Stephen King Day: The Daily Two Thousand

Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. His father walked out when he was two, and his mother raised him and his brother on low-paying jobs while moving between Maine, Indiana and Connecticut before settling back in Maine. He started sending stories to magazines as a boy and collected the rejections on a nail in his wall.

He graduated from the University of Maine with a degree in English in 1970 and took a job teaching English at Hampden Academy the following year. Carrie came out in 1974. More than sixty novels followed, along with a couple of hundred short stories, a seven-book pseudonymous career as Richard Bachman, and a fantasy series he spent over thirty years finishing.

He’s the most commercially successful novelist of his generation, and for a long stretch the literary establishment treated that as a mark against him. The National Book Foundation gave him its medal for distinguished contribution to American letters in 2003, and the reaction from some critics was outrage. In 2014 he received the National Medal of Arts. The argument over whether he counts as a serious writer is over, and the people who lost it are the ones who never read him.

How did Stephen King write Carrie?

In a laundry room, at a desk wedged between the washer and the dryer.

He and his wife Tabitha were living in a trailer, and money was short enough that he typed on her Olivetti from college because he couldn’t afford his own machine. He was teaching during the year and working summers at an industrial laundry. He wrote the opening pages of a story about a bullied girl with telekinetic powers, decided it wasn’t working, and threw them in the trash.

Tabitha fished the crumpled pages out, smoothed them flat, read them and told him he had something. She also helped him with the parts he didn’t know, the girls’ locker room where the book opens among them.

He finished it nine months later.

Doubleday paid a $2,500 advance. Then Signet bought the paperback rights for $400,000, half of it his, and King got the news by phone while he was alone in the house. The hardback sold about 13,000 copies. The paperback sold more than a million in its first year. He quit teaching.

Forget the money for a second. The book almost didn’t exist because its author lost faith in three pages, and a reader he trusted pulled it back out of the trash.

King later called Tabitha his Ideal Reader, the one person every book is written for, and he’s right that a writer needs one. A first draft you can’t judge looks worse to you than it does to anybody else.

What is Stephen King’s daily writing routine?

Ten pages a day. In On Writing he puts it at about 2,000 words, and he believes the first draft of a book, even a long one, should take no more than three months.

That number gets quoted as a challenge, and plenty of writers treat it as a target they’ve failed to hit. The quota matters less than the regularity. King writes every day, in the same place, at roughly the same time, and he doesn’t stop until he’s reached the number. The habit gets the book past the days when he doesn’t feel like it, and those days come for everybody.

My own writing day is built the same way, around a fixed shape. Client work takes the morning, my own books take the afternoon, and client work comes back in the evening. The afternoons belong to the novels, and I write them in Microsoft Word.

Nobody needs to match his number. Five pages a day, every day, beats twenty pages on the weekends you happen to feel inspired.

The three-month rule is the useful part. A first draft that stretches over two years goes stale. The writer forgets what the early chapters set up, the voice drifts, and the story loses the momentum that would have carried a reader through it. A fast draft lets you hold the entire book in your head while you write it.

What does On Writing teach about the craft?

More than most craft books three times its length.

King started On Writing in 1997, finished the memoir section and the section on grammar and style, then stalled and set it aside early in 1998. He picked it back up in June 1999, intending to finish it that summer. Instead he got hit by a van. When he came back to work in late July, this was the book he chose to return to. It came out in 2000.

The advice is blunt. If you want to be a writer, he says, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. Write the first draft with the door closed, for yourself. Rewrite with the door open, once other people get to see it. And cut. He quotes a formula an editor scrawled on one of his early rejection slips, and it says the second draft equals the first draft minus ten percent.

That last formula is the one I’d hand every new writer. I cut a lot. Ten percent is a floor, and the cuts come from the places where the writer was clearing his throat or explaining something the scene already showed.

He’s also hard on adverbs. “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs,” he writes, and he means the ones bolted onto dialogue tags in particular. That puts him in agreement with Elmore Leonard, and with me. I keep a fuller version of the book’s argument on my page for On Writing.

Does Stephen King outline his novels?

No, and he says so. He distrusts plot and thinks a writer who outlines ends up with characters pushed around to fit the diagram.

His method starts with a situation, a what-if, and a few characters dropped into it. Then he writes to find out what happens. In On Writing he describes stories as found things, closer to fossils dug out of the ground than to buildings designed in advance, and he treats the writer’s job as getting them out with as little damage as possible.

The approach explains both his strengths and his weaknesses.

The strength is that the characters behave like people instead of chess pieces, because nobody decided in advance where they had to end up. Readers believe them.

The weakness is endings. (See my review of IT) A writer who doesn’t know where the story is going has to land it somewhere when he gets there, and King’s landings are the least reliable part of his work. I write the opposite way. I love a twisty plot set up with small hints, and you can’t plant a hint for an ending you haven’t figured out. Both methods work, and they produce very different books.

Who was Richard Bachman?

King’s other self, invented because the publishing business in the 1970s believed a popular writer shouldn’t release more than one book a year.

King wrote faster than that. Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man and Thinner came out under the Bachman name, in plainer packaging and with almost no promotion. Part of the point was a test: could a King book sell without the King name on it?

The test ended in 1985. Steve Brown, a bookstore clerk in Washington, D.C., noticed the style, went to the Library of Congress and found records that named King as the author of Rage. Once the secret was out, Thinner sold far better than it had as a Bachman book. That’s a lesson every publisher already knew and every new writer has to learn: the name sells the book long before the prose gets a chance to. The 1987 film of The Running Man came from the Bachman list, and it barely resembles the novel.

How did addiction affect Stephen King’s work?

Badly, and he’s said so himself. He struggled with alcohol and drugs through the 1980s and wrote much of that decade’s work under the influence. He has said he barely remembers writing Cujo.

The books from those years are a mixed bag. Some of them are long, loose and wildly overwritten. Others, It and Misery among them, are as good as anything he’s produced. The work kept coming because the routine kept running. That cuts both ways. A daily quota will get a book written in almost any condition, and it’ll also get a bad book written in almost any condition. The family staged an intervention in the late 1980s and he got sober.

Misery is the book to read with that history in mind. It’s about a writer held prisoner by his most devoted fan, forced to produce a novel he doesn’t want to write, and King has connected it to his addiction. The fan is the drug. Rob Reiner’s 1990 adaptation, with Kathy Bates, is a model of how to film him.

What happened to Stephen King in 1999?

On June 19, 1999, King was walking along the shoulder of Route 5 in Lovell, Maine, when a van struck him. He suffered a collapsed lung, a broken hip and multiple fractures in his leg, and he needed several surgeries to walk again. For weeks afterward he couldn’t write at all.

He went back to work in late July, in pain, for short sessions. The book he chose to return to was On Writing, and its final section describes the accident and the recovery. He ends it by arguing that life doesn’t exist to support art. Art exists to support life. From a man who’d spent twenty-five years writing ten pages a day, that’s a big admission.

The accident also turned up in the fiction. Lisey’s Story and Dreamcatcher both draw on it.

He kept writing. Twenty-five years and dozens of books later, he’s still at it.

What does not hold up in Stephen King?

The length, to start. Plenty of his books are two hundred pages longer than the story needs, and the ten percent cut he preaches doesn’t always get made. The Stand exists in two editions, and the 1990 uncut version put back hundreds of pages his publisher had trimmed the first time.

The endings, again. The Dark Tower series runs eight books, the main story wrapped up in 2004 and an extra volume followed in 2012, and the final volumes write King himself into the plot as a character. Some readers love that. Others found it the moment the series lost its nerve.

And the adaptations are wildly uneven. That isn’t his fault, but it shapes his reputation. For every Carrie (1976) there’s a pile of cheap films that took his title and nothing else. He has said repeatedly that he dislikes Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining, and he wrote a television miniseries in 1997 that stuck closer to the book and was much less memorable. The Kubrick film is better cinema. King’s complaint about it, that it lost the father’s slow slide into madness, is still correct.

Which Stephen King book should you read first?

It depends on what you think he is.

If you think of him as a horror writer and nothing else, start with Different Seasons, the 1982 collection of four novellas. The Body became the film Stand by Me. Another of them became The Shawshank Redemption. Neither has a monster in it, and both show a writer who understood boyhood, friendship and prison better than most literary novelists of his era.

If you want the horror at full strength, read The Shining, published in 1977. It’s a haunted hotel story wrapped around a book about a father’s drinking, and the drinking scares more than the ghosts do.

If you want to see the method under pressure, read Misery.

And if you want the writer at his most controlled, read 11/22/63, his 2011 novel about a teacher who travels back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination. It’s long, as usual, and it earns most of its length. The ending works, too.

Finish with On Writing. It’s short enough to finish in a weekend, and the half that’s memoir explains the half that’s advice.

How should you mark Stephen King Day?

Write ten pages. If that’s too many, write five, but do it at the same time and in the same place tomorrow, and the day after. The habit is the whole method, and King has been proving it for fifty years.

For more on the writers who built the genre he inherited, see H.P. Lovecraft Day and the rest of the literary holidays calendar. If your first draft has been running for two years instead of three months, my book coaching service is built for exactly that problem.

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