Facts About Stephen King

Stephen King is undeniably one of the most notable writers of the 20th century. Known for his horror stories that capture both our imagination and our primal fear of the unknown, he has written masterpieces such as Carrie, The Shining and Misery. His name is legendary and his definitive body of work establishes him truly as the 'master of horror'.

Although inseparable from the horror genre, Stephen King has proven himself to be a serious writer capable of great prose and outstanding writing style. His later works shows a maturity that is rare in writers who have achieved economic successes and refuse to leave their comfort zones. Stephen King however, tries his hand in other genres which are sometimes not welcomed by the public who has gotten used to the scary thrills he has provided them. But King is not threatened by this, instead he slowly evolves in his writing giving us a glimpse of the different perspectives he has gathered over the years.

In his book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), Stephen King narrates to us how he came to be a writer. The book is more than a memoir, it's also a practical guide for any aspiring writer. I found this book more useful than any other book on the subject. King covers both theoretical as well practical tips he has gathered all these years as a writer. As a youngster, Stephen King knew he always wanted to be a writer. His first paid writing job was four stories "about four magic animals who rode around in an old car, helping out little kids" (King 14). Patterned after Combat Casey comics, his mother paid him a quarter a piece for their originality and quality. The experience, he said, gave him "an immense feeling of possibility at the idea, as if I had been ushered into a vast building filled with closed doors and had been given leave to open any I liked" (King 14).

Due to a complication to his ears and throat (brought on by a simple case of measles), he was housebound for nine months when he should've been attending first grade. He read his way "through approximately six tons of comic books, progressed to Tom Swift and Dave Dawson (a heroic World War II pilot whose various planes were always "prop-clawing for altitude"), then moved to Jack London's bloodcurdling animal tales" (King 13). King loved to read but he was also a regular kid who spent days with his older brother exploring the outdoors. He describes their playground in Stratford, Massachusetts as a "huge entangled wilderness area with a junkyard on the far side and a train track running through the middle. This is one of the places I keep returning to my imagination; it turns up in my books and stories again and again, under a variety of names. The kids in It called it the Barrens; we called it the jungle" (King 16).
Stephen King had nothing but creative and imaginative juices running up and down his body. In fact, as a young boy, he was writing serials for his brother's newsletter (called Dave's Rag), but he admitted the "journalistic duties" bored him (King 56). However, much of his creativity was funneled into plagiarized versions of the movie he loved so much. Deeply influenced by the horror movie The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), he turned it into a novelized version, printing forty copies of it and sold it for one quarter each. However, his teacher Mrs. Hisler berated him for writing junk, saying, "You're talented. Why do you waste your abilities?" (King 35). The sermon stuck and that started him off creating his own writings.

Married during his college years and children after three years of marriage did not, however, gave him enough time to earn money for basic needs, much more for writing. During summers in college, he and his bother worked at Brunswick High. Cleaning the girls' bathroom, he chanced upon graffiti written on the walls ("Pussyplugs, for them certain days of the month") and with a memory of an article written in Life about telekinesis and how evidence "suggest that young people might have such powers... especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first - ", the idea of Carrie was born (King 61). Stephen King did admit not liking the lead character Carrie White. To him, she "seemed thick and passive, a ready made victim". The novel Carrie however, much to King's earlier dislike of journalism, tries its hand at lending some credence to a supernatural event through journalism-style news clippings and interviews.
King tells how he came to create Carrie ["the only issue of a family as odd as any that has ever been brought to popular attention"(Carrie: Stephen King 13)] whom she patterned after the "two loneliest and most reviled girls in class". Now, Stephen King as a high school student was not what we can say a popular kid but he did understand the social hierarchy commonly associated with high school. That's why the book, on some levels, appealed to the general public, being reminded of the trauma and pain of high school. King says he pitied Carrie and her classmates as well, "because I had been one of them once upon a time" (King 68). His wife Tabitha Spruce was a huge influence in his life. She was the pillar that held him up in those tough times, when he was still an unknown writer, trying to make his way up the bestseller ladder. Carrie is in fact dedicated to her: "...for Tabby, who got me into it - and then bailed me out of it".

Graffiti also figured in a more recent story in a 2002 short story collection titled Everything's Eventual. In All That You Love Will be Carried Away, Alfie Zimmer is a traveling salesman, who all his life, has been collecting graffiti from his travels. He would see these writings written on bathroom walls and motel rooms and he is quite fascinated by them. He decides one day to kill himself in a motel room in Nebraska because he couldn't go on living the way he has been before. This is outside his usual horror genre but he managed quite well to portray loneliness at its loneliest.

Reading King's works would give you the wrong ideas on what influences him to write such dark stories and complex characters, but this writer who confesses about being afraid of the dark, gets his ideas from very strange and unexpected places. He narrates how on a trip to London, he dreamt of a "popular writer... who fell into the clutches of a psychotic fan living on a farm somewhere in the back of the beyond" (King 151). This would be the novel Misery. His other works are mostly situations where he thinks up "while showering, while driving, while taking my daily walk" (King 156). Some, I would assume from people, either dead or alive. The Shawshank Redemption's full title is Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, a short novella in his collection Different Seasons. The main character here asks a fellow inmate what the posters of Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield meant to him.

He answered "freedom" (Different Seasons: Stephen King 55). The posters, in fact, represented literal freedom, Andy Dufresne's brilliant escape tunnel (dug meticulously over the years), covered by posters of beautiful women. In The Stand, King employed symbolism to the maximum. He wanted to portray America as a place which "had become dangerously overcrowded - a veritable Calcutta". King was writing the story during the end of the Energy Crisis of the 1970s. The US' involvement in the Yom Kippur War triggered this shortage in gas, compelling the oil-rich Arab countries to withheld oil shipments to the West. He tells how he clearly saw how the story progress, "from the traffic jam plugging the dead tube of New York's Lincoln Tunnel to the sinister Nazi-ish rebirth of Las Vegas under the watchful (and often amused) red eye of Randall Flagg" (King 188). The story revolved around how technology and our dependence on it would eventually destroy us.

Even his dark days of alcoholism and drug use produced for him Misery, The Shining and the Tommyknockers. Not to say that he condoned the use of drugs and alcohol to produce an altered state to help him imagine those dark and frightening creatures that inhabit the deep crevices of the mind. King believed that he did function on a competent level but not letting go of the vices for fear of living any other life. In this point of his life, he used as a literary parallel the main character of Misery, Annie Wilkes: "Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie's pet writer" (King 84). King admits that creative people do have a greater risk of being alcoholics and addicts.

Understanding Stephen King's influences means we also have to understand why he reads what he reads. "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot" (King 131). Although he says that the reading he does is more for his personal amusement that his research on his craft, we cannot deny that what he does read can lead to inspiration for a new novel or even a short story. He even begins On Writing with a comment on Mary Knarr's memoir, The Liar's Club praising its beauty and ferocity. "Reading is the creative center of a writer's life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there all sorts of opportunities to dip by". As a youth and a great fan of Ray Bradbury, he would write in his style. H.P. Lovecraft, he describes "was a genius when it comes to tales of the macabre, but a terrible dialogue writer". I also seem to remember him describing Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie as one of the scariest books.

One cannot argue that Stephen King has carved a niche for himself in the annals of literature. Although it may be hard to separate him from the blood-covered Carrie or the sexy car Christine, or Cujo and the vampires in Salem's Lot, we have to accept that Stephen King has more breadth and talent as a writer than the above-mentioned works. His imagination is beyond fertile. It is a well-spring that will continue to gush forth stories upon stories that are both original and wonderful.

Works Cited
King, Stephen. "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away". The New Yorker.
January 29, 2001: 74.

King, Stephen. Different Seasons. USA: 1983.

King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir on the Craft. USA: 2000.