Experience, Shorter Fifth Edition with Essays (1992); Common Culture: Reading and Writing
About American Popular Culture (1st to 4th Editions, 1995-2003); The Bedford Guide for College
Writers (5th to 7th editions, 1999-2005); The Longwood Reader (4th to 6th editions, 1999-2005);
The Prose Reader: Essays for Thinking, Reading, and Writing (5th to 7th editions, 1999-2004); The
Simon and Schuster Short Prose Reader (2nd to 4th editions, 1999-2005); The Short Prose Reader
(9th and 10th editions, 2000-2002); Mirror on America: Short Essays and Images from Popular
Culture (2nd and 3rd editions, 2003-2006); and The Sundance Reader (4th edition, 2005); along
with ‘Instructor’s Editions’ for some of these textbooks.
Notes on Horror, published in Quest for June 1981. A piece titled Danse Macabre in Book
Digest for September 1981. The Healthy Power of a Good Scream in Self for September 1981. The
Sorry State of TV Shows: You Gotta Put on the Gruesome Mask and Go Booga-Booga in TV Guide
for December 1981—in this case the excerpt is of heavily edited passages from The Glass Teat
chapter.
Last Waltz: Horror and Morality, Horror and Magic in 1983/1984 Fiction Writer’s Market
(1983). A section titled Stephen King in The Open Door: When Writers First Learned to Read
(1989, 1992) excerpts the section in which King discusses finding his father’s old fantasy/science-
fiction books. In 1990 the Friends of the San Francisco Library excerpted the book for a fund-raising
broadsheet, as Danse Macabre.
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers in “They’re Here…”: Invasion of the Bodysnatchers: A Tribute
(1999). An untitled excerpt appeared in My Favorite Horror Story (2000), introducing Robert
Bloch’s story Sweets to the Sweet. Horror Fiction: FromDanse Macabre (2000) in the Book-of-
the-Month Club collection, Secret Windows. And, My Creature from the Black Lagoon in The
McGraw Hill Reader: Issues Across the Disciplines (8th Edition, 2003).
The last four examples to date all appear as an Introduction to The Stephen King Horror Library
editions of books reviewed by King in the Horror Fiction chapter. The remaining six books of the ten
King analyzed may appear in these editions at some point. The four are: Rosemary’s Baby by Ira
Levin (2003), The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (2003), Ghost Story by Peter Straub
(2003) and The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons (2004).
The Fright Report (January 1978)
Dying is when the monster gets you.
The Fright Report was originally published in the men’s magazine, Oui for January 1978. Large
portions, but by no means all of it appear in section four of the An Annoying Autobiographical Pause
chapter of Danse Macabre.
King recalls ‘the first movie I can remember seeing as a kid’— The Creature From the Black
Lagoon, at a drive in—‘And this four-year-old Steve King thinks that this is, undeniably, what dying
is like. Death is when the creature from the black lagoon dams up the exit. Dying is when the monster
gets you.’
King has us consider, ‘What makes a horror writer? Nobody really knows. We know that writers
of counterfeit horrors are always with us—the people who are in it for a buck and nothing more—and
that there are great writers who seem to have one great scream in them and no more. But the real
writer of horror never seems to exhaust his store of insecurities or his backlog of fears: the real
writer of horror is a man or woman living in constant, deadly terror, and readers always seem to be
able to recognize and respond to this.’ The balance of the article is substantively material covered in
Danse Macabre, although it is interesting to read King’s 1978 take of Salem’s Lot as a novel about
‘paranoia, the prevailing spirit of the past four years’, as the Watergate scandal and its aftermath
rolled across the American psyche.
Oui is ‘collectable’ as a men’s magazine and copies appear on the secondhand market, although
this edition less rarely. The piece was also reprinted in Chernobog, a horror “fanzine”, Number 18,
sometime in the late 1980s. That special issue was dedicated to King but neither the authors nor any
of our contacts have been able to unearth a copy.
On Writing (2000)
What follows is an attempt to put down, briefly and simply, how I came to the craft, what I
know about it now, and how it’s done. It’s about the day job; it’s about the language.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft was first published in October 2000 by Simon & Schuster’s
Scribner imprint, as part of a three book contract that also included Bag of Bones and Hearts in
Atlantis (the publisher secured three of King’s masterworks in that one contract). King’s longtime
British publisher, Hodder & Stoughton simultaneously released the UK edition. It was first released
in paperback in 2001 by Pocket Books (US) and NEL (UK).
The first UK mass-market paperback edition contained Jumper by Garrett Addams, the 12-page
story that won the United Kingdom On Writing competition run by Hodder and The Observer
newspaper. King picked the winner.
Readers may not have noticed this Author’s Note, buried on the copyright page: ‘Unless
otherwise attributed, all prose examples, both good and evil, were composed by the author.’
King explains in the First Foreword that fellow author and Rock Bottom Remainders59 band
member Amy Tan gave him the courage to write the book, which he dedicates to her: ‘One night...I
asked Amy if there was any one question she was never asked during the Q-and-A that follows almost
every writer’s talk—that question you never get to answer when you’re standing in front of a group of
author-struck fans and pretending you don’t put your pants on one leg at a time like everyone else.
Amy paused, thinking it over very carefully, and then said: “No one ever asks about the language.” I
owe an immense debt of gratitude to her for saying that. I had been playing with the idea of writing a
little book about writing for a year or more at that time, but had held back because I didn’t trust my
own motivations— why did I want to write about writing? What made me think I had anything worth
saying?...What follows is an attempt to put down, briefly and simply, how I came to the craft, what I
know about it now, and how it’s done. It’s about the day job; it’s about the language.’
In fact, the book was almost never written for two other reasons. King’s near death on 19 June
1999, the day after he wrote the first few pages of the On Writing section, is obviously one. In section
6 of the On Living section King explains the other: ‘That was because I’d put it aside in February or
March of 1998, not sure how to continue, or if I should continue at all. Writing fiction was almost as
much fun as it had ever been, but every word of the nonfiction book was a kind of torture. It was the
first book I had put aside uncompleted since The Stand, and On Writing spent a lot longer in the desk
drawer.’ It was not until the fateful month of June 1999 that its creator decided to breathe life again
into the moribund manuscript.
In the Second Foreword King writes the book is short (imagine the irony of King being
criticized for writing a short book) ‘… because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.
Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do...One
notable exception to the bullshit rule is The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White.
There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book. (Of course it’s short; at eighty-five pages it’s
much shorter than this one.) I’ll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read The
Elements of Style. Rule 17 in the chapter titled Principles of Composition is “Omit needless words.”
I will try to do that here.’ King refers to the same rule late in the Tales of the Tarot chapter of Danse
Macabre: ‘In that indispensable little handbook by William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of
Style, the thirteenth rule for good composition reads simply: “Omit needless words.’’’ Why the
discrepancy? In 1979, the Third Edition of The Elements of Style was released, with the addition of
four new rules!
The only instance of a Third Foreword to a King book is really a form of dedication to his
longtime editor: ‘One rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book: “The editor is
always right.” The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor’s advice; for all have
sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection. Put another way, to write is human, to edit is divine.
Chuck Verrill edited this book, as he has so many of my novels. And as usual, Chuck, you were
divine.’
Moving to the main book, we find it is split into a series of sections— C.V. (a series of
autobiographical vignettes, mostly from his youth; although King argues it is more an ‘attempt to show
how one writer was formed’); What Writing Is (‘Telepathy, of course.’); Toolbox (using his
grandfather’s massive carpentry toolbox as analogy for the writer’s toolbox of skills and knowledge);
On Writing (only 93 pages of advice—no bullshit here; needless words omitted!); On Living: A
Postscript (the brief tale of King’s near-death experience on a lonely Maine road and the loving
support given by wife Tabitha and his children during the long road to recovery); And Furthermore,
Part I: Door Shut, Door Open (an example of King’s editing style, using a selection from 1408); And
Furthermore, Part II: A Booklist (a list of the best books King had read in the three to four years
prior to completing On Writing).
Among the interesting stories and revelations in the C.V. section are tales of King’s first writing
efforts, for his mother; the high school newspaper, The Drum60 and King’s satire of it, The Village
Vomit; the infamous criticism of Hermon, Maine (rubbed in); meeting his wife, Tabitha; and the death
of his mother, from cancer. King’s tale of his addiction to alcohol and drugs and the intervention
group Tabitha formed (leading to his sobriety) is revelatory and brave. At his mother’s funeral: ‘I
gave the eulogy. I think I did a pretty good job, considering how drunk I was.’
A significant part of C.V. deals with King’s involvement with his local newspaper (as a result of
the infamous Village Vomit incident). Our Miscellany chapter provides more detail about these
articles and our resultant discovery of three previously unknown pieces. At this point in On Writing
King makes an error that members of the Lisbon Historical Society have asked we correct. The editor
of The Enterprise was John Gould, of whom King writes: ‘Gould—not the well-known New England
humorist or the novelist who wrote The Greenleaf Fires but a relation of both, I think....’ In fact John
Gould was that New England humorist (he also wrote a column for The Christian Science Monitor
over a period of fifty years), but not the novelist, John A. Gould. It is not commonly known that this
section of C.V. is a nearly direct lift from King’s 1986 piece, Everything You Need to Know About
Writing Successfully—in Ten Minutes (see our chapter, Opinion— The Craft of Writing). King
incorrectly identifies the newspaper in On Writing as the Weekly Enterprise, but correctly in the
earlier piece as The Enterprise. Of further interest is that Gould wrote a column for the Lisbon High
School newspaper, The Drum, during the period when two first met. The short Guest Column
appeared in the December 20, 1963 issue, in which King is credited as ‘News Editor’.
The Toolbox section covers some of the areas King considers important to good writing—
vocabulary (‘the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is
appropriate and colorful’); grammar (‘you should avoid the passive tense’ is the advice before a
full-scale rant against this offence; and ‘the adverb is not your friend...I believe the road to hell is
paved with adverbs’); dialogue attribution (‘to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is
divine’); and the paragraph (‘I would argue that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of
writing’).
In the preface to the On Writing section King says: ‘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’;
‘What follows is everything I know about how to write good fiction’ (not a bad offer to the reader,
that); and ‘If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a
lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.’
In the body of this section King deals with a large range of matters: writing schedules (his own
as example); the personal space in which to write; setting goals; the lack of importance of plot (‘In my
view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narration...description...and dialogue....’; ‘Plot is, I
think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice’; ‘Story is honorable and trustworthy;
plot is shifty’; and ‘I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that
they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow....’); his
manner of constructing a story (‘The situation comes first. The characters—always flat and
unfeatured, to begin with—come next. Once these things are fixed in my mind, I begin to narrate’);
description (less is more); dialogue (‘the key to writing good dialogue is honesty’); building
characters (‘I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which
is to say character-driven’); symbolism and theme; revision (here King proves yet again just what a
craftsman he is); resonance; pace; back story; and research.
Also, in this section King reminds us of the key themes in his fictive body of work: ‘I don’t
believe any novelist, even one who’s written forty-plus books, has too many thematic concerns; I
have many interests, but only a few that are deep enough to power novels. These deep interests (I
won’t quite call them obsessions) include how difficult it is—perhaps impossible!—to close
Pandora’s technobox once it’s open (The Stand, The Tommyknockers, Firestarter); the question of
why, if there is a God, such terrible things happen (The Stand, Desperation, The Green Mile); the
thin line between reality and fantasy (The Dark Half, Bag of Bones, The Drawing of the Three); and
most of all, the terrible attraction violence sometimes has for fundamentally good people (The
Shining, The Dark Half). I’ve also written again and again about the fundamental differences
between children and adults, and about the healing power of the human imagination.’
In one aside King tells of writing a novel (‘my dirty little secret’) while at university— Sword in
the Darkness. Although the novel has never been published, King allowed an entire chapter to
emerge into the light of day three-and-a-half decades later!61 In another King says his mother ‘may
have farmed my brother and me out to one of her sisters for awhile because she was economically or
emotionally unable to cope with us for a time’. This is confirmed by one of Ruth Pillsbury King’s
sisters: ‘ “My husband and I took Steve in when he was two,” said Ethelyn Flaws, Steve’s aunt who
lived in Durham at the time. Ruth “would have felt badly if she would have had to put him in a home.
My older sister, Molly, took in David. We took them for a year until Ruth got back on her feet.”’62
On Writing won the Non-Fiction Bram Stoker Award in 2000 63 and the Locus Non-Fiction
Award in 2001. With good reason, it has become a best seller well outside the King and horror
communities, as current and putative writers devour King’s practical advice, presented in plain and
entertaining terms. It is also available as an audio book, read by the master himself. We highly
recommend this to readers—listening to King telling stories about his life is well worth the admission
(for instance his babysitter story is pure gold—‘In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary
criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village
Voice holds few terrors.’)
Poet, novelist, biographer and critic Jay Parini was less than polite about On Writing in a
review for The Guardian (UK)64: ‘King has nothing much to say about writing that isn’t obvious.
King is infinitely better at writing than talking about writing, though fans will doubtless find moments
of interest here, especially when he talks about his own extraordinary writing habits. The best part of
the book remains his account of how writing—and the primitive urge to write—saved his life after
the accident. It’s a bizarre and absorbing story, told brilliantly by one of the great storytellers of our
time.’
Publisher’s Weekly said: ‘While some of his guidance is not exactly revolutionary (he
recommends The Elements of Style as a must-have reference), other revelations that vindicate authors
of popular fiction, like himself, as writers, such as his preference for stressing character and situation
over plot, are engrossing.’
Three excerpts from the book were released before the official publication date:
Selections from On Writing was published online on 15 December 1999. A 14-page piece, it
was composed of unrevised excerpts and was available for a $1, $5, or $10 donation to the Literacy
Partners program.
On Impact appeared in The New Yorker for June 2000. It contained revised excerpts from the
book, especially from the On Living: A Postscript section; and was reprinted in The Best American
Essays, 2001.
Stephen King On How to Write appeared in Bottom Line/Personal, Volume 23, Number 11
published on 1 June 2000.
As with Danse Macabre there have been numerous excerpts from On Writing published. The
fourteen post-publication excerpts to date are:
The Early Years... i n Life: The Observer Magazine (a UK newspaper supplement) for 17
September 2000; The Accident, in the same magazine for 24 September 2000; and the final part in the
magazine, How to Write, in the 1 October 2000 edition.
Attention Zestful Writers in the National Post (a Toronto, Canada newspaper) for October
2000. Before He Was Stephen King in Reader’s Digest for January 2001. It is interesting that, and
noting an excerpt from an interview with King65, this is the only time King’s work has appeared in
Reader’s Digest. This may well be a result of King’s opposition to his fiction being abridged in any
written form.
Getting Back to Work in Writer’s Yearbook 2001; How to Write 10 Pages a Day in Writer’s
Digest for April, 2001; Plotting Gets You Nowhere in The Writer for January 2002; From On
Writing in White Lines: Writers on Cocaine (2002); a different article also under the title From On
Writing in Guys Write for Guys Read (2005); On Reading and Writing in Strategies for College
Writing: A Rhetorical Reader, Second Edition (2003); A Ten-Minute Writing Lesson in Writing for
Teens for October 2005; Stephen King’s Library in The Stephen King Desk Calendar 2006; and
simply On Writing in The New Millennium Reader (4th Edition, 2006).
Hardcover US and UK editions of On Writing asked for entries to a Short Story Competition
(‘in the spirit of Stephen King’). The competition is long closed but budding writers (ignoring the
original deadline) apparently still want to submit. King’s official website has this to say about the
matter in the FAQ section: ‘Sorry, but we are no longer accepting submissions for the writing
exercise given in On Writing. We have asked that the offer to make submissions through the web site
be deleted from future printings. When he came up with that idea, I don’t think Stephen was thinking
about the fact that someone would months or years later read his offer and want to participate.’ There
are also constant requests on the website’s message board for tips about writing and the like. The
web site moderator is fortunate in being able to recommend On Writing as a resource.
How likely is it that King will complete another volume of non-fiction? In truth it is most
unlikely. He has indicated on many occasions that he views lengthy non-fiction as hard work and not
nearly as fulfilling as fiction. Perhaps he will resort again to the virtual blogging format of Faithful;
or, perhaps (we can only wish) to a full-scale autobiography? At least we do know that he will
continue to deliver short non-fiction in significant quantities and for the foreseeable future.
BASEBALL—FAITHFUL; HEAD DOWN AND THE RED SOX OBSESSION
These are the faces of children who have not yet been told the dream is usually just on loan,
there to be looked at and lived in and enjoyed only for a short, dust-golden time—the years when
you come back from the field, sit on the back step and pour the sand out of your sneakers before
going in barefoot to eat your supper.
—From Diamonds Are Forever
.
King’s love of baseball and of the Boston-based Red Sox major league team goes back to his
childhood (the Sox are New England’s only Major League Baseball franchise, and are physically
located closer to Maine than any other such team). His passion for the game and his team seems only
to have accelerated over the years (the first recorded piece of dedicated baseball writing was his
King’s Garbage Truck column for October 23, 1969), as this chapter clearly demonstrates. As is
often the case with King parts of his ‘real life’ leak into his fiction and this is very much the case with
both the Sox and baseball. They are referred to in many of his novels and short stories66 and a real
Boston relief pitcher carries talismanic qualities for Trisha McFarland, the lead character in King’s
1999 novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.
Further proving his love of the game, the only piece of non-fiction King has included in one of
his mainstream collections is a baseball essay, Head Down (reviewed later in this chapter), which
appears in Nightmares & Dreamscapes. The same volume includes one of the few King poems
published in such a collection— Brooklyn August, a wistful and elegiac homage to the Brooklyn
Dodgers’ last season in New York.
We’ll start with the major work—King’s book-length collaboration with Stewart O’Nan
covering the extraordinary 2004 Boston Red Sox—and continue with his broader baseball writings,
covering the Red Sox, the New York Yankees, Little League and broader musings on America’s
national pastime.
Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season (2004, 2005)
Scribner published Faithful, by Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan, in hardcover on 2 December
200467 (the audiobook had been released the previous day). The paperback edition, including
additional material by both King and O’Nan was released in August 2005. Weidenfeld & Nicolson
published a UK hardcover in January 2005 (this is surely a rare event in publishing—a hardcover
baseball book for the UK market!)
The 2005 paperback features an index, a new essay by O’Nan and a reprint of King’s It’s Weird
But True: The Gloom is Gone in Mudville, which had first been published in The New York Times
for April 3, 2005 (that piece is reviewed separately, at the end of this chapter).
The unique background to the book’s creation and the partnership between King and O’Nan
(King had previously delivered professional collaborative prose with one other author, Peter
Straub68) is described here by O’Nan from an interview with King chronicler, Hans-Ake Lilja:
‘Steve and I have been going to games together for years. We e-mail and talk about the team all the
time, and last year in August when the team got hot, Steve decided we should keep a log of our
reactions to their games. This spring, when the season was about to start, my agent asked if I wanted
to write a book about the Red Sox (every year he asks me this, but this year I’d just finished a novel
and finally had the time). I said I’d write it only if Steve could be my co-author. Steve was busy, but
said he’d try to contribute as much as he could. And once the season got going, his natural love for the
game kicked in and he couldn’t stay away.’69
Apart from being a Red Sox fan Stewart O’Nan is an engineer turned novelist (Snow Angels,
The Speed Queen70 and The Night Country among others). His A Prayer for the Dying won the 1999
International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel.
O’Nan wrote the larger portion of the book (in word count at least). Readers can identify which
author is writing as King’s contributions are in bold font, O’Nan’s in normal font (there are also
numerous e-mail exchanges with King identified as ‘SK’). They have very different styles as writers
and different views of life as a fan, as noted by many reviewers (see below). This lends the book a
slight anarchic flavor but the two men’s love of the Red Sox baseball (and writing) comes through in
spades. Of course, the amazingly unlikely events portrayed have their own roller-coaster effect. Just
as King had chosen the year his son Owen played for the West Bangor Little League All-Star team,
who made it all the way to the Regional Finals, to write of Little League baseball, the year he agreed
to write a chronicle of his beloved Red Sox they were able to break an 86-year fabled drought and
win the World Series. Coincidence?
At www.bookreporter.com the reviewer observes: ‘The style has been compared with that of a
broadcast team, with O’Nan doing the play-by-play, and King the color commentary. It works quite
well. On occasion, they share a dialogue with their readers.’ In a review for CNN Todd Leopold
observed, ‘... King is the emotional hand wringer; O’Nan the slightly more controlled detail man.’
Frank Mosher of The Boston Globe blurbs the paperback edition with: ‘ Faithful isn’t just about the
Red Sox. It’s also about family, friendship, and what it truly means to be a baseball fan and to be—
well, faithful, come hell or high water...The season was full of priceless moments, and King and
O’Nan catch nearly all of them in amber.’
In 2005 a new literary award was introduced in the United States—the Quill Awards (or
‘Quills’). Created by Reed Business Information (owners of Publisher’s Weekly) these combine
nominations from booksellers nationwide with consumer voting. Faithful won the inaugural award
for Sports book (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was the overall Book of the Year).
As readers can easily secure a copy of Faithful we will limit our review to selected choices
from King’s entries in the book that any reader (even one with no interest in baseball) should be
aware of:
* ‘Oh well. I used to joke, you know, about having a tombstone that read: STEPHEN KING with
the dates, and then, below that, a single sock, and below that: NOT IN MY LIFETIME. And
below that: NOT IN YOURS, EITHER. Not a bad tagline, huh?’ (March 17th)
* King’s interesting philosophical take on addiction (April 4th) in which he states he became a
Red Sox junkie in 1967 and pans the Curse of the Bambino as ‘the bullshit creation of one
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