is to gain insights into the underlying meaning, style, and techniques of the text and apply them to one’s own writing.

Creating a table to keep track of notable quotes, themes, or stylistic elements can be a useful tool for analysis . For example, a table may include columns such as “Author”, “Book/Article Title”, “Technique Used”, and “Impact on Reader”. This can help to organize and compare different texts and techniques used by various writers.

Example Table:

By cultivating a critical eye through extensive reading and analysis , aspiring writers can improve their writing skills and develop their own unique style.

Expanding Your Literary Horizons

As a writer , it’s easy to fall into the habit of consuming similar content repetitively, limiting your knowledge of different writing styles . Literary horizons describe the vast expanse of diverse literature styles that can help you sharpen your writing skills. Exploring a variety of genres and authors can broaden your creativity and expand your writing style.

Reading different genres can also inspire you to explore unconventional ideas that you may not have discovered otherwise. So, pick up a book outside of your genre of preference once in a while and dive into a new world of possibilities.

Moreover, reading diverse authors exposes you to varying perspectives and backgrounds, leading you to write more inclusively. Today’s readers crave characters that represent the wide range of diverse cultures and lifestyles that make up our world.

This quote by Maya Angelou highlights the importance of literary diversity: “It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.”

Cultivating a love for reading diverse literature can open doors to new writing possibilities, which can lead to growth as a writer .

Mining Inspiration from Books

Books serve as a valuable source of inspiration for writers, providing a wealth of ideas to fuel the creative process. Reading widely across genres, styles, and time periods can spark new perspectives and fresh ideas. From character development to inventive plot twists, books can inspire writers to experiment with different writing techniques and explore new possibilities.

One key strategy for mining inspiration from books is to keep a reading journal. Jot down your favorite quotes, scenes, and characters from the books you read, along with any ideas that come to mind while reading. This can serve as a reference and source of inspiration for future writing projects.

Another effective approach is to analyze the writing style and techniques of your favorite authors. Take note of their use of language, pacing, and tone, and consider how you can apply these techniques to your own writing.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss

Analyzing Writing Styles and Techniques

Reading widely is an essential aspect of improving your writing craft . By examining different writing styles and techniques, you can gain valuable insights that can significantly enhance your own writing.

One effective way to analyze writing styles is to break down a piece of writing into its fundamental components, such as sentence structure, tone, and characterization. Take notes on how the author uses language and imagery to convey their message. Observe how the writer builds suspense or creates an emotional impact through their language choices. Pay attention to how the writer transitions between scenes or sections and how they structure their plot.

Another useful method is to read reviews or critiques of books written by literary experts or fellow writers. These analyses can provide a broader perspective on the technical aspects of writing and highlight specific techniques that can be applied to your own writing.

One of the critical benefits of analyzing writing styles and techniques in your reading is to develop a better understanding of how to create an engaging and memorable experience for your readers.

Examples of Writing Techniques to Analyze

“The best way to analyze writing is to read it carefully and thoughtfully, paying attention to the structure, style, and details that make it great. By studying different writing techniques, you can develop your own unique style and voice as a writer.”

Incorporating Reading into Your Writing Routine

Developing a consistent writing routine is crucial to honing your craft, but it’s equally important to include frequent reading habits within this routine. Here are some practical tips to help you integrate reading into your daily writing practice :

1. Set Aside Dedicated Time for Reading

Allocate specific time slots for reading, just as you would for writing. This could be during your commute, during lunch breaks, or before bed. By creating a routine for reading, you’re more likely to commit to it and see the benefits.

2. Vary Your Reading Material

Don’t limit yourself to one genre or style of writing. Expanding your reading horizons can inspire new ideas and techniques for your own writing. Whether it’s classic literature or contemporary non-fiction, keep your reading material diverse and stimulating.

3. Take Notes While Reading

Cultivate a critical eye while reading by taking notes on writing techniques and styles that pique your interest. Jot down passages that resonate with you or inspire you to try new things in your own work.

4. Discuss Your Reading with Other Writers

Join a book club or writer’s group to discuss your reading and gain insights from other writers. Sharing your thoughts and opinions on literature can deepen your understanding of writing techniques and help refine your own work.

“Reading is essential to writing, both as a source of inspiration and a way to improve your craft.” -Stephen King

Integrating regular reading habits into your writing routine can have a significant impact on your skills and productivity as a writer. Embrace the joys of reading and watch as it enhances your writing practice .

Overcoming Writer’s Block Through Reading

At some point, every writer faces creative blocks, known as writer’s block . This can be frustrating and demotivating, but there’s no need to despair; taking a reading break can help reignite your creativity.

When you’re struggling with writer’s block , taking a break to read can help spark new ideas and provide inspiration. Allow yourself a reading break , and you might find yourself inspired by new characters, settings, or plot twists. Sometimes, all it takes is a few moments of immersion in a new story to help you energize your creativity and find new writing directions.

Reading can also help you clear your mind and give you a fresh perspective. When you take a break to read, it can be just what you need to recharge your writing skills and refresh your creativity.

To overcome writer’s block, try setting a routine of taking regular reading breaks during your writing. If you find yourself getting stuck, take a moment to read a few pages of your favorite book, or explore new genres and authors to expand your literary horizons.

The Benefits of Reading for Writing Craft

Reading is an essential practice for every writer. It provides numerous benefits that help improve their writing craft . Here are some of the specific advantages of reading:

• Expanding Vocabulary: Reading a wide range of materials, from newspaper articles to novels, can increase a writer’s vocabulary. This can help them choose the right words to convey their ideas effectively.
• Improving Writing Style: Exposure to different styles of writing, such as poetic prose or tight and concise business language, can help writers find their voice and develop their personal style.
• Gaining New Perspectives: Reading diverse materials from different authors can help writers understand perspectives different from their own. This can help them develop characters with more depth, unique viewpoints, and a broader range of experiences.
• Stimulating Creativity: By experiencing different worlds and characters presented in various writing styles, writers can spark their own creativity and develop new and innovative ideas for their writing projects.
• Developing Critical Reading Skills: By critically analyzing other authors’ writing techniques, writers can develop a more critical eye to improve their own writing and apply these new insights to their own writing process.

To fully harness these benefits, writers need to develop effective reading strategies . It is essential to read widely and diversely, trying different genres, authors, and formats. Writers should also seek to analyze and understand what they are reading, taking notes, and asking questions to improve their critical reading skills. Incorporating reading into your daily writing routine will help develop these strategies and allow you to gain more fully from reading’s many benefits.

In conclusion, reading is a vital aspect of improving your writing skills. As Stephen King has emphasized, reading can help you develop a critical eye, expand your literary horizons, mine inspiration from books, analyze writing styles and techniques, and overcome writer’s block. By incorporating reading into your daily routine, you can enhance your writing practice and productivity.

Remember to diversify your reading choices and delve into different genres to broaden your creative horizons. Utilize effective reading strategies , such as analyzing and learning from other authors’ techniques, to improve your own writing.

Continuous growth as a writer requires the constant pursuit of knowledge and improvement. Reading is an excellent way to gain insights, inspiration, and new perspectives that can help you develop your writing craft .

How can reading improve my writing skills?

Reading exposes you to different writing styles, storytelling techniques, and vocabulary, which can inspire and influence your own writing. It helps you understand the mechanics of effective storytelling, character development, and plot structure.

Why is reading important for writers?

Reading is essential for writers because it enhances creativity, expands knowledge, and improves critical thinking. It allows writers to learn from established authors, explore different genres, and stay updated with current trends in literature.

What is Stephen King’s approach to reading?

Stephen King emphasizes the importance of reading widely and voraciously. He believes that writers should read for pleasure, but also analyze and study the works of other authors to understand their writing techniques and incorporate them into their own craft.

How can I develop a critical eye through reading?

To develop a critical eye, actively engage with the text while reading. Pay attention to the author’s tone, language choices, and narrative structure. Analyze the plot development, character arcs, and overall effectiveness of the storytelling. Take notes and ask yourself why certain writing techniques are successful or not.

Why should I expand my literary horizons?

Expanding your literary horizons exposes you to a diverse range of writing styles, perspectives, and storytelling techniques. It allows you to explore different genres, cultures, and themes, which can spark creativity, broaden your perspective, and inspire unique ideas in your own writing.

How can reading inspire my writing?

By reading widely, you expose yourself to a variety of narratives, characters, and settings, which can trigger new ideas and awaken your imagination. It helps you see how other authors tackle certain themes or develop compelling plots, serving as a catalyst for your own creative process.

How can I analyze writing styles and techniques?

To analyze writing styles and techniques, focus on the author’s use of language, sentence structure, dialogue, pacing, and descriptive imagery. Pay attention to their storytelling choices and how they evoke emotion or create a vivid sense of place. Consider how these techniques can be applied or adapted in your own writing.

How can I incorporate reading into my writing routine?

Make reading a regular part of your writing routine by setting aside dedicated time for it. Choose books that align with your writing goals and interests. Integrate reading breaks during your writing sessions or incorporate it as a reward after achieving writing milestones. Consider keeping a reading journal to record insights and reflections.

Can reading help overcome writer’s block?

Yes, reading can help overcome writer’s block by providing a break from your own writing process and immersing yourself in someone else’s story. It can reignite creativity, generate new ideas, and offer valuable perspective and inspiration. Sometimes, stepping away from your project and indulging in a good book can help you return to your writing with a fresh mindset.

What are the benefits of reading for writing craft?

Reading enhances your writing craft by improving your language skills, vocabulary, and understanding of narrative structures. It helps you develop a stronger sense of storytelling, character development, and pacing. Reading also exposes you to different writing voices, which can influence and shape your own unique writing style.

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How Stephen King Teaches Writing

Looking back on his days in front of a high school classroom, the acclaimed writer shares his views on grammar and explains why discovering great literature is like losing one's virginity.

Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft has been a fixture in my English classroom for years, but it wasn’t until this summer, when I began teaching in a residential drug and alcohol rehab, that I discovered the full measure of its worth. For weeks, I struggled to engage my detoxing, frustrated, and reluctant teenage students. I trotted out all my best lessons and performed all my best tricks, but save for one rousing read-aloud of Poe’s “A Tell-Tale Heart,” I failed to engage their attention or imagination.

Until the day I handed out copies of On Writing. Stephen King’s memoir of the craft is more than an inventory of the writer’s toolbox or a voyeuristic peek into his prolific and successful writing life. King recounts his years as a high school English teacher, his own recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, and his love for his students (“even the Beavis and Butt-Head types”). Most importantly, he captivates the reader with his honest account of the challenges he’s faced, and promises redemption to anyone willing to come to the blank page with a sense of purpose.

I asked King to expound on the parts of On Writing I love most: the nuts and bolts of teaching, the geekiest details of grammar, and his ideas about how to encourage a love of language in all of our students.

Jessica Lahey : You write that you taught grammar “successfully.” How did you define “success” when you were teaching?

Stephen King :  Success is keeping the students’ attention to start with, and then getting them to see that most of the rules are fairly simple. I always started by telling them not to be too concerned with stuff like weird verbs (swim, swum, swam) and just remember to make subject and verb agree. It’s like we say in AA—KISS. Keep it simple, stupid.

Lahey : When people ask me to name my favorite books, I have to ask them to narrow their request: to read or to teach? You provide a fantastic list of books to read at the end of On Writing , but what were your favorite books to teach, and why?

King : When it comes to literature, the best luck I ever had with high school students was teaching James Dickey’s long poem “Falling.” It’s about a stewardess who’s sucked out of a plane. They see at once that it’s an extended metaphor for life itself, from the cradle to the grave, and they like the rich language. I had good success with The Lord of the Flies and short stories like “Big Blonde” and “The Lottery.” (They argued the shit out of that one—I’m smiling just thinking about it.) No one puts a grammar book on their list of riveting reads, but The Elements of Style is still a good handbook. The kids accept it.

Lahey : You write, “One either absorbs the grammatical principles of one’s native language in conversation and in reading or one does not.” If this is true, why teach grammar in school at all? Why bother to name the parts?

King : When we name the parts, we take away the mystery and turn writing into a problem that can be solved. I used to tell them that if you could put together a model car or assemble a piece of furniture from directions, you could write a sentence. Reading is the key, though. A kid who grows up hearing “It don’t matter to me” can only learn doesn’t if he/she reads it over and over again.

Lahey: While I love teaching grammar, I am conflicted on the utility of sentence diagramming. Did you teach diagramming, and if so, why?

King : I did teach it, always beginning by saying, “This is for fun, like solving a crossword puzzle or a Rubik’s Cube.” I told them to approach it as a game. I gave them sentences to diagram as homework but promised I would not test on it, and I never did. Do you really teach diagramming? Good for you! I didn’t think anyone did anymore.

Lahey : In the introduction to Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style , E.B. White recounts William Strunk’s instruction to “omit needless words.” While your books are voluminous, your writing remains concise. How do you decide which words are unnecessary and which words are required for the telling?

King : It’s what you hear in your head, but it’s never right the first time. So you have to rewrite it and revise it. My rule of thumb is that a short story of 3,000 words should be rewritten down to 2,500. It’s not always true, but mostly it is. You need to take out the stuff that’s just sitting there and doing nothing. No slackers allowed! All meat, no filler!

Lahey : By extension, how can writing teachers help students recognize which words are required in their own writing?

King : Always ask the student writer, “What do you want to say?” Every sentence that answers that question is part of the essay or story. Every sentence that does not needs to go. I don’t think it’s the words per se , it’s the sentences. I used to give them a choice, sometimes: either write 400 words on “My Mother is Horrible” or “My Mother is Wonderful.” Make every sentence about your choice. That means leaving your dad and your snotty little brother out of it.

Jessica Lahey : In On Writing , you identified some phrases that should be excised from every writer’s toolbox: “At this point in time” and “at the end of the day.” Any new irksome phrases you’d be willing to share? (Mine’s “on accident.”)

King : “Some people say,” or “Many believe,” or “The consensus is.” That kind of lazy attribution makes me want to kick something. Also, IMHO, YOLO, and LOL.

Lahey : You write that “it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer.” If so, how should writing teachers proceed when it comes to our least talented students?

King : Ask yourself what they need to get on in life, the bare minimum (like filling in a job application), and concentrate on that. Sometimes it can be as simple as writing—as a class exercise—instructions on how to get from Point A in town to Point B. They tie themselves in knots, at least to start with. It can be pretty hilarious. My kids used to end up shouting at each other, “No, no, you go left at the water tower!” Stuff like that.

Lahey : Great writing often resides in the sweet spot between grammatical mastery and the careful bending of rules. How do you know when students are ready to start bending? When should a teacher put away his red pen and let those modifiers dangle?

King : I think you have to make sure they know what they’re doing with those danglers, those fragmentary and run-on sentences, those sudden digressions. If you can get a satisfactory answer to “Why did you write it this way?” they’re fine. And—come on, Teach—you know when it’s on purpose, don’t you? Fess up to your Uncle Stevie!

Lahey : Oxford comma: yea or nay?

King: It can go either way. For instance, I like “Jane bought eggs, milk, bread, and a candy bar for her brother.” But I also like “Jane raced home and slammed the door,” because I want to feel that whole thing as a single breath.

Lahey : You extol the benefits of writing first drafts with the door closed, but students are often so focused on giving teachers what they want and afraid of making mistakes that they become paralyzed. How can teachers encourage kids to close the door and write without fear?

King : In a class situation, this is very, very hard. That fearlessness always comes when a kid is writing for himself, and almost never when doing directed writing for the grade (unless you get one of those rare fearless kids who’s totally confident). The best thing—maybe the only thing—is to tell the student that telling the truth is the most important thing, much more important than the grammar. I would say, “The truth is always eloquent.” To which they would respond, “Mr. King, what does eloquent mean?”

Lahey : Of course, once they have something down on paper, they are going to have to open the door and invite the world to read what they have written. How did you cope with the editing process early in your writing career, and how did you teach your students to handle feedback?

King : A lot of them didn’t care; they were just hacking out assignments. For those that are sensitive and insecure, you have to combine gentleness with firmness. It’s a tightrope, particularly with teenagers. Did I have students actually bust out crying? I did. I’d say, “This is just a step to get you to the next step.”

Lahey : You warn writers not to “come lightly to the blank page.” How can teachers encourage kids to come the blank page with both gravity and enthusiasm?

King : It went best for me when I could communicate my own enthusiasm. I can remember teaching Dracula to sophomores and practically screaming, “Look at all the different voices in this book! Stoker’s a ventriloquist! I love that!” I don’t have much use for teachers who “perform,” like they’re onstage, but kids respond to enthusiasm. You can’t command a kid to have fun, but you can make the classroom a place that feels safe, where interesting things happen. I wanted every 50-minute class to feel like half an hour.

Lahey : You have called informal essays “silly and unsubstantial things,” not at all useful for teaching good writing. What kinds of essay assignments are useful?

King : I tried to give assignments that would teach kids to be specific. I used to repeat “See, then say” half a dozen times a day. So I would often ask them to describe operations that they take for granted. Ask a girl to write a paragraph on how she braids her sister’s hair. Ask a boy to explain a sports rule. These are just basic starting points, where students learn to write on paper what they might tell a friend. It keeps it concrete. If you ask a kid to write on “My Favorite Movie,” you’re opening the door to subjectivity, and hence to a flood of clichés.

Lahey : I do a lot of reading out loud in my classroom because I think it’s the best way to ease students into challenging language and rhetoric. Do you have any favorite read-alouds, either from your classroom, or from reading to your own kids?

King : I used to read my lit kids “August Heat,” by W.F. Harvey. By the time I reached the last line—“The heat is enough to drive a man mad”—you could hear a pin drop. Wilfred Owen was also a hit: “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” My kids wanted comic books when they were small. Later it was The Hobbit , and from The Hobbit to Lord of the Rings . On long trips, we all listened to audio books. A good reader digging into a good book is wonderful. Musical .

Lahey : English teachers tend to fall into one of two camps when it comes to literacy: Those who believe we should let students read anything they want so they will be more likely to engage with books, and those who believe teachers should push kids to read more challenging texts in order to expose them to new vocabulary, genres, and ideas. Where would you pitch your tent?

King : You don’t want to leave them in despair, which is why it’s such a horrible idea to try teaching Moby-Dick or Dubliners to high school juniors. Even the bright ones lose heart. But it’s good to make them reach a little. They’ve got to see there are brighter literary worlds than Twilight . Reading good fiction is like making the jump from masturbation to sex.

Lahey : You paint a pretty bleak picture of teachers as professional writers. Teaching is, after all, a “consumptive profession,” as a friend of mine puts it, and it can be a real challenge to find the juice for our own creative endeavors after a day at school. Do you still feel that teaching full time while pursuing the writing life is a doomed proposition?

King : Many writers have to teach in order to put bread on the table. But I have no doubt teaching sucks away the creative juices and slows production. “Doomed proposition” is too strong, but it’s hard, Jessica. Even when you have the time, it’s hard to find the old N-R-G.

Lahey : If your writing had not panned out, do you think you would have continued teaching?

King : Yes, but I would have gotten a degree in elementary ed. I was discussing that with my wife just before I broke through with Carrie . Here’s the flat, sad truth: By the time they get to high school, a lot of these kids have already closed their minds to what we love. I wanted to get to them while they were still wide open. Teenagers are wonderful, beautiful freethinkers at the best of times. At the worst, it’s like beating your fists on a brick wall. Also, they’re so preoccupied with their hormones it’s often hard to get their attention.

Lahey : Do you think great teachers are born or do you think they can be trained?

King : Good teachers can be trained, if they really want to learn (some are pretty lazy). Great teachers, like Socrates, are born.

Lahey : You refer to writing as a craft rather than an art. What about teaching? Craft, or art?

King : It’s both. The best teachers are artists.

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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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Ten things I learned about writing from Stephen King

The novelist James Smythe, who has been analysing the work of Stephen King for the Guardian since 2012 , on the lessons he has drawn from the master of horror fiction

• Stephen King short fiction competition – send us your stories

Stephen King is an All-Time Great, arguably one of the most popular novelists the world has ever seen. And there’s a good chance that he’s inspired more people to start writing than any other living writer. So, as the Guardian and King’s UK publisher Hodder launch a short story competition – to be judged by the master himself – here are the ten most important lessons to learn from his work.

1. Write whatever the hell you like

King might be best known – or, rather, best regarded – as a writer of horror novels, but really, his back catalogue is crammed with every genre you can think of. There are thrillers (Misery, Gerald’s Game), literary novels (Bag Of Bones, Different Seasons), crime procedurals (Mr Mercedes), apocalypse narratives (The Stand), fantasy (Eyes Of The Dragon, The Dark Tower series) … He’s even written what I think of as being one of the greatest Young Adult novels of all time: The Long Walk. Perhaps the only genre or audience he hasn’t really touched so far is comedy, but most of his work features moments that show his deft touch with humour. It’s clear that King does what he wants, when he wants, and his constant readers – the term he calls his, well, constant readers – will follow him wherever he goes.

2. The scariest thing isn’t necessarily what’s underneath the bed

Horror is a curious thing. What scares one person won’t necessarily scare another. And while there might be moments in his horror novels that tread towards the more conventional ideas of what some find terrifying, for the most part, the truly scary aspects are those that deal with humanity itself. Ghosts drive people to madness, telekinetic girls destroy whole towns with their powers, clowns … well, clowns are just bloody terrifying full stop. But the true crux of King’s ability to scare is finding the thing that his readers are actually worried about, and bringing that to the fore. If you’re writing horror, don’t just think about what goes bump in the night; think about what that bump might drive people to do afterwards.

3. Don’t be scared of transparency

One of my favourite things about King’s short story collections are the little notes about each tale that he puts into the text. The history of them, the context for the idea, how the writing process actually worked. They’re not only invaluable material for aspiring writers – because exactly how many drafts does it take to reach a decent story? King knows! – but they’re also brilliant nuggets of insight into King himself. Some people might think that it’s better off knowing nothing about authors when they read their work, but for King, his heart is on his sleeve. In his latest collection, The Bazaar of Broken Dreams, King gets more in-depth than ever, talking about what inspired the stories in such an honest way that it couldn’t have come from another writer’s pen. Which brings us to …

4. Write what you know. Sort of. Sometimes

Write what you know is the most common writing tip you’ll find anywhere. It’s nonsense, really, because if we all did that we’d end up with terribly boring novels about writers staring out of windows waiting for inspiration to hit. (If you like those, incidentally, head straight for the literary fiction section of your nearest bookshop.) But King understands that experience is something which can be channelled into your work, and should be at every opportunity. Aspects of his life – addiction, teaching, his near-fatal car accident, rock and roll, ageing – have cropped up in his work over and over, in ways that aren’t always obvious, but often help to drive the story. That’s something every writer can use, because it’s through these truths that real emotions can be writ large on the page.

5. Aim big. Or small

King’s written some mammoth books, and they’re often about mammoth things. The Stand takes readers into an apocalypse, with every stage of it laid out on the page until the final fantastical showdown. It deals with a horror that hits a group of characters twice in their lives, showing us how years and years of experience can change people. And The Dark Tower is a seven (or eight, or more, if you count the short stories set in its world) part series that takes in so many different genres of writing it’s dizzying. When he needs to, King aims really big, and sometimes that’s what you have to do to tell a story. At the other end of the spectrum, some of King’s most enduring stories – Rita Hayworth & Shawshank Redemption, The Mist – have come from his shorter works. He traps small groups of characters in single locations and lets the story play out how it will. The length of the story you’re telling should dictate the size of the book. Doesn’t matter if it’s forty thousand words or two hundred, King doesn’t waste a word.

6. Write all the time. And write a lot

King’s published – wait for it – 55 novels, 11 collections of stories, 5 non-fiction works, 7 novellas and 9 assorted other pieces (including illustrated works and comic books). That’s over a period of 41 years. That’s an average of two books a year. Which is, I must admit, a pretty giddying amount. That’s years of reading (or rereading, if you’re as foolishly in awe of him as I am). But he’s barely stopped for breath. This year has seen three books published by him, which makes me feel a little ashamed. Still, at my current rate of writing, I might catch up with him sometime next century. And while not every book has found the same critical and commercial success, they’ve all got their fans.

7. Voice is just as important as content

King’s a writer who understands that a story needs to begin before it’s actually told. It begins in the voice of the novel: is it first person, or third? Is it past or present tense? Is it told through multiple narrators, or just the one? He’s a master at understanding exactly why each story is told the way it’s told. Sure, he might dress it up as something simple – the story finding the voice it needs, or vice versa – but through his books you can see that he’s tried pretty much everything, and can see why each voice worked with the story he was telling.

8. And Form is just as important as voice

King isn’t really thought of as an experimental novelist, which is grossly unfair. Some of King’s more daring novels have taken on really interesting forms. Be it The Green Mile’s fragmented, serialised narrative; or the dual publication of The Regulators and Desperation – novels which featured the same characters in very different situations, with unsettling parallels between the stories that unfolded for them; or even Carrie’s mixed-media narrative, with sections of the story told as interview or newspaper extract. All of these novels have played with the way they’re presented on the page to find the perfect medium for telling those stories. Really, the lesson here from King is to not be afraid to play.

9. You don’t have to be yourself

Some of King’s greatest works in the early years of his career weren’t published by King himself. They were in the name of Richard Bachman, his slightly grislier pseudonym. The Long Walk, Thinner, The Running Man – these are books that dealt with a nastier side of things than King did in his properly attributed work. Because, maybe it’s good to have a voice that allows us to let the real darkness out, with no judgments. (And then maybe, as King eventually did in The Dark Half, it’s good to kill that voice on the page … )

10. Read On Writing. Now

This is the most important tip in the list. In 2000, King published On Writing, a book that sits in the halfway space between autobiography and writing manual. It’s full of details about his process, about how he wrote his books, channelled his demons and overcame his challenges. It’s one of the few books about writing that are actually worth their salt, mainly because it understands that it’s about a personal experience, and readers might find that useful. There’s no universal truths when it comes to writing. One person’s process would be a nightmare for somebody else. Some people spend years labouring on nearly perfect first drafts; some people get a first draft written in six weeks, and then spend the next year destroying it and rebuilding it. On Writing tells you how King does it, to help you to find your own. Even if you’re not a fan of his books, it’s invaluable to the in-development writer. Heck, it’s invaluable to all writers.

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Short Takes

June 3, 2020, reading (stephen king) to learn to write, a "starter's guide" to the king of terror, from the new york times, is a reminder that learning happens in many forms.

By Jacqui Banaszynski

Tagged with

Stephen King

It washed up in my inbox with the flood of all the other summer reading lists. I’ve never understood why summer, when in theory we have longer days and perhaps a bit more leisure, has us lean towards frothy reads, but then I don’t understand the lure of a sticky, sweaty body after a day at the beach, either. Give me a trail through the forest, a cold mountain stream, and a book that holds you in its grip.

Sniff if you want at the idea of a Stephen King thriller being that kind of book. He’s definitely not everyone’s cuppa — nor has me been mine for most of the last 30 years. But for a good 15 before that, as I was easing back into fiction after the blinding required reading of college and, more important, as I was trying to learn how to write news pieces that someone would compel someone to get to the end, I was among the gripped.

And now here he was again, with a guide from none other than the New York Times. I opened it out of idle curiosity, and soon was making a list of hen started a few King novel’s I had never read, and some I wanted to read again — kicking myself, of course, for taking a shelf-full to the used book store several years back.

The Times’ offers an interesting selection of mostly King classics and a few newer works. But what stood out for me were the summaries that came with the recommendations. Rather than the usual quick recap of the book’s plot or even a mini-review, they are smart notes about what is noteworthy in literary terms: character development, suspense and pacing, big themes and more. (The summaries also provide appropriate warnings to the scariest of King’s 70-plus books. And much to my delight, it flagged some of the books that aren’t scary, but just damned good. Among them: “Different Seasons” and, now on my read list, “11/22/1963.” )

I was never schooled in writing. Grammar, yes, but not the other things that come with the literary craft. I bashed my way forward as a reporter who lucked into a few good editors who helped me clean up my notebook dumps. And I read pretty constantly — everything from fiction to other journalists to the back of the toothpaste tube. (I can still recite most of the Crest blurb.).

Then, in my 20s and early 30s, I read a lot of Stephen King. I still remember sitting up through the night, not able to put down “The Shining.” I woke up my newish partner about 3 a.m., insisting I had to finish the book but needed lights and company to do so. To his credit, he shook himself awake, propped himself up and sat with me. A keeper. Some years later we read “The Bachman Books” aloud to each other on a backpacking trip. Somewhere along the way, “The Stand”  held me in its thrall with its biblical themes of good and evil set in a modern context and fraught with politics rather than religion.

During the same stretch, I had set out on a mission to read at least one of the “classics” each year — an education I had mostly missed in school. With them, I was intrigued by the writing conventions of the time, and the mind game of what made them “classics.”

But it was King who held sway over my hand as I turned the pages, and kept turning them, chapter after chapter, no matter the hour or the frankly ridiculous nature of the story. I still remember moments when I would stop with a wannabe writer’s curse of envy and go backwards a few pages, trying to figure out his tricks. (Hint: Foreshadow then hold, hold, hold before the delivery. I once heard Chris Jones, longtime senior writer at Esquire, do an entire keynote on how narrative writing is like a card trick : It’s all about setting up the reveal.)

Fast forward: I’ve moved on from King and am somewhat established in my own career. I am one of six American journalists teaching a workshop in Paris. Over lunch, the French journalists at my table ask me where I learned to write. I hesitate — because I never did and still don’t feel I ever really learned how to write — and finally say: “Stephen King novels.” The table grew uncomfortable quiet. Confused, I turned to the Portuguese journalist seated next to me — who was the only one still looking at me — and asked what had happened. He gently explained the role and standing of French journalists, and how they tended to view a lot of American journalism as “low brow.” Apparently I had just reinforced that notion.

To which I say: “C’est dommage.” The dude didn’t get rich on his good looks alone.

Improving Student Writing through Reading Strategies

In their MLA Style Center post “Reading Is Not One Thing,” Annie Del Principe and Rachel Ihara make some excellent points about student reading behaviors. They observe that reading a text carefully while marking key passages and making notes in the margins, while once traditional, is no longer required in every class or discipline. The cursory, nonlinear reading that many students do often yields the information they are looking for, especially online. Perhaps this should not surprise us. As Del Principe and Ihara note, experienced academic readers also read selectively to see if a text merits closer attention. (In fact, I skimmed Del Principe and Ihara’s article the first time through!) The authors argue that “[t]hese strategies are not shortcuts or signs of laziness; rather, they are skillful, smart approaches appropriate to our goals and purposes and to the genres we are reading.” I agree in many instances.

Why Deep Reading Is Valuable

That said, what Nicholas Carr characterizes as deep reading is still a valuable skill (97). For one thing, good writing is unlikely without deep reading. Composition courses emphasize documentation (as readers of The MLA Style Center know), but students also learn about essay content and structure from exposure to effective models . Instructors can teach students to notice and analyze authors’ rhetorical moves and to practice applying those techniques in their own writing.

In the classroom, writing instructors may focus on fewer texts so they can spend time helping students read more actively and deeply. In my classes, I demonstrate how I approach an article, a story, or a poem by “thinking aloud” to show the mental connections I make when I read (Schoenbach et al. 101). I read a few lines of the text (a paragraph or less) out loud slowly, verbalizing the thoughts, questions, and associations that come to my mind as I read. After I model the process, students take turns verbalizing their own reading thoughts in pairs or small groups. I also show various ways to annotate or mark the text and, again, give students time to experiment. As the semester progresses, students use these reading strategies and others to connect with assigned texts both in and outside class. Our group discussions are better, and many students seem more engaged as a result.

How Reading and Writing Intersect

In more than twenty years of experience teaching composition and working in a writing center, I have seen many ways that reading intersects with writing:

• In all disciplines, reading is an important precursor to writing on a purely informational level. Students must understand a topic before they can write coherently about it. They must do the research before they can write a research paper.
• Students who read widely (in any genre) usually have a greater command of vocabulary and the nuances of written expression. Many readers also absorb correct grammar and punctuation subconsciously, whether or not they know the rules behind when to use a comma. The poet Jane Kenyon’s advice to “have good sentences in your ears” is often quoted for a reason (qtd. in Popova) .
• This relationship between reading and writing is not a new concept. Reflecting on his writing process, for instance, the popular author Stephen King notes the value of ineffective models as well as inspirational ones. “One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose,” he says. In contrast, “[g]ood writing . . . teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth telling” (211). While fiction writing is less emphasized in academia, the principle holds true.
• Finally, college writers need a deeper knowledge of their subject to think—and write—critically about it. Whether it be anthropology, economics, or literature, that knowledge often comes from scholarly articles and books, whether in print or online.

In our digital society, we have become accustomed to easy access to information; however, the metacognitive work of active reading is still necessary for effective writing. Google and YouTube are useful, but there are things they cannot provide.

Using Reading Strategies in the Writing Center

Learning assistance benefits from cross-pollination with reading as well. Some training and practice with reading strategies is a valuable addition to the skills of any tutor, especially in the writing center. Writing tutors focus primarily on the process of developing an essay, but they can also demonstrate and encourage reading strategies on multiple levels:  

• The text that tutors and students look at together most frequently is the writing prompt assigned by the teacher. Tutors should model how to break the prompt into manageable parts; point out questions, key terms, and other significant features; and help tutees interpret unfamiliar vocabulary.
• Tutors can read both writing prompts and student papers aloud and verbalize their thoughts. This gives tutees some “reader response” feedback and often helps them feel more comfortable sharing their own thoughts and questions.
• Embedded tutors who work with students in a specific class have even more opportunity to coach students in reading skills because they are familiar with the teacher’s expectations and the assigned texts as well as the required writing.

Ultimately, tutors are ideally situated to support metacognitive development by helping students recognize, evaluate, and adapt the ways they approach both reading and writing in college courses.

Modeling Literacy Expectations

Reading—in all its variety—is a key method of accessing information and understanding concepts in every academic field and in the world at large. Students have limited experience, so college instructors who want their students to engage effectively with the course material must take responsibility for explaining and modeling the literacy expectations of their disciplines. Tutors can help, but teachers need to “make the invisible visible” by showing students the cognitive moves that seem natural to them after years of study and specialization (Schoenbach et al. 23). To quote Del Principe and Ihara again, we must “slow down our instructional pace to make space to model and enact the types of reading we think are valuable and will work best in our classes for our students.” Then we must scaffold assignments that facilitate their learning. This takes time and effort, but the results are worth it for both students and instructors.

Works Cited

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology , edited by Samuel Cohen, 5th ed., Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2017, pp. 87–97.

Del Principe, Annie, and Rachel Ihara. “Reading Is Not One Thing.” The MLA Style Center , 27 Aug. 2019, style.mla.org/variability-of-reading-practices/.

King, Stephen. “Reading to Write.” 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology , edited by Samuel Cohen, 5th ed., Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2017, pp. 210–14.

Popova, Maria. “Poet Jane Kenyon’s Advice on Writing: Some of the Wisest Words to Create and Live By.” Brain Pickings , 15 Sept. 2015, www.brainpickings.org/2015/09/15/jane-kenyon-advice-on-writing/.

Schoenbach, Ruth, et al. Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves  Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms . 2nd ed., Jossey Bass, 2012.

Jamil 10 November 2021 AT 01:11 PM

Your article is excellent

Your e-mail address will not be published

Sophy sophi 16 November 2021 AT 12:11 AM

The work is awesome...what are the reading strategies that one can adopt that can help in writing a term paper?

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On Writing by Stephen King: Summary & Notes

Rated : 8/10

Available at: Amazon

ISBN:  9781439156810

Related:   Dreyer‚Äôs English , On Writing Well

Get access to my collection of 100+ detailed book notes

An entertaining mix of autobiography & guide to writing. More focused on fiction than other writing guides, and easier to read.

Lighter on writing and grammar rules, but useful because King shows that many of the commonly held beliefs about writing fiction can be ignored.

• The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
• It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

Chapter 2 - What Writing Is

• Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

Chapter 3 - Toolbox

• Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.
• Avoid the passive tense.
• Avoid adverbs.
• The best form of dialogue attribution is said.
• There should be lots of short paragraphs and white space in an easy-to-read book.
• Even in the informal essay, however, it’s possible to see how strong the basic paragraph form can be. Topic-sentence-followed-by-support-and-description insists that the writer organize his/her thoughts, and it also provides good insurance against wandering away from the topic.

Chapter 4 - On Writing

• I am approaching the heart of this book with two theses, both simple. The first is that good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments. The second is that while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
• But if you don’t want to work your ass off, you have no business trying to write well—settle back into competency and be grateful you have even that much to fall back on.
• If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
• I believe the first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season. Any longer and—for me, at least—the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel.
• I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book—something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
• The biggest aid to regular (Trollopian?) production is working in a serene atmosphere.
• You can read anywhere, almost, but when it comes to writing, library carrels, park benches, and rented flats should be courts of last resort—Truman Capote said he did his best work in motel rooms, but he is an exception; most of us do our best in a place of our own.
• By the time you step into your new writing space and close the door, you should have settled on a daily writing goal. As with physical exercise, it would be best to set this goal low at first, to avoid discouragement. I suggest a thousand words a day, and because I’m feeling magnanimous, I’ll also suggest that you can take one day a week off, at least to begin with. No more; you’ll lose the urgency and immediacy of your story if you do.
• Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all … as long as you tell the truth.
• Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. Especially work. People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do.
• In my view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.
• You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere.
• I’m not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they’re wearing.
• I think locale and texture are much more important to the reader’s sense of actually being in the story than any physical description of the players. Nor do I think that physical description should be a shortcut to character.
• The key to good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary.
• Your job is to say what you see, and then to get on with your story.
• Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%
• You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself. These lessons almost always occur with the study door closed.
• The most important thing you can do for yourself is read the market.

Chapter 5 - On Living: A Postscript

• 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. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
• The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.

And Furthermore, Part II: A Booklist

• Bryson, Bill: A Walk in the Woods
• Buckley, Christopher: Thank You for Smoking
• Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist
• Faulkner, William: As I Lay Dying
• Gerritsen, Tess: Gravity
• Golding, William: Lord of the Flies
• Hunter, Stephen: Dirty White Boys
• Krakauer, Jon: Into Thin Air
• Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird
• Schwartz, John Burnham: Reservation Road
• Smith, Dinitia: The Illusionist
• Spencer, Scott: Men in Black
• Vonnegut, Kurt: Hocus Pocus

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Stephen King Revisited

Essays, memories, and even a little history…, racing the king by wrath james white.

Beginning with the very first book I ever read, I developed the habit (or perhaps compulsion is a better word) of picking a subject matter and reading every book written on that subject in the three local libraries I had access to—Lovett Memorial Library, Northwest Regional Library, and the little library at Lingelbach Elementary School. The first subject I latched onto, like many six-year-old boys, was dinosaurs.

My grandmother, Luvader Logan, bought me my very first dinosaur book. I was instantly obsessed. Over the course of that year, I read every book in all three libraries on prehistoric beasts. Then came modern animals, both wild and domesticated, then paranormal phenomena, aliens, and then the Tolkien trilogy. Then I read Firestarter .

Firestarter was the book that began my love affair with the writings of Stephen King. I was eleven or twelve when I first read it back in 1982. I’ve read it seven or eight times since. What fascinated me, captivated me, about that book was it required far less suspension of disbelief than reading about hobbits and trolls. I believed Firestarter . I believed in pyrokinesis and mental domination. I wasn’t suspending my disbelief. Stephen King had actually convinced me these things were possible, at least for the duration of the novel, and that completely awed me. So, my new quest was to read everything Stephen King had ever written.

The problem, however, was that I had a late start, and the good Mr. King was still writing. This was the early eighties, when he was throwing down six thousand words a day and cranking out two to three books a year. But I was on a mission.

I imagined we were in a competition, that he was in on this crazy game with me. I read Cujo and Salem’s Lot . He wrote Christine and Pet Sematary . I read Carrie , The Stand , The Dead Zone , and Cycle of the Werewolf . He wrote The Talisman . I read Christine and Pet Sematary . He wrote It , Misery , and The Tommyknockers . It was a race I was determined to win. I would not be denied.

In one year, I read Night Shift , The Talisman , The Shining , The Dead Zone , Different Seasons , Eyes of The Dragon , and Skeleton Crew . I even convinced my high school English teacher to allow me to read It instead of Julius Caesar because it was “more relevant to my development as a writer in today’s market.”

I was catching him. No one, not even the wildly prolific Mr. Stephen King, could write faster than I could read. And, somewhere between 1987 and 1988, right before graduating from the Philadelphia High School of the Creative and Performing Arts, I caught up. I had read every Stephen King novel written up to that point (with the exception of The Dark Tower ), or so I thought. That’s when my then best friend and fellow Creative Writing major told me about “The Bachman Books.”

“The what?”

“The Bachman Books? Come on, you know. Stephen King wrote a bunch of books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. They talked about it in Writer’s Digest a couple years ago.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”

What fuckery was this? I had been tricked, fooled, bamboozled! Mr. King hadn’t played fair. I’d read everything he had written to that point, even the new stuff, while keeping up with my school work and all my other reading and writing assignments. Even as his books grew longer and longer, I’d still managed to read them all. But he had been slipping books past me the entire time. I was pissed. Unreasonably so. But I wasn’t ready to give up. So, I read Rage , Roadwork , The Long Walk , Thinner , and finally, The Running Man .

The Bachman novels were noticeably different. They were bleaker. The heroes weren’t terribly heroic. Ben Richards, for example, was kind of racist, sexist, and homophobic. The n-word fell from his lips too effortlessly, as did “faggot” and other unflattering terms. Yet, I knew guys like him. Uncivilized, crude, anti-authoritarian, yet intelligent and possessed of a bravery born of hopelessness and desperation. And we were all a little racist, sexist, and homophobic back then. They were less enlightened times. I look back on some of the ideas and opinions I held in the 80s and cringe. Ben Richards wasn’t a great guy, but I could relate to him. He was from the streets, just like me.

I grew up in a part of Philadelphia that guys who looked like Stephen King couldn’t walk safely through at night. Yet, I was betting on my ability to tell a scary story to get me out. My odds weren’t terribly better than Ben Richards’s odds of avoiding the hunters for 30 days.

The cops in my neighborhood were as brutal and corrupt as those chasing Ben Richards. You could bribe a Philly cop out of a traffic ticket with five bucks back in the 80s, and everyone knew you got the best weed from cops. They would take it from white college kids, let them off with a warning, and sell it back to us. You wanted an untraceable firearm? Buy it from a cop. That’s what Philly was like in the 80s. Those of us who knew how to navigate all that corruption and criminality did okay. Others? Not so much.

The folks who lived in the more affluent neighborhoods like Mount Airy and Chestnut Hill were as oblivious and indifferent to how the rest of us lived as Amelia Williams was to the lives of the contestants on The Running Man , plucked from the slums to die for the amusement of the well-to-do while maintaining the facade that they had a fair chance.

Just like the wonderful folks who reply “All Lives Matter” as a way to silence those proclaiming the equal value of Black American lives, Amelia and her ilk fervently believed the contestants they saw slaughtered on the “Free-Vee” were hardened criminals, anarchists, and murderers rather than poor people trying to scrape out a living any way they could, reduced to bartering their lives for the lives of their families. They believed the underclass were all animals who would have come for their posh insulated lives, destroyed their entire way of life, raped their women, and murdered their kids had they not been stopped. Their deaths were justified by how and where they lived.

The poor are dangerous. This wasn’t just an idea manufactured by Mr. King to give his novel more drama. This is how the upper class always looked upon us on the bottom. We were dangerous, subhuman, savages, impossible to empathize with, unworthy of sympathy. If we only worked harder, we wouldn’t be in the situations we were in. In their eyes, our poverty was proof of our laziness and poor character. The same dehumanization that allowed the upper-class citizens of King’s dystopian future to watch poor people murdered for sport is what has allowed that same class of people to watch people of color in this country murdered by police while justifying and excusing it.

“He shouldn’t have run.”

“He shouldn’t have resisted.”

“She shouldn’t have talked back.”

“She should have followed the officer’s instructions quicker.”

“He must have been doing something wrong, or he wouldn’t have been stopped.”

Over the years, King’s vision of 2028 has come to me again and again in sudden bursts of déjà vu as reality shows like Cops , America’s Most Wanted , and even The Ultimate Fighting Championships hit the airwaves. When I was twenty-four, awaiting the birth of my first child while working as a bouncer at a nightclub, I watched the very first UFC and began training to enter it. I fought in No-Holds-Barred tournaments all over The Bay Area for a few hundred dollars to buy food and clothing for my wife and son.

When the economy imploded in 2009 and I lost my ninety-thousand-dollar-a-year job as a construction manager, I considered coming out of retirement, at forty years of age, and taking a few fights just to put food on the table. I was older, slower, with joints that ached with arthritis and injury from all the abuse I had put my body through in the ring and the cage, but I was ready to risk my life to feed my family. I knew exactly how Ben Richards must have felt.

Luckily, it didn’t come to that. I sold a few manuscripts instead. But who knows what may have happened if no one purchased my novels. If the country was ruled by an omnipotent TV network, and the only way to take care of my family was to enter contests like “Treadmill to Bucks,” “Swim The Crocodiles,” “Run For Your Guns,” or “The Running Man.” See, the wonderful thing about Stephen King’s writing, just as I’d discovered almost forty years prior when I was an eleven-year-old kid reading Firestarter for the first time, was that it didn’t require much suspension of disbelief to imagine myself making the choices Ben Richards made. I was convinced I would do it. Given the choice between letting my family starve or running from an entire country eager to kill me, for a slim chance at a better life for my loved ones, I would have gone out the same way Ben Richards did, grinning and giving the establishment the finger.

Oh, and if you’re wondering if I ever caught up, if I ever managed to read everything Stephen King has ever written, I didn’t. But the game isn’t over.

The complete list of the books to be read can be found on the  Stephen King Books In Chronological Order For Stephen King Revisited Reading Lists  page. To be notified of new posts and updates via email, please sign-up using the box on the right side or the bottom of this site.

WRATH JAMES WHITE is a former World Class Heavyweight Kickboxer, a professional Kickboxing and Mixed Martial Arts trainer, distance runner, performance artist, and former street brawler, who is now known for creating some of the most disturbing works of fiction in print.

Wrath is the author of such extreme horror classics as THE RESURRECTIONIST (now a major motion picture titled “Come Back To Me”) SUCCULENT PREY, and its sequel PREY DRIVE, HORRIBLE GODS, YACCUB’S CURSE, 400 DAYS OF OPPRESSION, SACRIFICE, VORACIOUS, TO THE DEATH, THE REAPER, SKINZZ, EVERYONE DIES FAMOUS IN A SMALL TOWN, THE BOOK OF A THOUSAND SINS, HIS PAIN, POPULATION ZERO and many others. He is the co-author of TERATOLOGIST co-written with the king of extreme horror, Edward Lee, SOMETHING TERRIBLE co-written with his son Sultan Z. White, ORGY OF SOULS co-written with Maurice Broaddus, HERO and THE KILLINGS both co-written with J.F. Gonzalez, POISONING EROS co-written with Monica J. O’Rourke, among others.

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Roadwork Revisited by J.D. Barker

I purposely haven ’ t read the essays by the other authors in this book. I wanted to approach this with a clean slate, no preconceived notions, no roadmap. Most likely, that means I ’ m doing it all wrong. If I am, I apologize for that. I ’ ve never been good at following directions. After (God, has it really been) forty-plus years of reading King and Bachman, I get the distinct feeling that King tends to follow most directions in life while Bachman is more likely to scoff when someone tells him what to do, take their suggestions under advisement, then do whatever the hell he wanted to do before that someone rudely interrupted him.

We all have that inner voice, the devil camped out on our shoulder whispering in our ear. The difference here is King made a conscious decision to grant his life, set him free. He handed him a Black Beauty pencil and pad, pointed at an armchair across the room, and said, “ You do your thing, and I ’ ll be over here doing mine. Curious to see what you come up with. ”

The weekend psychologist in me has often wondered how exactly that worked, but it did. And the odd thing is, there are distinct differences between the two. Voice, cadence, sentence structure … the stories themselves. Bachman will say things King wouldn ’ t dare. Those differences grew over the years. In many ways, this is a testament to King ’ s ability to tell a story, to create a character. Bachman started as an idea on the page and eventually became someone else living in the house. I can see the two of them fighting over the remote, because they wouldn ’ t want to watch the same thing. Tabitha is probably the real hero of the story. She somehow managed to keep them both in line.

As an author, I get it. The moment you write a book, everyone wants to tag you with a label and stuff you into the appropriate genre box. Heaven forbid you write fast and gum up the publisher ’ s production line with too many titles. Using a pseudonym granted King the ability to skirt both those problems. He ’ s also used John Swithen and Beryl Evans. Although the two of them were more like passing acquaintances, while Bachman was akin to that old friend who popped up every few years, crashed on the couch for a bit, then vanished again after leaving a note on the coffee table with a few bucks to cover groceries.

Just as the members of a successful band sometimes do side projects, Bachman, I imagine, was also a much-needed outlet. King ’ s books were successful right out of the gate. Bachman ’ s got relegated to the back of the rack, and that kind of anonymity offers a lot of freedom.

I ’ ve had Roadwork up on the shelf for some time. I ’ ve got a first edition paperback with Bachman on the cover, no mention of King. I do remember knowing King wrote it when I bought it, so I imagine I picked it up sometime around 1985, most likely at the long defunct used bookstore in Englewood, Florida. I would have been fourteen at the time, having just moved to the sunshine state from Illinois. I finished reading it on 2/10/1986, again on 10/19/2009, and most recently on 3/20/2020. I know this, because anytime I read a book, I sign and date it in the back—a habit I started back when I was ten after finding a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes at a garage sale with signatures and dates on the last page going back almost a hundred years. When I first saw that, it made me realize how books live a quiet life of their own—read, borrowed, sold, given—most will outlive us. The book you ’ re reading right now is only visiting. Where will it go when you ’ re done? Up on a shelf? Off into the world? Or will it vanish with the flick of a power switch? I guess that ’ s up to you, but if it ’ s a physical copy and someone picks it up a century from now, wouldn ’ t it be cool if they saw your signature and date?

Roadwork is about a man named Barton George Dawes, who learns a highway extension is about to be built in his backyard, literally. His house will be demolished. His neighbors’ homes. Even the laundromat where he works is on the chopping block. Someone else ’ s idea of progress is set to dismantle his life. Bart doesn ’ t take the news well. He ’ s compensated financially for the house but doesn ’ t buy a replacement. He ’ s tasked with finding a new location for the laundromat but lets the deal fall apart. When his wife learns about the numerous balls he ’ s dropped, she leaves him. Bart is not in a good place, and led by his anger, begins exploring ways to put an end to the construction project, with very little consideration of what that means for him.

The story struck home with me for a silly reason. Several years before, back in Illinois, my friends and I considered a real-life plot similar to the one in the book. My parents had bought a forest and built our family home in the middle when I was still in diapers. That forest was our childhood playground for the years that followed—riding ATVs, playing capture the flag, hide and seek—everything we did took place in those woods. Around the time I was thirteen, my friends and I learned that someone bought the sod farm next door to our forest and planned to build a shopping mall there. That night at dinner, my parents told my sister and me the same company made them an offer on the forest, and they planned to accept. Our world came apart. For the weeks that followed, every kid in the neighborhood had a singular thought—how do we stop this from happening? There were talks of dynamite, sabotage. We even considered telling people the forest was built on an old Indian graveyard, land that had to be preserved. That was probably our best idea. None of it played out, though. Kids don ’ t have access to dynamite. Sabotage is scary. And when children tell stories of old, haunted burial grounds, adults shrug it off and refer back to these crazy things called “ town records ” that held no mention of such a thing.

The sod farm sold.

My parents’ land sold.

Our house sold, and we made the move to Florida.

They broke ground on the shopping mall about the same time I found Roadwork in that old bookstore and read the jacket copy. So the first time I met Barton George Dawes, I think I related to him in a roundabout way. I understood his frustration and anger. My shopping mall was his road, and my teenage brain wanted to see him succeed. This was a time when Stallone and Schwarzenegger ruled the box office and the A-Team dominated television. Problems were solved with explosions and gunshots. Shouldn ’ t Bart be allowed his revenge? Damn right, he should.

What would Rambo do?

Ah, the eighties.

I ’ ve always liked the way books take on different meanings if you read them at different times in your life. That ’ s all I really remember from that early read. Bart ’ s drive, the action stuff. I remember him being horribly pissed off, trying to do something about it, and failing miserably.

I wouldn ’ t pluck it down off the bookshelf again until I was thirty-eight and fast approaching my first midlife crisis (yes, you can have more than one). I was trapped in a job I hated (I really wanted to be a writer), a marriage slowly moving toward the finish line (she didn ’ t understand why I wanted to write when I had a real job), and my father had recently passed away with cancer.

I ’ ve always read a lot, and a handful of books had made my shortlist of repeat-worthy:

All the classics—Dickens, Golding, Orwell, Brontë , Stoker, Twain, Austen, Vonnegut, Bradbury …

Anything by Thomas Harris.

Anything by Stephen King.

Life ’ s too short to read a bad book, but there ’ s certainly enough time to go back and revisit the good ones a couple times. For every three or four new books I read, I ’ ll go back and pull one of the above down and give it another look. In October 2009, Roadwork was back on deck, and I nearly missed it. It ’ s a small paperback and was tucked in with the B ’ s rather than the several shelves of King books I ’ d accumulated at that point. I ’ d completely forgotten about it. It ’ s not one of his bestsellers. I ’ m not sure it was even a mediocre seller. I barely remembered the story, and I think that ’ s what compelled me to give it another go.

About twenty pages in, I remember thinking, This is King, but it isn ’ t . His innate ability to develop a character in only a handful of sentences was there. The inner thoughts and structure that completely hooked me in Gerald’s Game  were there, too. But this didn ’ t feel like a King book. There was no supernatural element. He used the phrase “ a long second, ” the bastard cousin of “ a long moment, ” something he ’ s complained about on Twitter when found in other books. There was horror, but this particular horror had a strange sense of realness to it. One I found unnerving. Unlike most King books, this story could happen. Easily. I personally find that far more frightening than some of the other night-bumpers he ’ s created over the years. Bart was a monster. Bart could be living right across the street. Bart might be ahead of you in line at the supermarket. Behind you at the gas pump. This world is filled with Bart s —we ’ ve seen them in the headlines on the regular.

When my younger self read this book the first time, it was the action that grabbed me. This time, twenty-some years later, it was that human element. Bart was in a bad place. He went dark, and then he only got worse. His high school yearbook said he was the class clown, but life had thrown one horrible event at him after another, and this rapid fire of suffering changed him, beat him down. You can feel the pain in his thoughts, his every action. Again, I related to Bart, not because of what he wanted to do but because of what he had been through.

I later learned King lost his mother to cancer around the same time he wrote this book, and while my younger self wouldn ’ t have noticed the influence of something like that in an author ’ s work, there was no denying it here. Bart bled for him. When I closed the cover on that second read, I thought about the loss of my father a lot. I missed him. On that second read, I found myself wondering about Olivia, too. The young girl who spends a night with Bart before thumbing her way to Nevada in search of something better. I didn ’ t remember her from my first read, but by this time in my life, I had known my share of Olivias. I ’ d seen girls just like her get on a bus all bright-eyed, only to return years later with the sheen gone. I can ’ t help but wonder if she ever came back and learned just what Bart did.

Fast-forward to 2020. I received an e-mail from Brian Freeman of Cemetery Dance, asking if I ’ d like to read Roadwork and contribute an essay to Stephen King Revisited . For the third time in my life, I reached for that tattered paperback and settled into a comfortable chair. Much had changed in my own life since my last read—I met and married the most incredible woman. I write full time now. And we have a little girl. Again, I had changed. While the book itself was comfortingly familiar, one particular scene jumped out at me, one I didn ’ t recall from my first two visits with Barton George Dawes. He goes up into the attic of his soon- to -be demolished home and opens a box of his son ’ s clothing, sifts through the contents. His son, Charlie, had died of a brain tumor.

I nearly closed the book at that point and put it away.

I could hear my own little girl laughing with her mother in the other room, and just the thought of losing a child was too much. It wasn ’ t something I wanted in my head. Not ever.

My younger (non-parent) self had glossed right over this scene, not once but twice.

That is the magic of a good book.

While the words don ’ t change, the meaning, their impact, might. It ’ s one of the main reasons I revisit the good ones.

Roadwork is dark. It ’ s unforgiving.

It ’ s one of the good ones .

If your reading of King has been limited to the big hitters, pick this one up and give it a shot. You ’ ll find hints of the author he ’ d later become, but more importantly, you ’ ll see where he came from. This is Springsteen before the Nebraska album , and every note hits home.

J.D. Barker is an international bestselling American author whose work has been broadly described as suspense thrillers, often incorporating elements of horror, crime, mystery, science fiction, and the supernatural. Find him on the web at jdbarker.com

Richard Chizmar’s Latest Project: GWENDY’S BUTTON BOX co-written with Stephen King

As most of you probably know by now, Richard Chizmar hasn’t had a lot of time to write his essay for The Talisman (although he promises it is on the way!) because he’s been busy writing and then promoting his new novella, Gwendy’s Button Box, which he co-wrote with Stephen King!

If this is news to you, a great way to catch-up is to read this story in  Entertainment Weekly : Stephen King made a frightening proposal with Gwendy’s Button Box: Write a story with him.

The Eyes of the Dragon Revisited by Joseph Maddrey

What really got me was the author’s voice. Stephen King conveyed a sense of awe about his fictional world, constantly dropping hints that there were countless stories within his story. It was as if the world of his imagination was comprised of fictional fractals. Even more importantly, he expressed a contagious curiosity about his characters. I felt like he knew them all as real, flesh-and-blood people and cared about every move and every decision they made. As a result I cared about them too, and I quickly realized that this myth was not really about dungeons and dragons, but about human relationships—particularly the relationships between two fathers and two sons.

King Roland, the biological father of Peter and Thomas, is essentially a good man—but weak. Prince Peter is a good man like his father, but strong like his mother. Prince Thomas is weak like his father, and thus susceptible to the manipulation of a surrogate father-figure named Flagg, who is strong but evil. King assures us, however, that Thomas is NOT evil like Flagg…. And it was this assurance that resonated with me as an eleven-year-old boy. » Read more

Revisiting The Eyes of the Dragon by Richard Chizmar

THAT WAS THEN…

Well, this should be an easy one.

Roadwork was the first of the pair, and despite its overwhelmingly dark nature and (at times) rough prose, I greatly enjoyed that initial reading and regretted not doing so earlier.

And so now, ladies and gents, we come to the final Stephen King book I’ve somehow managed to never crack open: The Eyes of the Dragon .

My reasoning these past nearly thirty years was simple (and clearly misguided; but more on that later): Eyes of the Dragon, huh? It sounds a little too fantasy-oriented for my tastes. Castles. Dragons. Kings and Queens. Heck, there are probably a dozen characters with names I can’t even pronounce. And elves, I bet you anything there are elves running around a dark forest. And fairies living up in the treetops. And…

…and no thanks. I’ll pass for now and get around to it one day. When I have nothing else tempting to read.

But I never did. » Read more

The Two Princes by Bev Vincent

By the age of thirteen, King’s daughter, Naomi, was an avid reader but hadn’t read any of his books [1] , even though her younger brother, Joe, had already read two. Her mother pushed her to read some horror with the idea that it would be another way for her to know her father. However, she made it clear to him that she had “very little interest in my vampires, Ghoulies and slushy crawling things.” So, as he wrote in a letter for Viking Press [2] , “I decided that if the mountain would not go to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain.”

He started working on the story, originally called The Napkins , in their house in western Maine. He wrote on a yellow legal pad in front of a woodstove while a screaming northeaster blew snow across the frozen lake outside. King had recently been working on The Talisman with Peter Straub, so the fantasy land of the Territories was fresh in his mind. He wrote The Eyes of the Dragon at the same time as he was writing Misery , working on one in the morning and the other at night, completing the first draft in 1983.

Naomi, he admits, took hold of the manuscript with a marked lack of enthusiasm, but he was rewarded. The story kidnapped her and the only thing wrong with it, she told him later, was that she didn’t want it to end. » Read more

A Stony Heart by Stewart O’Nan

Of all Stephen King’s early novels, Pet Sematary is the simplest and direst. A sustained riff on W.W. Jacobs’ classic “The Monkey’s Paw,” it cleaves to its twisted source. From the very beginning the reader knows the story: someone is going to die, and someone who can’t bear to let that loved one go will make a desperate bargain to raise him from the dead.  What happens then—the awful complications—is what the reader wants to see.

Was there ever a balder promise? And by 1983, King’s constant readers didn’t have to wonder if he’d balk at killing a child. Just two years before, the author who’d spared Mark Petrie in ‘Salem’s Lot and Danny Torrance in The Shining had already crossed that line in Cujo.

Set-up, build-up, payoff. Basic storytelling. In this case, we think we know the set-up and build-up. The author can throw variations at us, and delay, which he does, introducing a dying student who warns Louis to steer clear of the Pet Sematary, later using the family cat, Church, as a test case for its powers, but ultimately a child must die. Early on it feels as if King is running a subtle shell game, making us guess which one it will be, with both Gage, the adorable toddler, and Ellie, the needy kindergartener, slipping away unnoticed from their distracted parents.  When the accident inevitably happens, it’s a shock, mainly because of how it’s presented. » Read more

Revisiting Pet Sematary by Richard Chizmar

I can’t remember when I first read Pet Sematary or where I was when I first read it (unusual for me). All I really remember is the story , and my intense reaction to it.

So…I was young. That much I know. Brand shiny new to the perils of adulthood. Wide-eyed, unmarried, and childless.

And still Pet Sematary destroyed me.

‘Salem’s Lot and Carrie and The Shining had thrilled me and scared me – but Pet Sematary was different. Once things went bad (and this happened quickly by King standards; only about a third of the way into the book), they not only stayed bad, they kept getting worse. Much worse. The rest of the book was a dark spiral and there were no reprieves to be found anywhere. The story was grim and unrelenting and profoundly unpleasant…yet I couldn’t stop reading.

King spends the first third of Pet Sematary introducing and establishing a fairly small (for him) cast of characters and a wonderful sense of place. Ludlow, Maine is the kind of small, picturesque New England town so many of us wish we had grown up in, and the Creeds and the Crandalls are the kind of folks we wish we had grown up across the street from: kind, big-hearted, interesting, companionable folks with a real sense of friendship and loyalty. » Read more

A Man’s Heart Is Stonier by Bev Vincent

In 1978, Stephen King was invited to be writer in residence at the English department of his alma mater, the University of Maine at Orono. He moved his family into a rented house on a major highway in Orrington. The heavy traffic included transports heading to and from a nearby chemical plant. A new neighbor warned the Kings to keep their pets and children away from this road, which had “used up a lot of animals.” [1] In support of this claim, the Kings discovered a burial ground not far from the house, with “Pets Sematary” written on a sign in a childish hand. Among its residents: dogs, cats, birds, and a goat.

The road almost “used up” the Kings’ youngest son, too. Owen was about eighteen months old when he wandered dangerously close to the highway. To this day, King isn’t sure whether he knocked Owen down before he reached the highway as a tanker approached or if the boy tripped over his own feet. Owen had been born with an unusually large head, and the Kings had already agonized over the possibility of losing him to hydrocephalus. This near miss was an unwelcome reminder of the fragility of their children. » Read more

Revisiting Cycle of the Werewolf by Richard Chizmar

Cycle of the Werewolf was yet another Carol’s Used Bookstore find for me. I had somehow completely missed the spring 1985 release, so when I stumbled upon a used copy of the Signet trade paperback on the crowded shelves at Carol’s it was a total surprise to me – and what a wonderful surprise it turned out to be!

Clocking in at a mere 127 pages, Cycle was a slender volume, especially compared to my earlier Stephen King reads. That was my first impression, and I remember feeling mild disappointment because it was so short. But then I opened the glossy, black cover and flipped a couple pages, and that feeling went away pretty darn fast.

There was artwork inside – both color and black-and-white illustrations – and so much of it! In fact, I couldn’t turn more than a page or two without being confronted with yet another magnificent, visual feast. Full-page paintings, two-page spreads, even spot art! I flipped back to the cover and saw that the illustrator was a guy named Bernie Wrightson. I made a mental note to remember his name (not realizing at the time that I already knew his amazing work from many previous comic book excursions).

And then there was the story…boy, what a fun, old-fashioned story. I couldn’t even remember the last werewolf novel I had read, much less one presented in such a unique manner. » Read more

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Read an Excerpt from Stephen King’s You Like It Darker

When a famous writer dies at ninety, his son investigates the defining friendship of his life. Turns out the old man kept his friends close—and his secrets closer.

My father—my famous father—died in 2023, at the age of ninety. Two years before he passed, he got an email from a freelance writer named Ruth Crawford asking him for an interview. I read it to him, as I did all his personal and business correspondence, because by then he’d given up his electronic devices—first his desktop computer, then his laptop, and finally his beloved phone. His eyesight stayed good right up to the end, but he said that looking at the iPhone’s screen gave him a headache. At the reception following the funeral, Doc Goodwin told me that Pop might have suffered a series of mini-strokes leading up to the big one.

Around the time he gave up his phone—this would have been five or six years before he died—I took early retirement from my position as Castle County School Superintendent, and went to work for Dad full-time. There was plenty to do. He had a housekeeper, but those duties fell to me at night and on the weekends. I helped him dress in the morning and undress at night. I did most of the cooking, and cleaned up the occasional mess when Pop couldn’t make it to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

He had a handyman as well, but by then Jimmy Griggs was pushing eighty himself, and so I found myself doing the chores Jimmy didn’t get around to—everything from mulching Pop’s treasured flowerbeds to plunging out the drains when they got clogged. Assisted living was never discussed, although God knows Pop could have afforded it; a dozen mega-best-selling novels over forty years had left him very well off.

The last of his “engaging doorstoppers” (Donna Tartt, New York Times ) was published when Pop was eighty-two. He did the obligatory round of interviews, sat for the obligatory photos, and then announced his retirement. To the press, he did so graciously, with his “trademark humor.” (Ron Charles, Washington Post ) To me he said, “Thank God the bullshit’s finished.” With the exception of the informal picket-fence interview he gave Ruth Crawford, he never spoke for the record again. He was asked many times and always refused; claimed he’d said all he had to say, including some things he probably should have kept to himself.

“You give enough interviews,” he told me once, “and you are bound to stick your foot in your mouth a time or two. Those are the quotes that last, and the older you are, the more likely it becomes.”

Yet his books continued to sell, so his business affairs continued. I went over the contract renewals, cover concepts, and the occasional movie or TV option with him, and I dutifully read every interview proposal once he was incapable of reading them himself. He always said no, and that included Ruth Crawford’s proposal.

“Give her the standard response, Mark—flattered to be asked, but no thanks.” He hesitated, though, because this one was a little different.

Crawford wanted to write a piece about my father and his longtime friend, David “Butch” LaVerdiere, who died in 2019. Pop and I went to his funeral on the West Coast in a chartered Gulfstream. Pop was always close with his money—not stingy, but close—and the whopping expense of that round trip said a lot about his feeling for the man I grew up calling Uncle Butch. That feeling held strong, although the two men hadn’t seen each other face-to-face in ten years or more.

Pop was asked to speak at the funeral. I didn’t think he would—his rejection of the public spotlight spread in all directions, not just interviews—but he did it. He didn’t go to the podium, only stood up where he was with the help of his cane. He was always a good speaker, and that didn’t change with age.

“Butch and I were kids going to a one-room schoolhouse before the Second World War. We grew up in a no-stoplight dirt-road town fixing cars, patching them up with Bondo, playing sports and then coaching them. As men we took part in town politics and maintained the town dump—very similar jobs, now that I think about it. We hunted, we fished, we put out grassfires in the summer and plowed the town roads in the winter. Knocked over a right smart of mailboxes doing it, too. I knew him when no one knew his name—or mine—outside of a twenty-mile radius. I should have come to see him these last years, but I was busy with my own affairs. I thought to myself, there’s time. We always think that, I guess. Then time runs out. Butch was a fine artist, but he was also a good man. I think that’s more important. Maybe some here don’t and that’s all right, that’s all right. Thing is, I always had his back and he always had mine.”

He paused, head down, thinking.

“In my little Maine town there’s a saying for friends like that. We kep’ close.”

Yes they did, and that included their secrets.

Ruth Crawford had a solid clip file—I checked. She had published articles, mostly personality profiles, in a dozen places, many local or regional ( Yankee , Downeast , New England Life ), but a few national, including a piece on the benighted town of Derry in The New Yorker . When it came to Laird Carmody and Dave LaVerdiere, I thought she had a good hook to hang her proposed piece on. Her thesis had come up glancingly in pieces either about Pop or Uncle Butch, but she wanted to drill down on it: two men from the same small town in Maine who had become famous in two different fields of cultural endeavor. Not only that, either; both Carmody and LaVerdiere had achieved fame in their mid-forties, at a time when most men and women have given over the ambitions of their youth. Who have, as Pop once put it, dug themselves a rut and begun furnishing it. Ruth wanted to explore how such an unlikely coincidence had happened…assuming it was a coincidence.

“Has to be a reason?” Pop asked when I finished reading him Ms. Crawford’s letter. “Is that what she’s suggesting? I guess she never heard about the twin brothers who won large sums of money in their respective state lotteries on the same day.”

“Well, that might not have been a complete coincidence,” I said. “Assuming, that is, that you didn’t just make the story up on the spur of the moment.”

I gave him space to comment, but he only offered a smile that could have meant anything. Or nothing. So I pressed on.

“I mean, those twins might have grown up in a house where gambling was a big thing. Which would make it a little less unlikely, right? Plus, what about all the lottery tickets they bought that were losers?”

“I’m not getting your point, Mark,” Pop said. Still with the little smile. “Do you even have one?”

“Just that I can understand this woman’s interest in exploring the fact of you and Dave both coming from Nowheresville and blossoming in the middle of your lives.” I raised my hands beside my head as if framing a headline. “Could it be… fate ?”

Pop considered this, rubbing one hand up the white stubble on the side of his deeply lined face. I actually thought he might be about to change his mind and say yes. Then he shook his head. “Just write her one of your nice letters, tell her I’m going to pass, and wish her well on her future endeavors.”

So that was what I did, although something about the way Pop looked just then stuck with me. It was the look of a man who could say quite a lot on the subject of how he and his friend Butch had achieved fame and fortune…but who chose not to. Who chose, in fact, to keep it close.

Ruth Crawford might have been disappointed in Pop’s refusal to be interviewed, but she didn’t drop the project. Nor did she drop it when I also refused to be interviewed, saying my father wouldn’t want me to after he’d said no, and besides, all I knew was that my father had always enjoyed stories. He read a lot, went nowhere without a paperback jammed in his back pocket. He told me wonderful tales at bedtime, and he sometimes wrote them down in spiral notebooks. As for Uncle Butch? He painted a mural in my bedroom—boys playing ball, boys catching fireflies, boys with fishing poles. Ruth wanted to see it, of course, but it had been painted over long ago, when I outgrew such childish things. When first Pop and then Uncle Butch took off like a couple of rockets, I was at the University of Maine, getting a degree in advanced education. Because, according to the old canard, those who can’t do teach, and those who can’t teach, teach teachers. The success of my father and his best friend was, I said, as much a surprise to me as to anyone else in town. There’s another old canard about how no good can come out of Nazareth.

I put that in a letter to Ms. Crawford, because I did feel bad—a little—about not giving her the interview. In it I said they surely had dreams, most men do, and like most men, they kept those dreams to themselves. I had assumed Pop’s stories and Uncle Butch’s cheerful paintings were just hobbies, like whittling or guitar-picking, until the money started rolling in. I typed that, then handwrote a postscript: And good for them!

There are twenty-seven incorporated towns in Castle County. Castle Rock is the largest; Gates Falls is the second largest. Harlow, where I grew up, the son of Laird and Sheila Carmody, isn’t even in the top ten. It’s grown considerably since I was a kid, though, and sometimes my pop—who also spent his whole life in Harlow—said he could hardly recognize it. He went to a one-room school; I went to a four-roomer (two grades in each room); now there’s an eight-room school with geothermal heating and cooling.

When Pop was a kid, all the town roads were unpaved except for Route 9, the Portland Road. When I came along, only Deep Cut and Methodist Road were dirt. These days, all of them are paved. In the sixties there was only one store, Brownie’s, where old men sat around an actual pickle barrel. Now there are two or three, and a kind of downtown (if you want to call it that) on the Quaker Hill Road. We have a pizza joint, two beauty parlors, and—hard to believe but true—a nail salon that seems to be a going concern. No high school, though; that hasn’t changed. Harlow kids have three choices: Castle Rock High, Gates Falls High, or Mountain View Secondary, most commonly known as the Christer Academy. We’re a bunch of country bumpkins out here: pickup-driving, country-music-listening, coffee-brandy-drinking, Republican-leaning hicks from the sticks. There’s nothing much to recommend us, except for two men who came from here: my pop and his friend Butch LaVerdiere. Two talented bastids, as Pop put it during his brief over-the-fence conversation with Ruth Crawford.

Your mom and pop spent their whole lives there ? a city person might ask. And then YOU spent your whole life there? What are you, crazy?

Nope. Sane.

Robert Frost said home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. It’s also the place you start from, and if you’re one of the lucky ones, it’s where you finish up. Butch died in Seattle, a stranger in a strange land. Maybe that was okay with him, but I have to wonder if in the end he wouldn’t have preferred a little dirt road and the lakeside forest known as the 30-Mile Wood.

Although most of Ruth Crawford’s research—her investigation —was centered in Harlow, where her subjects grew up, there are no motels there, not even a bed and breakfast, so her base of operations was the Gateway Motel, in Castle Rock. There actually is a senior living facility in Harlow, and there Ruth interviewed a fellow named Alden Toothaker, who went to school with my pop and his friend. It was Alden who told her how Dave got his nickname. He always carried a tube of Lucky Tiger Butch Wax in his hip pocket and used it frequently so his flattop would stand up straight in front. He wore his hair (what there was of it) that way his whole life. It became his trademark. As to whether he still carried Butch Wax once he got famous, your guess is as good as mine. I don’t know if they even still make it.

“They used to pal around together back in grade school,” Alden told her. “Just a couple of boys who liked to fish or go hunting with their daddies. They grew up around hard work and didn’t expect nothing different. You might talk to folks my age who’ll tellya those boys were going to amount to something, but I’m not one of em. They were ordinary fellas right up until they weren’t.”

Laird and Butch went to Gates Falls High. They were placed in what was then called “the general education” courses, which were for kids who had no plans to go to college. No one came out and said they weren’t bright enough; it was just assumed. They took something called Daily Math and Business English, where several pages of their textbook explained how to correctly fold a business letter, complete with diagrams. They spent a lot of time in woodshop and auto shop. Both played football and basketball, although my pop spent most of his time riding the bench. They both finished with B averages and graduated together on June 8th, 1951.

Dave LaVerdiere went to work with his father, a plumber. Laird Carmody and his dad fixed cars out on the family farm and sold them to Peewee’s Car Mart in Gates Falls. They also kept a vegetable stand on the Portland Road that brought in good money.

Uncle Butch and his father didn’t get along so well and Dave eventually struck out on his own, fixing drains, laying pipe, and sometimes digging wells in Gates and Castle Rock. (His father had all the business in Harlow, and wasn’t about to share). In 1954, the two friends formed L&D Haulage, which mostly meant dragging the summer people’s crappie to the dump. In 1955, they bought the dump and the town was happy to be rid of it. They cleaned it up, did controlled burns, instituted a primitive recycling program, and kept it vermin-free. The town paid them a stipend that made a nice addition to their regular jobs. Scrap metal, especially copper wire, brought in more cash. Folks in town called them the Garbage Twins, but Ruth Crawford was assured by Alden Toothaker (and other oldies with intact memories) that this was harmless ribbing, and taken as such.

The dump was maybe five acres, and surrounded by a high board fence. Dave painted it with murals of town life, adding to it each year. Although that fence is long gone (and the dump is now a landfill), photographs remain. Those murals remind people of Dave’s later work. There were quilting bees that merged into baseball games, baseball games that merged into cartoon caricatures of long-gone Harlow residents, scenes of spring planting and fall reaping. Every aspect of small-town life was represented, but Uncle Butch also added Jesus followed by the apostles (last in line came Judas, with a shit-eating grin on his face). There was nothing really remarkable about any of these scenes, but they were exuberant and good-humored. They were, you might say, harbingers .

Shortly after Uncle Butch died, a LaVerdiere painting of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe strolling hand-in-hand down the sawdust-floored midway of a small-town carnival sold for three million dollars. It was a thousand times better than Uncle Butch’s dump murals, but it would have looked at home there: the same screwy sense of humor, set off by an undercurrent of despair and—maybe—contempt. Dave’s dump murals were the bud; Elvis & Marilyn was the bloom.

Uncle Butch never married, but Pop did. He’d had a high school sweetheart named Sheila Wise, who went away to Vermont State Teachers College after graduation. When she came back to teach the fifth and sixth grades at Harlow Elementary, my father was delighted to find she was still single. He wooed and won her. They were married in August of 1957. Dave LaVerdiere was Pop’s best man. I came along a year later, and Pop’s best friend became my Uncle Butch.

I read a review of Pop’s first book, The Lightning Storm , and the reviewer said this: “Not much happens in the first hundred or so pages of Mr. Carmody’s suspenseful yarn, but the reader is drawn on anyway, because there are violins.”

I thought that was a clever way to put it. There were few violins for Ruth Crawford to hear; the background picture she got from Alden and others around town was of two men, decent and upstanding and pretty much on the dead level when it came to honesty. They were country men living country lives. One married and the other was what was called “a confirmed bachelor” in those days, but with not a whiff of scandal concerning his private life.

Dave’s younger sister, Vicky, did agree to be interviewed. She told Ruth that sometimes Dave went “up the city”—meaning Lewiston—to visit the beer-and-boogie clubs on lower Lisbon Street. “He’d be jolly at the Holly,” she said, meaning the Holiday Lounge (now long gone). “He was most apt to go if Little Jonna Jaye was playing there. Oh my, such a crush he had on her. He never brought her home—no such luck!—but he didn’t always come home alone, either.”

Vicky paused there, Ruth told me later, and then added, “I know what you might be thinking, Miz Crawford, most everyone does these days when a man spends his life without a longtime woman, but it’s not so. My brother may have turned out to be a famous artist, but he sure as hell wasn’t gay .”

The two men were well liked; everyone said so. And they neighbored . When Philly Loubird had a heart attack with his field half-hayed and thunderstorms in the offing, Pop took him to the hospital in Castle Rock while Butch marshaled a few of his dump-picking buddies and they finished the job before the first drops hit. They fought grassfires and the occasional house fire with the local volunteer fire department. Pop went around with my mother collecting for what was then called the Poor Fund, if he didn’t have too many cars to fix or work to do at the dump. They coached youth sports. They cooked side-by-side at the VFD pork roast supper in the spring and the chicken barbecue that marked the end of summer.

Just country men living country lives.

No violins.

Until there was a whole orchestra.

Copyright © 2024 by Stephen King. From the forthcoming book YOU LIKE IT DARKER: Stories by Stephen King, to be published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.

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1 stephen king theory completely changes how you see his books.

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11 Stephen King Short Stories That Are Begging For An Adaptation

6 most controversial moments in stephen king books, 10 stephen king books that are way scarier than the movie.

• Overexposure vs. obscurity: King's Bag of Bones protagonist Mike reveals the perfect writer's pace is one book a year.
• Writer's block solution: King might've used Mike's strategy to stash extra manuscripts from productive years.
• Near-death trauma: King's accident was life-changing, revealing the true extent of the horror writer's perseverance.

Stephen King is one of the world's most prolific writers, but a theory rooted in one of his novels entirely changes how a reader might view his books. He is arguably the most famous living writer, his name known around the world, his books becoming bestsellers in dozens of languages and Stephen King's villains becoming some of the most memorable in literature. Publishing trackers have estimated he's sold over 400 million books throughout his 50-year career , making him one of the most successful and widely-read authors in history.

His output is absolutely staggering. Since 1974, Stephen King has written 66 books (including under his pen name, Richard Bachman), 12 collections, 5 nonfiction books, 21 screenplays, and miscellaneous other pieces of writing while also consulting on the many, many TV and movie adaptations of his work. He's written so much that it's hard to believe there might ever have been or will be a time when the words weren't flowing and King struggled to write. A chapter from one of his older books, however, hints that he may indeed have struggled with writer's block , but had an ingenious way of dealing with it.

While there are plenty of Stephen King movies already, some of the author's best short stories still have no movie adaptations (and badly need them).

Bag Of Bones' Mike Noonan Has Been Hiding His Writer's Block

Mike reveals a truth about the publishing industry that he exploits.

In Stephen King's 1998 novel Bag of Bones , the protagonist Mike Noonan reveals an interesting confession that reads as far too specific not to be pulled from some sort of real-world truth. As a once-prolific writer, Mike hasn't been able to write a single paragraph in the four years since his wife died in a tragic accident. His publisher doesn't know, his editor doesn't know, and he's lied to himself for so long that he's almost become comfortable with his own writer's block. Mike reveals the optimal pace of publishing is to put out one book a year. Publish too often, and a writer becomes overexposed. Publish too infrequently, and writers are prone to forgetting about the writer. Thus, the sweet spot for editors and publishers is a pace of about one book a year.

Publish too often, and a writer becomes overexposed. Publish too infrequently, and writers are prone to forgetting about the writer.

Considering Mike hasn't been able to write in four years, one would think his bosses would have noticed that he hadn't been submitting anything new. However, Mike has been able to hide his profound writer's block thanks to the fact he had written so much before his wife's death that he sometimes averaged two written books every year, enabling him to publish one and store the other one . For the past four years, Mike has pulled out these backup manuscripts, polished them up, and sent them off to his editor as though they were brand-new ideas:

"The secret is simple, and I am not the only popular novelist in America who knows it – if the rumors are correct, Danielle Steel (to name just one) has been using the Noonan Formula for decades. You see, although I have published a book a year starting with Being Two in 1984, I wrote two books in four of those ten years, publishing one and ratholing the other."

It's a brilliant strategy, but Mike knows he can't keep it up forever – eventually, he will run out of manuscripts to pull out of his safe. Healing from the grief of his trauma - in his case, his wife's unexpected death - is his character's arc through Bag of Bones , but it's an interesting little nugget for King to include in the book.

Stephen King is one of horror’s most prolific authors. However, some controversial elements in his books still make them challenging reads today.

Stephen King Could Have Used This Same Technique

It would make a fair bit of sense.

Stephen King has been open about how often he pulls from his own life and experiences as a writer; it's not a coincidence that so many of his protagonists have also been writers. The very specific information Mike Noonan shares about the ideal publishing schedule is something that King himself would obviously know. Considering that, and that a few of King's books right around the time of his near-fatal accident felt more like King's B-sides than his usual stuff, it wouldn't be a stretch to think that King himself has employed Mike Noonan's trick in the past himself.

Looking back at King's bibliography shows many years – more than 20 – in which he published more than one book , with most of those years seeing one book written under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. In others, the other book was a collaboration with another writer, such as The Talisman (1984) or Black House (2001), both of which were collaborations with Peter Straub. There are a handful of years that found King publishing a whopping three novels, but, again, many of those were collaborations, counted as two-parters, or were written under his pseudonym. Despite his prodigious output, it's not common that more than one solo novel under the name of Stephen King came out per year.

Many movies have tried traversing the chills from Stephen King's novels to the silver screen, but not all have been equally successful in this pursuit

All of the above doesn't even include his one-off short stories, short story collections, his novellas, or the partially-formed ideas that King has often talked about. With how much he writes, it's entirely likely that King had more than a few manuscripts squirreled away for a rainy day . It's absurd to think that King had writer's block for four straight years, as his protagonist did, but it wouldn't be at all surprising to learn that the King of Horror has pulled out old first-draft manuscripts and brushed them up to send to publishers from time to time; even the most creative fountains hit a low ebb from time to time. This would be especially understandable in the aftermath of his 1999 car accident, which almost took his life.

It's absurd to think that King had writer's block for four straight years, as his protagonist did, but it wouldn't be at all surprising to learn that the King of Horror has pulled out old first-draft manuscripts and brushed them up to send to publishers from time to time; even the most creative fountains hit a low ebb from time to time.

Stephen King Has Explained How Hard Writing Was In The Aftermath Of His Accident

The accident was far worse than people knew at the time.

Similar to how no one knew how badly Mike Noonan was struggling after his wife's death, few outside those closest to Stephen King knew just how bad his accident was or how close he came to death . On June 19, 1999, King was on one of his walks - originally enough, it was because he had writer's block and found walking often helped him work out story tangles - when he was struck by a minivan driven by Bryan Edward Smith. Smith had been distracted by his dog, which was trying to get into a cooler. The result was his eyes weren't on the road when he hit Stephen King and sent the writer flying 14 feet through the air.

The trauma was so great that he only remembers the accident and its immediate aftermath in snippets. King's extensive injuries included a punctured and collapsed lung, a right leg so shattered doctors considered amputation, a broken hip, scalp lacerations, and more. At some point on the LifeFlight to Central Maine Medical Center, he had to get a chest tube inserted so he could breathe. His injuries were so bad that the EMT who worked on him at the scene didn't expect him to survive the ride to the hospital, King later wrote. (via The New Yorker )

It was before the internet and social media, and despite the severity of his injuries, quite a bit of it had been downplayed in the immediate aftermath of the incident. Likewise, only a handful of people knew how grueling King's recovery process was, including the torturous physical therapy he had to undergo to regain his functionality. King didn't publish another book for two years, and while he'd had two-year gaps before, it had always been after he'd published 2-3 books in the past year. He didn't even attempt writing again for five or six weeks after his accident - a lifetime for King. Even when he did write, it was torture, as he explained:

"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."

Today, through various interviews and that excellent piece in The New Yorker, fans of Stephen King know just how close the world was to losing the King of Horror and all he wrote after that point. That includes some of the most important books in his vast bibliography, including the second half of The Dark Tower series, various collaborations with his sons, a sequel to The Shining , his foray into the crime drama genre, and more. If Stephen King ever did secretly lean on the Noonan Formula for a while, it clearly worked.

• Stephen King