brand names in that place; only people who will try to create something out of nothing, and those who
succeed and those who fail.’ Noting that Charles Dickens was perhaps the first brand name writer,
King argues that stardom did not hurt his later work, ‘Nor is there any reason for anyone to think it
might or expect it should. The idea that success in itself can hurt a writer is as ridiculous and elitist as
the commonly held belief that a popular book is a bad book... Being a brand name is all right. Trying
to be a writer, trying to fill the blank sheet in an honorable and truthful way, is better.’
There is some intentional obfuscation in this essay to deter readers from King’s Richard
Bachman pseudonym. One unintentional error is the reference to his two sales to ‘Robert A.
Lowndes’s Magazine of Strange Stories’, which was actually the magazine Startling Mystery
Stories.
In addition to Secret Windows the piece was also reprinted as Foreword—On Becoming a
Brand Name in Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of StephenKing, edited by Tim Underwood and
Chuck Miller (1982).
On The Shining and Other Perpetrations (August 1982)
This piece appeared in Whispers #17/18 for August 1982. A special hardback edition (limited
to 376 copies) of this issue, signed by King and editor Stuart Schiff, was also released. The same
issue carries a revised version of King’s short story It Grows on You; along with the unexpurgated
version of the deleted prologue for The Shining, Before the Play.
King writes here of ‘The Question’—the one most writers find to be ‘the bane of their
existence’—the inevitable ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ He notes that while any writer can answer
The Question—in his case it is normally that ‘two facts or two observations come in collision with
each other and produce an offspring—a what if? ’—this can only be done with clear specificity in
relation to a particular novel or story. What ‘boggles’ the mind of most writers is that The Question
itself ‘seems to presuppose some sort of giant idea-bin that could perhaps be reached by anyone, if
they were given the right treasure-map.’ He recalls once responding, ‘I get them at 239 Center Street
in Bangor, just around the corner from the Frati Brothers Pawnshop.’ The general question cannot be
answered sensibly but the specific one, ‘Where did you get the idea for?’(insert novel or story name),
can.
The balance of the essay is largely dedicated to the inspiration for King’s classic, The Shining.
He says the gestation took ‘roughly ten years’, beginning with his fascination for Ray Bradbury’s
‘wonderful’ story The Veldt (in which children are able to make dreams become real—but that’s a
massive oversimplification, you really should read the story). In 1972, while showering it occurred
to him that ‘the power to make dreams—or nightmares—become real might be in a place...as well as
in a person...The following day I began to toy with an idea for a novel called Darkshine, which
would feature a boy who was a psychic receptor and which would be set in an amusement park.’
However, King was concerned about both the setting not isolating the child properly, and the
possibility of plagiarizing Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. So the story went into
limbo until the Kings moved to Colorado in 1974, and spent ‘a lovely October weekend’ at The
Stanley Hotel in Estes Park.
The rest is history, and readers should seek out this piece, if simply for its detailed description
of such developments as the dream that set King off (of his son running, screaming through the hotel’s
corridors); the decision (a ‘lucky accident’) to make Jack Torrance an alcoholic child-beater; King’s
feeling of pressure and inadequacy in his ‘early-marriage doldrums’ prior to the success of Carrie;
the use of The Shining as ‘ritual burning of hate and pain’ from those times, as he reflected upon Jack
Torrance’s face (‘to a large extent, my own’); the structure of The Shining (in explanation of the first
publication of Before the Play in the same magazine); and the effect of strong casting and
visualization in the book, which would lead many readers to be ‘offended’ by Kubrick’s film version.
King also provides short notes about It Grows On You (‘written when I was very much under the
influence of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. I grew up in
a small town...and for a while in my twenties I felt an almost constant urge to capture that world of
dirt roads, abandoned houses, and general stores full of old men, old baked bean supper posters, and
old fly paper.’ It seems that particular urge has never left (see for instance, Bag of Bones).
This is one of King’s more important non-fiction pieces and it is therefore to be hoped that it
may be reprinted elsewhere. Copies of the magazine and hardback editions are generally available
through King resellers, although readers should expect to pay a significant sum.
Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully—In Ten Minutes (July 1986)
This popular piece first appeared in The Writer for July 1986. Many have forgotten that it
included the first appearance of The Village Vomit incident and its aftermath, with King working as a
sportswriter for his local newspaper89 and John Gould’s invaluable advice, which later appeared
(with only minor revision) in On Writing.
King says he learned everything he knows about pursuing ‘a successful and financially
rewarding career writing fiction’ from Gould in ten minutes, which is how long reading the core of
the article—excluding the two introductions and a story (the one about The Village Vomit, The
Enterprise and John Gould) will take.
These are the twelve points King makes: ‘Be talented’ (if people buy a writer’s work, then ‘they
are communicating. Ergo, they are talented.’); ‘Be neat’; ‘Be self-critical’; ‘Remove every extraneous
word’ (this advice migrated to the shorter ‘omit needless words’ by On Writing); ‘Never look at a
reference book while doing a first draft’; ‘Know the markets’; ‘Write to entertain’; ‘Ask yourself
frequently, “Am I having fun”’; ‘How to evaluate criticism’ (after showing your piece to, say, ten
people—if a significant number criticize the same things change them); ‘Observe all rules for proper
submission’; ‘An agent? Forget it. For now’ (‘…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’); 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.’)
This article has been reprinted in The Writer’s Handbook, edited by Sylvia K. Burack (1988,
1989, 1992); and the 2002 edition of the same book, edited by Elfrieda Abbe. It was also reprinted in
The Fractal, edited by David Gardener (Fall 1993); The Writer for March 2000; and as All the
Writing Advice You Need in 10 Minutes in The Writer’s Survival Guide (a special edition of The
Writer magazine released in November 2005). Most of these magazines and books are easily
accessed on the secondhand market.
Write In: Words from Stephen King (October 1986)
This one paragraph response to a question appeared in Writing!: The Continuing Guide to
Written Communication for October 1986. A relatively unimportant piece, it answers a reader’s
question: ‘When you are writing a new horror story, how do you make something shock a reader?’
King says this isn’t always necessary but when it is, ‘it’s easier if the shock arises from a story and a
situation where the reader feels at home, and comfortable with the characters.’ He then gives a rather
gross example (a model visiting Brazil on a shoot thinks her cat is lying next to her but awakens to
find a ‘vampire bat, bloated with her blood, bursts open and lies squeaking in a puddle of gore.’ King
concludes with trademark humor, ‘As you can see, it also helps to have a sick mind.’
This magazine is rare but does appear at King resellers on occasion.
The Best Advice (December 1995)
This two-paragraph piece is King’s part of a larger article of writing advice, The Best Advice,
which appeared in Writer’s Digest for December 1995. The overall article included input (each with
a date) from such writers as Shirley Jackson, Jack Kerouac and Louis L’Amour. King’s section is
dated March 1992 and it can therefore be argued it is not strictly an article by King but rather a
simple quote.
Reflecting a theme he would take up strongly in On Writing King feels, ‘The best work that I’ve
ever done always has the feeling of being excavated. I don’t feel like a creative writer as much as I
feel like an archaeologist who is digging things up and brushing them off....’ Sometimes he gets a little
pot (‘that’s a short story’), sometimes a bigger pot (‘a novella’), and sometimes a building (‘which is
like a novel’). ‘When I feel like I’m “creating” I’m usually doing bad work.’
As many writers retain this magazine, copies tend to surface with King resellers fairly regularly.
I Want To Be Typhoid Stevie (1997)
‘Reading Stephen King: Issues of Censorship, Student Choice, and the Place of Popular
Literature in the Canon’ was the title of a conference held at the University of Maine in Orono, Maine
(the title University of Maine at Orono had been superseded by this time) on October 11& 12, 1996.
In 1997 the National Council of Teachers of English published the papers in a slim oversized
paperback volume of the same title, edited by Brenda Miller Power, Jeffrey D. Wilhelm and Kelly
Chandler.
King, the Keynote Speaker, was introduced by his old mentor, UMO Professor of English Burton
Hatlen; and his speech, I Want To Be Typhoid Stevie, is reproduced in this volume; along with a
paper, King in the Classroom by noted King expert, Michael R. Collings, professor of English at
Pepperdine University in California.
King’s speech when printed covers seven-and-a-half pages and begins, ‘Readable, interesting
novels don’t begin with a desire to teach but a desire to please. The writers of such books aren’t
always successful because of any particular skill, but because their loves, obsessions, and objects of
fascination overlap [those] of their readers.’ Using other authors as example and noting Robert James
Waller’s complaint that each book he has written since Bridges of Madison County ‘is better written
and sells fewer copies’, King says, ‘I have been fortunate enough in my career to have struck a
number of those chords in my readers—points where my own perception of the world seems to
overlap their own, thus offering up that shock of recognition that sometimes only a book can provide.’
Repeating a Frank Norris comment90, one of his favorites, King says ‘I would be perfectly happy
to have that last part—I never truckled, I told the truth—on my tombstone. I may have told a few
whoppers about ghosts, goblins, vampires, and the living dead, but I like to think I have told the
truth...about the human beings that the books are mostly about.’
He explains he writes each book twice—as the first draft flows he is ‘mostly concerned about
the emotional gradient’ with ‘zippo interest in theme, allegory, symbolism, politics, ethics, sexual
roles, culture, or dramatic unity. What I want is to reach through the page and grab the reader. I don’t
want to mess with your head. I want to mess with your life.’ King wants his readers to be so
engrossed, so passionate about the tale as to leave everything else to one side until it is done.
‘Compulsive reading is a sickness, and I have always wanted to be Typhoid Stevie.’ King continues
that, of course, a book can be more than emotion, as in the many levels of blood imagery in Carrie.
And, since that first published novel, its author has re-written to ‘satisfy my own intellectual
curiosity’, each should be ‘about something’. Salem’s Lot was about ‘the connection between small-
town life as I understood it and the whole idea of vampirism. With The Shining, it was the connection
between alcohol abuse and child abuse; it was also the idea that, while hotels may or may not be
haunted in the off-season, human lives are almost always haunted by the lives of others.’
King continues to explain the connections, theme, subtext, call it whatever academic term you
will, of many other novels, but more importantly how some stories make him feel (‘there is nothing
thematic about the way the book [ It] feels to me; like The Body, it is about what I remember most and
treasure best in my childhood’), making this a valuable piece for King fans, students and academics
alike. The balance of the article deals with King’s disdain of being the ‘poster-boy’ for the pleasures
of reading; or of getting children to read in general, although he agrees of course with both—he
simply asks to be read for his own work, not as ‘a ramp’ on the way to something else. Equally, he
does not want to be the poster-boy for fighting censorship in the classroom (King’s strong views
against censorship are amply demonstrated in a number of pieces in our Opinion— Venturing into
Politics chapter)—his job is to write books, not to defend them; although he does condemn
censorship in a lengthy conclusion to the speech.
This is an important piece that deserves a wider audience than the dry academia of the
collection. Reading Stephen King is still in print and easily accessed.
Stephen King Comments on Fears That He’s Unable to Write (November 2, 1999)
This piece was posted on November 2, 1999 at King’s official website, www.stephenking.com.
King notes he is ‘aware that a lot of people have been concerned about press reports that I am either
not writing or not able to write.’ He credits this rumor to ‘material taken out of context in the Dateline
interview Tabby and I did. What I said—and I believe the actual interview makes this clear—is that I
found it extremely difficult to find my way back into writing after the accident.’ He says he ‘fought’
and won that battle the previous July and had since finished On Writing and Riding the Bullet and
begun work on Rose Red (‘an expansion of a screenplay I wrote some years ago.’) While he says his
‘endurance is much less than it was, and my output has been cut in half’, he is working and is ‘touched
by the expressed concern’.
The post no longer appears at the official website. Copies are best obtained from other King
fans (note that such material should not be bought or sold, as this would breach King’s copyright).
Advice to Writers (September 22, 2000)
This interesting article, published shortly before On Writing, appeared as the Author Forum
section in Book Street, a Special Advertising section in USA Today for September 22, 2000. King
says, ‘ On Writing contains ideas about writing and lots of examples, but little outright advice. This is
by design. My wife likes to say, “Never give a man a fish if you can give him a fishing pole,” and
when I wrote my book, my thinking...ran along that course...Advice, which is often no more than
superstition or received wisdom handed down as fact, is often tastier [than instruction] but hardly
ever so useful in the long run.’
He notes there’s plenty of advice ‘in the writing field. I’ve been given plenty and cannot resist
passing on some of my favorites.’ Of the ten pieces of advice he offers he accepts some—‘Never
write in the afternoon...don’t ruin the shine on a perfectly good story by writing when your mind is
dull’; others he does not—in 1975 Richard Matheson (‘a writer I absolutely idolized’) wrote him a
note, ‘Stephen, one piece of advice...get yourself a music stand’ (on which to place copy in an attempt
to avoid shoulder and back problems).
Perhaps most interesting is King’s advice to ‘Keep your sense of perspective’: ‘Don’t bore your
spouse, your kids, or anyone else with the old tortured-artist act. Please remember that what you’re
doing is only writing stories and making things up. It’s not curing cancer or assuring world peace in
our time. The novelist is, when you get right down to it, just another ink-stamping bureaucrat; call him
or her a secretary of dreams. It’s a good job, no one would agree with that more than I, but if you
were crucified on Friday you would not rise on Sunday—please believe me on this.’ The Secretary
of Dreams, of course, is the title of a two-volume collection of King short stories, illustrated by
Maine artist Glenn Chadbourne, and due for release by Cemetery Dance Publications in 2006.
This is an obscure piece (appearing as it did in an advertising supplement) but copies do appear
from time to time at King resellers.
Great Hookers I Have Known (2000)
This piece appeared exclusively in Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of
Writing (2000), a Book-of-the-Month compilation of King’s writing, which can be obtained from
King dealers and the secondhand book market.
King opens with family matters: ‘All three of my kids write well, and all three enjoy making
fiction. I don’t find this particularly surprising, given the increasing evidence that most talents are
hereditary...My father, a merchant mariner, regularly submitted short stories to the pulps, and while he
was never published (at least not while living with my mother...), he had received enough rejection
notes from magazines like Argosy with added invitations to try them again to suggest he was getting
close, and might have made some sort of professional career for himself with a little more effort.’ He
goes on to describe asking his mother how good his father had been as a writer: ‘She shrugged. “Bad
Westerns,” she said. “He was pretty good with animals. The best were sea stories. Those were the
ones he came closest to getting published. There was one about a boat going down in a storm that I
liked very much.” She paused and added carefully, “I think you’re a little better, Stevie.”’ On the
subject of his wife Tabitha’s writing talent, King adds she ‘writes wonderful poetry and has
published three novels...they’re all damned good and... Caretakers, is much better than anything I’ve
ever written or ever will.’ There is also more about their children’s reading habits and writing skills.
The main thrust of the article is the use of ‘hookers’—the slang for opening lines in pulp-
magazines, to which son Joe was ‘attracted’—‘the same pulp fiction that attracted his old man, and
his old man’s father.’ Joe’s query of his father as to whether his books usually opened with great
‘hooker-sentences’ led King to realize he did not, in fact, usually do so. Even his personal favorite
from opening lines in his own novels, ‘Everybody thought the man and the boy were father and son’
(from ‘Salem’s Lot), ‘isn’t much of a hooker.’ King feels that, in an unconscious reaction to this lack,
he had often used other writer’s hookers as epigraphs to his own novels—for instance, ‘It was a
pleasure to burn’, from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in Firestarter.
He then lists ten great hookers by other novelists, ranging from James M. Cain’s The Postman
Always Rings Twice through one important to Bag of Bones (‘Last night I dreamed I went to
Manderley’ from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca) and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. He does feel the
hookers for his short stories are better than his novels, going so far as to argue that the one from
Beachworld (‘Fedship ASN/29 fell out of the sky and crashed’) is one of the best.
Creating by Hand (March 2001)
This article first appeared in Inside Borders, a free monthly magazine distributed at Borders
bookstores, for March 2001. It also appeared as Stephen King Takes Pen in Hand for Dreamcatcher
in The Book Report, a free monthly newsletter distributed at Waldenbooks bookstores that month. The
same company owns these chains.
The piece was to promote the release of King’s novel, Dreamcatcher, which he had written
entirely in longhand as part of his post-accident therapy. He notes that he’d used word processing
devices to write since ‘1989 or so’ and was by now a Mac user, ‘… like most Mac users, I’m a huge
fan: you’ll have to pry my Power-Book from my cold dead fingers, as they say.’ Calling this
technology ‘downright seductive’ King says he had caught himself on a ninth rewrite of one passage
i n Insomnia for no other reason than the technology allowed it to be done with great ease. For
Dreamcatcher he’d returned to a cartridge pen ‘in a deliberate effort to slow myself down...I printed
simply because I thought my assistant, Marsha, would find it easier to transcribe my work.’ The result
was, King believes, ‘a ground-level view of a story, the kind I hadn’t had for years. I found myself
writing more directly and simply because the physical effort of writing longhand...is far more arduous
than tickling a keyboard.’ The result was ‘that I heard my own voice more clearly’; the process was
‘intimate’; and he had a feeling ‘of actual work involved in writing.’
T h e Inside Borders article appeared entirely in King’s handwriting (which was fitting,
considering the subject); while The Book Report appearance had only the first paragraph in
handwriting, with the balance typeset. Copies of these magazines are best obtained through King
resellers.
America the Literate (July/August 2003)
A spectacular piece of satire, America the Literate appeared in Book magazine for July/August,
2003. King appears on the magazine’s cover, unshaven and looking down at the heels—the cover
headline reads: ‘The Shocking Truth About Literary Losers Like Me*’. In small print the asterisk
notes: ‘Actual Truth Not Included’. The magazine’s table of contents introduces the essay: ‘You’d
think that the author of The Shining, Carrie, The Dead Zone and dozens of other bestsellers would
have it made. Truth be told, while Jonathan Franzen, Annie Proulx and Margaret Drabble are raking
in the big bucks, Stephen King is barely getting by.’
The four pages of the article (including two photos of King on the steps of and in an old trailer
home), and subtitled A Fictional Essay, are heavily footnoted, including: ‘This quote and this source
—like all the quotes and sources in this essay—are, of course, fictitious. One may argue that this to
some extent negates the arguments that the essay makes, but since actual sources supporting these
arguments don’t exist, all I can say is that it seemed necessary.’
Clearly having enormous fun King begins by arguing that literate writers, far from having no
audience but themselves, in fact sell and are read in record numbers: ‘Let us begin with Ulysses,
James Joyce’s tale of Leopold Bloom’s big day. In 1998, eighty-one million copies of Ulysses were
sold—not worldwide, but in the United States alone.’ He quotes a high-school junior’s rather
sophisticated views of William H. Gass’s The Tunnel (‘it was pretty easy to see the vaginal
symbolism’); and claims one of Jonathan Franzen’s novels ‘sold fourteen million copies in a single
month.’ As a result literary novelists were living in tax havens and buying entire islands in the South
Pacific! He wonders why the ‘myth’ of the literate novelist being broke and a lone voice persists in
face of such facts and quotes one author as claiming she would get no respite from relatives if they
knew she earned more than Clancy, Grafton and Grisham combined.
King argues ‘wealth has always made writers uncomfortable’, although this has ‘always been
less true of the more easily recognized “popular” writers’; this explains why such novels as
Nabokov’s Ada, although selling millions of copies each year, never appears on bestseller lists—‘a
powerful group of “literary novelists” have purchased all the major newspaper and Internet sites that
publish bestseller lists, and any novel considered “too literary” is blocked from those lists.’
So, ‘Where is Stephen King?’, along with Cussler, Rice, Kellerman, Lehane and Connelly? ‘I,
like virtually every other popular novelist in America, live mostly on a subsidy check of just over
twelve thousand dollars a month...The check comes from Literature ‘R’ Us, a company incorporated
in the Bahamas.’ This company is owned and run by literary novelists (who, after all, have all the
money). ‘As for my last novel, From a Buick 8? It sold just over a thousand copies.’
He concludes in confession mode, ‘America’s so-called “popular novelists” are actually fronts,
created so that TV and the press will have someone to bother when they have an extra five minutes at
the end of the nightly news or space to fill in the arts-and-leisure section of the Sunday paper...On a
personal level I must admit I wish my books sold more, but sometimes the movies give me a boost;
thanks to Frank Darabont’s film of The Green Mile, for instance, my novel sold an extra fifteen
thousand copies. And, as J.K. Rowling admits, “Without the movies, Harry Potter would actually be a
total unknown.”’
Copies of this magazine are best obtained through King resellers, although copies do appear at
other venues.
We can expect more essays and articles on writing from King as the years pass—for, as we
know, writing is core to the man, his family and his life.
Author’s Notes and Introductions
to His Own Work
More than anything else I wanted to get inside my reader’s defenses, wanted to rip them and
ravish them and change them forever with nothing but story. And I felt I could do those things. I
felt I had been made to do those things.
—From On Being Nineteen (and a Few Other Things) in the Revised and Expanded Edition of
The Gunslinger.
King took early to including introductions, afterwords, notes and the like to his work—the first
appeared in only his second novel. They are generally intended to enlighten the reader about the
work, often exposing the spark for the idea that became the novel or short story, and normally include
acknowledgements of various individuals. We would encourage readers so inclined to actually read
the pieces in order. They give a wonderful insight into King the writer, King the man and his
development in these two ‘roles’ over the past three decades.
Often written with humor and always interesting they almost deserve a collection of their own.
But only almost. In the end each piece best serves its purpose in the context of the fiction it is
illuminating.
Notes: The following pieces are dealt with in the Danse Macabre, On Writing chapter of this
book: the Forenote, Forenote to the Paperback Edition and Afterword to Danse Macabre; the
Author’s Note, and the three Foreword s to On Writing. The authors have classified the Foreword to
the Paperback Edition of Dolores Claiborne (first published in 1993) as ‘fiction’ for the purposes of
this book. While we realize this is subject to debate, a close reading of the piece did not justify its
inclusion in this volume, a review of King’s non-fiction writings.
Author’s Note—Salem’s Lot (1975)
The first example of King as author speaking directly to the readers of one of his books appears
in only his second novel, ’Salem’s Lot. In On Writing the author described it as ‘a peculiar
combination of Peyton Place and Dracula....’ that he had originally titled Second Coming.
The Note begins, ‘No one writes a long novel alone…’ and proceeds to thank four people—‘…
my wife, whose criticism is as tough and unflinching as ever’, a Catholic priest, the County medical
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