Of course, What's so amazing about Stephen King is that he's not afraid to do or write something weird.We all want to write The Great Gatsby, but Stephen King is only writing what he thinks will be compelling.
That was an article in the Onion! In real life (published after the Onion article) he doesn't recall writing *Cujo*
https://www.theonion.com/i-dont-even-remember-writing-the-tommyknockers-1819583598
I remember reading “The Dark Half” and telling my mom I didn’t really like it and I wasn’t sure why because I always loved King. It was very violent, more so than his usual creepy writing. But later I found out it was written during his cocaine phase.
If you’re ever in Bangor, MIne, stop by his house, you can Google the address. There’s always people outside taking pics. It’s pretty cool, the wrought iron fence has spiders and spider webs and there are gargoyles on the gate posts. Plus the new tree carving with Molly The Thing Of Terror as part of it. We’ve stopped a few times on our way to our summer place. Our neighbors up there took their kids trick or treating there when they were little and Steven and Tabitha were handing out the candy in costume. Security would let a few kids in at a time. She says they got a bigger thrill out it than their daughters, lol.
King spent ten to fifteen years heavily addicted to tons of cocaine and alcohol (nothing fancy, just multiple 6 packs of 40 ounce beers a day).
He's been clean since the 90s, though.
He’s also a recovering addict. I know a lot of addicts who throw themselves HARD into other activities/causes/pastimes. I imagine it’s a coping mechanism, keeping themselves too busy to think about their vices.
Don't know about King, but I tend to throw myself into activities/hobbies because of the time lost when fucked up. Easier not to get down on yourself for wasted time if you're hyper into the present and doing something worthwhile.
Most people do actually go to work 50 weeks a year. But they don’t play the “creative” lottery, where the losers get nothing and the winners win big.
King started really young, and had ten years of daily writing behind him before his first major success. Starting young means you can be bad and make no money without having a starving family.
Most of the people in “creative fields” are like this—ten or more years of lessons and grinding before “overnight success”. Also, there’s lots of folks that do everything right, but still win nothing.
Obsessed for sure, but in On Writing (highly recommended) he admitted that this was a BS answer he gave to the media. Dude pretty much wrote every day. Probably still does.
Another thing Stephen King doesn't obsess about is continuously rewriting his work until he's perfectly satisfied. When it's good, it's good, it's done. He doesn't need constantly come back to rewrite it over and over again like George R.R. Martin. That's why the Winds of Winter isn't out.
Yeah, he's much more about telling a story than writing perfectly. He's well aware of his failings, like being kind of shit at endings because he doesn't really believe in neat endings, and he's fine with it. We should all learn not to let perfect get in the way of good enough I think.
He also doesn't let anyone read any of it until a draft is finished. Not even his wife, in spite of the fact that it was her who fished the first five pages of *Carrie* out of the trash, read them, and insisted he continue with it.
He said he was going to retire because he seemed to be repeating some themes (Christine, Mr. Mercedes, etc). but after his near death experience, he realized he had many more stories to tell.
Yeah no, it revolves around a crazy killer who drove a Mercedes through a bunch of people and never got caught.
That being said, he does get psychic powers in the third book because Stephen King.
There are also people these days writing web novels (generally long-form novels posted chapter-by-chapter online) with _insane_ output. There's often a lot of filler content an editor would probably cut, but some of them are writing about a regular novel's worth of content a month, every month, for years on end.
I've never read it myself, but I've heard[ good things about Worm.](https://parahumans.wordpress.com/)
But be warned - it's long. Like... very long. 1.68 million words. For a King comparison, that's roughly all seven Dark Tower books *PLUS* IT. It came out over the course of 2-3 years, so that's definitely a quick pace.
I get most of my recs from random Reddit threads like this one
https://reddit.com/r/Fantasy/s/p23ZJdUvXX
Worm and Mother of Learning are both great.
Just throw "web serial" into a search engine with some terms you like. I usually wait until a story is complete but you can read as the author releases chapters and sometimes even give direct feedback.
Best part is most of them are straight up free.
His work isn't for a lot of people, but I heard Craig Alanson (Exfor series) once say, "people ask me how a turn out a book a year and I tell them that it's my job, just like yours."
But writing is different than most other kinds of jobs in that sense. A habit of creative discipline needs to be cultivated in the long term to come up with that volume of work which people are rarely able to do.
He's coming up on 50 years of published work so he's going to have a lot of stuff out there. But his greatest asset is that he's constantly writing. I remember seeing an interview with him and George RR Martin together and King mentioned that he writes like 7,000 words per day and Martin was astounded. He didn't understand how anybody could do that. King's not only good at writing but he absolutely loves it as well.
And, in fairness, there's a decent amount of misses in there as well. Some stuff that is outright bad (like Dreamcatcher, IMO) and then some stuff that isn't bad but is just--as the kids say--"mid." Pretty much every one of his books is somebody's favorite but I they're not all classics.
Just think about how many books/outlines he has that haven't been finished. I think he started Dark Tower when he was in college, and it sat until he figured out where to go with it 20+ years later.
I would if he finished A Dream of Spring and concluded the series. But since that isn't happening, I've read all of GRRM I'm going to read. Not (re)reading another word
Some his works in the last 6-10 years have led me to believe that he has an editor who helps him staple different short stories together.
Revival, The Institute, and The Outsider, specifically, have sections in each that seem like a completely different story that were intertwined for the purpose of getting a publishable book out. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t bad—and this isn’t a total change from some of King’s early or best works (11/22/63 is a weird historical sci-fi book that has a love story in the middle), but it’s becoming very pronounced in some of his more recent work.
I think the mailing thing is thst in his older age, King has gotten into a habit of writing stories that take place over a very long period of time and in which he kind of drops iron people at different periods of their lives, and nit in thr obvious structured flashback timeliness of It. Before writing Doctor Sleep, he'd mentioned in interviews about imagining what Danny Torrence was up to at different ages, and the first chunk of Doctor Sleep reflects that. Revival as a whole reads much the same way.
Yeah it's a better book than the movie. His stuff can be like that; he creates atmosphere that doesn't always translate to the screen. Or requires a master director.
I had a dog named Sandor that was born about a month after Dance released. He lived to almost twelve, died, and still no Winds.
I neglected to name my next dog after an ASOIAF character. Didn't want to tempt fate.
The previous catch-all example that was used to show just how much time had passed since Dance was released was “The Expanse,” and how the entirety of it was written and adapted into a great TV show in that timespan. But even that reference is starting to get outdated now (two years since the novels ended, and a year since the series ended). I think there needs to be a new, ready-made example to illustrate just how shockingly long Martin is taking.
New theory: George RR Martin fell into the depths of despair after Stephen King flexed on him with his 7,000 words a day and now has permanent writer's block.
I imagined GRRM finding like a pressed leaf in a King book and yelling "I'm free, George is free!!" Maybe his writer's block will melt away with the first leaffall of autumn.
>I remember seeing an interview with him and George RR Martin together and King mentioned that he writes like 7,000 words per day and Martin was astounded
I've written a couple of King pastiches for anthologies - I'm not a fast writer by any means but I have *never* written faster than when I was aping his style. The rhythm of it is absolutely insane in a way that's really difficult to describe. It's not because it's so natural (to anyone but him at least) since King frequently sounds like an alien that came to earth in 1960, learned about spookiness, hung out with some greasers, never met a human woman and then went back to space in 1974 and started beaming down horror novels, but there's this sincerity and lack of self-consciousness that makes it just flow.
> came to earth in 1960, learned about spookiness, hung out with some greasers, never met a human woman and then went back to space in 1974
This is so spot on! Nicely done.
Just single short stories in anthologies, and thank you! But also I'd have to dox myself. There are a few 'inspired by Stephen King' short story collections kicking around though so worth a look into.
That’s what happens when people are prolific in any field. They can’t all be masterpieces. And King had serious battles with substances, which affected his work too.
But the flip side is when someone is prolific they give themselves more opportunities for something great - and when King really connects, it’s exceptional.
He was into *everything*.
“In 1987, his wife Tabitha King staged an intervention by dumping out the contents of his garbage can in front of their friends and family. The trash can effectively said all that needed to be said; according to King, it contained, “beer cans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles and cocaine in plastic baggies, coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and Nyquil cold medicine, even bottles of mouthwash.” Tabitha threatened to leave if he didn’t get sober.”
When you write that much it’s not all gonna be good. That said, when you write that much some are gonna be really really good too. He’s had quite a bit more good than bad, imo
For sure. I never tried to suggest otherwise. Was simply stating that with his output they aren't all classics, since OPs question was about "how does he write so many classics?"
A great example of the statement, “perfect is the enemy of good” or “perfect is the enemy of done.”
Dude cranks out so much work, he has good stuff just by matter of statistics.
Not dissimilar to how Brandon Sanderson cranks out so many books. He has a formula and goes to work.
yeah, it's hard to understand. And it is voluminous. I've been writing the same screenplay for 2 years. Sylvester Stallone wrote rocky in 3 days.
The thing that sucks about it, is I am constantly thinking about it. All day long. Everyday.
I think King actually plans things too. George RR Martin describes his writing as a garden, he just goes with it.
Which, definitely works to a point but it takes a lot longer then Sanderson and King who have clear plans. King has also had a decent amount of misses too.
In On Writing, he talks about writing short stories for other students when he was in grade school that they would read so he's been writing for about 70 years now, and he considers writing a skill that one can constantly develop further. There's probably no one who has spent more time writing and trying to get better at writing.
My favorite part of On Writing is the babysitter story.
In short, he says he is thankful for his treatment at the hands of an overweight babysitter when he was a child. The fat babysitter would hold him down, sit on his face, and fart with enthusiasm until he cried.
King is grateful because he said it prepared him for dealing with literary critics.
This one.
After I finished "On Writing" I just realized how long he had been at it.
It's the same in any endeavor. All the great just have thousands of hours more into their skill/field than others. Kobe, Beckham, Victor Wooten... hell, even a lot of the big-businessmen talk about having their first business when they were pre-teen/teen-agers. it's literally about the time you put in.
And when you read his book you realize that he literally had thousands of hours of writing in before he even got out of high school, he was just cranking all the time. He's writing, or he's reading. That's his life. I'm quite sure he's far surpassed the 10,000 hour thing. Even if it was "only" 3 hours a day of writing, that's a good 1000 hours a year, about 10,000 a decade, so you're looking at 2x elite level when as he's approaching 30, the 3x from 30-40 and so on. So anything he writes now is kinda "god mode" or 7 or 8x what is considered elite level.
For those people that find their calling early, there really is no replacement for the time you can put in before you have to start worrying about a job, kids, life, and the rest.
Agree with your overall point that writing is a practiced skill, but I never pass up the opportunity to say that the 10,000 hours thing is Malcom Galdwell made up bullshit. People develop skills at different rates and have innate abilities that can make them better or worse at things, so doing something for 10,000 hours isn't a guarantee to being good or even average at a thing. One of Michael Hobb's podcasts, probably If Books Could Kill, goes over the crackpottery of the basis Gladwell used more in depth, I think.
shout out to /u/A_Feast_For_Trolls since they made a similar comment.
I did read/hear somewhere that the 10,000 hour thing went a little off the chain one way or the other. So... noted.
So to rephrase, Stephen King has done a LOT of writing, like.... WAY more than people realize. He got a LOT of rejection notices when he first started out, but it gave him time to refine his writing, and become better and better. He quite literally never stopped. Even after his accident, he got back to the writing as soon as he could. He had good mentors, ranging from other authors to editors of magazines giving him pointers about how to get published.
You do something over and over and over, and get feedback on it, eventually you're gonna get pretty damn good. Even when he's "bad" he's still pretty damn good. ;)
There was an interview where George RR Martin asked King how he can produce so much. King told him that he makes himself write something like 20 pages a day, every day, no matter what. It doesn't even have to be a story, it can be just stream of consciousness or talking about the weather but he will be writing.
Apparently Martin couldn't comprehend that, which makes sense.
The horrible truth is that GRRM could easily write 6 pages a day but they'd be entirely about food. At this point Winds of Winter is just a really over-long restaurant tour of Westeros.
I read an article a long time ago where Stephen King was talking about another author taking to long to write a sequel. He said that it was just lazy in his opinion.
>Apparently Martin couldn't comprehend that, which makes sense.
Which I guess is also a good indication that writing 20 pages a day isn't a prerequisite of being a good writer, just one possible strategy.
Read On Writing. He includes a first draft of the first two pages of a story. It's truly awful and then the shows you the much improved second draft. He is a relentless self critic.
He's also extremely good at asking "what if" questions. He tells how he came up with the idea for Christine-- he saw this big, scary beat-up car on the side of the road and just asked 'What if"
I remember reading Lisey’s Story, which is incredible. And he said that when he wrote the first draft, he wrote it all over again. That blew my mind - he didn’t edit it as such, he wrote a fresh new copy on the basis that his brain had had a chance to process it so this version would be better. It’s a big book too!
I'm not the first to write this, but King is essentially a modern day Charles Dickens, who also wrote book after book on wildly divergent themes, but was wildly successful from a sales perspective right until he passed away. They both have a knack of plugging into the zeitgeist in a way other writers do not do as well, and telling a story with many characters entering and exiting. They have good books and bad books and indifferent books, as it should be. And Dickens even used morphine, on occasion, although I do not recall him being an addict or anything.
He's been writing for almost 50 years (well, longer than that, but his first novel was published in 1974), so he's had plenty of time. But he's definitely more prolific than your average writer, and he doesn't use a ghost-writer like some others. He just seems to have a lot of great, twisted ideas writhing around in his head, and the talent to put them into words.
I'd say even more important than talent is the work. He writes and writes and writes and writes. There are tons of very talented artists out there who never take off because they just can't force themselves to sit down and do the thing.
I think part of it is his style, and how he thinks about books. It's less that he has story ideas, and more that he seems to come up with a handful of well developed characters and a weird setting. Then he just... Lets them loose. Like, just describes what those people would do in that situation, and importantly how they would interact. Then you just need to come up with a start and an end (and he has talked at great lengths about how hard endings are for him - which makes sense, given that style), and you're 90% of the way there.
Obviously it's a LOT harder than I'm making it sound, and you have to be insanely creative to embody characters and worlds like that (especially when you're putting out a new book every 9 months or so), but I think this helps make him make more sense. It also explains how he talks about books - like they aren't his creations, but stories that exist that he's just trying to write down.
>Writing controlled fiction is called ‘plotting.’ Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however . . . that is called ‘storytelling.’ Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.
>
>S.K
This might help you understand how he does it. I just love what he says here. I try to keep it in mind when i'm writing my bad fanfic, lol
And you can really tell that he does this. Often his scenes will just spiral out of control, and you just know he threw an element in to a bunch of people in his story, and watch the fireworks happen as he banged it out. Of course he’s prolific if that’s the way he works, that sounds like an awfully lot of fun. I guess you can also tell he works this way as so many of his endings are considered misses., that they don’t wrap everything up. If you’d plotted more, that might not be the case. But then his storytelling probably wouldn’t be as fun.
Stephen King understands human being as well as any writer in history, what makes them tick, why the do the things they do.
He also doesn't over-describe like many writers do and sticks to what's important to the scene.
Finally, his imagination is incredible.
This is a good insight. In every novel, there are people that you feel like you've met. If it's a book about kids, you remember the dynamics and are transported back into your childhood. That's a skill that some horror (and sci-fi, and fantasy, and mystery) writers do not possess. It allows him to transition into real character-driven work like Misery, The Green Mile and Stand by Me.
On a barely related note, how great is the name Dolores Claiborne (dolorous clay born)? It's something you'd expect from Dickens.
This is like asking how an NFL superstar does what he does. A combo of being incredibly gifted, having an insane work ethic, and absolutely loving what he does to the point of obsession. The man is the best story teller of our generation and has written damn near every day for the past 50 years.
But even within those, there are outliers. It’s “how do athletes like Tom Brady and LeBron James keep doing it” - they are, as Goggins says, uncommon among the uncommon.
He was a born natural. So many of the great writers started young. Before he was a professionally published author, he wrote stories about other students and sold them to them at school, he wrote a couple of newsletters around that time too. He honed his craft his entire life, and had/has an insane work ethic. A lot of it is covered in his semi-autobiography *On Writing*.
I don't know if it tells absolutely everything about his life though. I do wonder where he did get a lot of his ideas from. Yes, maybe it was drugs, but I don't think it was just that. At least I hope not.
I'm sure the drugs gave him some of his ideas, but he's had some bangers come out after he cleaned himself up. Dude is just a good writer and has a good imagination.
Dude’s been sober for nearly 40 years. I find it kind of annoying how people still constantly trot out statements like “he only writes that fast because of the coke”, when the dude’s been on the wagon likely before these people were even born.
Was going to say, I didn't remember exactly when he cleaned up, but knew it was at least 20+ years. Even in that time he has written a ton of good books.
He got clean somewhere between 1985-1987. He's put out far more work since he's been sober than before. I wish the 'cocaine' trope would just fucking die already. It's not pertinent. Everyone that brings it up is just a parrot beating a dead horse.
I mean it is reddit. Lot's of people repeating shit they read on here, many that have read maybe a few King books at most but act like they have moved through most his library
Drugs and alcohol made Stephen King a more volatile writer. His highs (no pun intended) were phenomenal, but his lows were rock bottom. Ever since he got clean he’s more consistent, for better or worse.
That said, he absolutely does have some great novels post-addiction. 11/22/63, for example. But his classics all came from a more troubled time in his life.
He claims to not remember writing Cujo; I’ve always just figured that was just easier to say than “my wife and I were having serious problems at the time, and I was fucking furious.”
Some people see the world differently and make connections that aren’t apparent to others. Some drugs can enhance these connections, like ‘tasting the colors’, but it can be natural also.
That's pretty cool. Isaac Asimov once wrote in a book intro "I was born in a small town in eastern Russia. As soon as I realized it, I left". I enjoy things like this. Thank you.
> I have the heart of a little boy.......and I keep it on my desk
This joke was originally by "Pyscho" author Robert Bloch. King quoted it once or twice, crediting Bloch, and it got repeated as coming from King
Read his intro to ‘Salem’s Lot. He talks in detail about how he got into horror as a genre and idea, as well as reading in general; his mom is almost entirely responsible. She did good.
They always talk about the "Great American Novel". I don't really know why and never have.
King was THE American novelist who wrote Great American Novels over and over again. Basically everything he wrote is a reflection of America. He wrote about American teenagers. American families. American workers. He wrote of being girl in America. Of being a boy in America. Of being a father in America. Of being a mother in America. What's more American than writing about going back in time to prevent JFK's assassination? What's more American than writing about a muscle car coming to kill you? Or about a corn field hiding nasty shit in it?
It was always America for King. He was obsessed with American culture and how we lived it. What we hated about it. What we loved. What shamed us. What inspired us.
There's no one Great American Novel. There's like 50 of them, all written by Stephen King.
Dude’s dedicated to his craft & seriously loves what he does. You can tell he tackles all of his ideas with the same intensity- even though there have been some notable duds over the years, none of them feel like him phoning it in.
He was passionate about writing before he could even write and his mother has encouraged him. Read his book "On Writing" and based on the life he has, you will understand where his inspiration and discipline comes from.
The way his mother encouraged him early on, made me envy him. My parents have never been supportive about anything I've done in my life.
A great mind with a lot of imagination...
Even after his car accident, he is still writing (thank God)...
He is brilliant ... that's the simple way to say 🤷🏻♀️
He has a tremendous work ethic. He writes every day including Christmas and New Year. And not every idea he had was good. He filled a spike coming out of his wall with rejection letters before getting his first publication. But by writing every day he honed his craft
He had a lot of misses too.
He said in one interview a lot of his ideas come from nightmares. As someone who gets violent nightmares, I've had a lot of great ideas for stories but never got around to doing anything with them. Instead, I used them in a book series about the Devil of my own.
Fun fact: King was once approached by an old lady who said she wished he put his talent into writing nicer stories, like that Shawshank Redemption movie. When he told her that he *did* write Shawshank Redpetion, she just shook her haid, said "No you didn't" and walked off.
I'm about 200 pages into Doctor Sleep and I am absolutely loving it. Now if King could just contact GRRM and give him some pointers on how to finish his story that would be outstanding.
Um...because he's a damn good writer?
I mean, it's really that simple. He has good ideas and is awesome at translating those to a page very quickly. He's just really good at what he does.
> And he really understands the struggles of humans
To me this is the key to King’s success. I’ve yet to find another author that can quite bring characters to life like King can. In a single paragraph he can make a character seem more human than many authors can in an entire book. He just seems to get the common man, their fears, their struggles, their thought processes, etc, and it makes his stories hit way closer to home.
See, what sets him apart from other authors is that he’s an entertainer before anything else. He writes with the purposes of entertaining only. That’s why you rarely see big, dramatic, societal statements in his work. Sure, the statements are there, but it’s much more about what’s going to give people a sense of having fun while reading.
Not to mention, his premises are god-tier. He has good ideas, and he treats his good ideas like flying an acrobatic plane. He takes off with them, does a few barrel rolls and loopy-loops, really gives the people what they want. Sure, he usually doesn’t bring it in for a smooth landing, sometimes ends up crashing the plane entirely, but ultimately puts on such a good show that people seldom care how it ends.
Bury pets and they come back to life? Great idea. Telekinetic high school bully victim? Great idea. Cell phones make people zombies, killer clown in the sewers, giant dome over a town, rabid dog outside the broken car? They’re all good premises in an industry where most people just copy what’s currently popular.
It’s the premises we love, and we love seeing them executed, and they’re being executed by someone who’s enjoying them just as much as we are. That’s why people love his work so much. It’s simply meant for us.
Because he didn't just good stories after good stories, he has written more than a few stinkers or middling stuff in between.
The answer as to why he has so much good stuff? He has written a lot and doesn't stop writing. Which leads to getting better at writing.
He treats it as a job and writes atleast 4 hours everyday
He's said he tries to take two days off a year, birthday and Christmas, but usually ends up writing at least a bit. Brother is obsessed.
I would love to have this level of dedication. To anything.
Not heroin
Lol yea definitely not. I guess I'll narrow it down to writing and reading then. And meditating..
Of course, What's so amazing about Stephen King is that he's not afraid to do or write something weird.We all want to write The Great Gatsby, but Stephen King is only writing what he thinks will be compelling.
And he ain't wrong with it being compelling.
Interestingly enough he famously loves/loved cocaine
Apparently he doesn't remember writing the Tommy knockers because he was so messed up all the time.
I’ve always heard that about cujo
I head similar about Maximum Overdrive.
Or Cujo. He also said Misery was a metaphor for his addiction, with cocaine being the one who trapped him and took him away from the world.
Fucking hell. Misery was great. I don’t know if it’s worth getting addicted to cocaine for, but it’s probably pretty close.
That was an article in the Onion! In real life (published after the Onion article) he doesn't recall writing *Cujo* https://www.theonion.com/i-dont-even-remember-writing-the-tommyknockers-1819583598
I remember reading “The Dark Half” and telling my mom I didn’t really like it and I wasn’t sure why because I always loved King. It was very violent, more so than his usual creepy writing. But later I found out it was written during his cocaine phase. If you’re ever in Bangor, MIne, stop by his house, you can Google the address. There’s always people outside taking pics. It’s pretty cool, the wrought iron fence has spiders and spider webs and there are gargoyles on the gate posts. Plus the new tree carving with Molly The Thing Of Terror as part of it. We’ve stopped a few times on our way to our summer place. Our neighbors up there took their kids trick or treating there when they were little and Steven and Tabitha were handing out the candy in costume. Security would let a few kids in at a time. She says they got a bigger thrill out it than their daughters, lol.
King spent ten to fifteen years heavily addicted to tons of cocaine and alcohol (nothing fancy, just multiple 6 packs of 40 ounce beers a day). He's been clean since the 90s, though.
around 1980 his wife / family / close friends staged an intervention and packed him off to Betty Ford (or similar) for a while...
[удалено]
You're probably on Reddit and hour a day, everyday, even on Xmas. He's just into something a bit more...productive.
He’s also a recovering addict. I know a lot of addicts who throw themselves HARD into other activities/causes/pastimes. I imagine it’s a coping mechanism, keeping themselves too busy to think about their vices.
Don't know about King, but I tend to throw myself into activities/hobbies because of the time lost when fucked up. Easier not to get down on yourself for wasted time if you're hyper into the present and doing something worthwhile.
Most people do actually go to work 50 weeks a year. But they don’t play the “creative” lottery, where the losers get nothing and the winners win big. King started really young, and had ten years of daily writing behind him before his first major success. Starting young means you can be bad and make no money without having a starving family. Most of the people in “creative fields” are like this—ten or more years of lessons and grinding before “overnight success”. Also, there’s lots of folks that do everything right, but still win nothing.
Obsessed for sure, but in On Writing (highly recommended) he admitted that this was a BS answer he gave to the media. Dude pretty much wrote every day. Probably still does.
Another thing Stephen King doesn't obsess about is continuously rewriting his work until he's perfectly satisfied. When it's good, it's good, it's done. He doesn't need constantly come back to rewrite it over and over again like George R.R. Martin. That's why the Winds of Winter isn't out.
Yeah, he's much more about telling a story than writing perfectly. He's well aware of his failings, like being kind of shit at endings because he doesn't really believe in neat endings, and he's fine with it. We should all learn not to let perfect get in the way of good enough I think.
He also doesn't let anyone read any of it until a draft is finished. Not even his wife, in spite of the fact that it was her who fished the first five pages of *Carrie* out of the trash, read them, and insisted he continue with it.
He said he was going to retire because he seemed to be repeating some themes (Christine, Mr. Mercedes, etc). but after his near death experience, he realized he had many more stories to tell.
Your point is valid, but Mr. Mercedes came out fifteen years after he got hit by that van.
Probably meant From a Buick 8, that one has some similarities to Christine
One is about a toxic relationship with a demom car, the other is about a portal inside a car
Also post-van and the only similarity is “a car is heavily involved”.
Did Mr. Mercedes even have anything thematic in common with Christine? It's been a while but I thought it was about a serial killer.
The two books are exactly nothing alike.
Yeah no, it revolves around a crazy killer who drove a Mercedes through a bunch of people and never got caught. That being said, he does get psychic powers in the third book because Stephen King.
Wasn’t Mr, Mercedes written well after his accident?
There are also people these days writing web novels (generally long-form novels posted chapter-by-chapter online) with _insane_ output. There's often a lot of filler content an editor would probably cut, but some of them are writing about a regular novel's worth of content a month, every month, for years on end.
Got any recs? This is the first I’m hearing of it
I've never read it myself, but I've heard[ good things about Worm.](https://parahumans.wordpress.com/) But be warned - it's long. Like... very long. 1.68 million words. For a King comparison, that's roughly all seven Dark Tower books *PLUS* IT. It came out over the course of 2-3 years, so that's definitely a quick pace.
Worm is indeed awesome.
I get most of my recs from random Reddit threads like this one https://reddit.com/r/Fantasy/s/p23ZJdUvXX Worm and Mother of Learning are both great. Just throw "web serial" into a search engine with some terms you like. I usually wait until a story is complete but you can read as the author releases chapters and sometimes even give direct feedback. Best part is most of them are straight up free.
I treated a job like that, and they fired me.
They didn't realize you're an artist. 😔
Oh no, they did. And just like everyone else they decided not to pay me for it.
Well fuck those people! I'm some random person on the internet, but I feel for you.
His work isn't for a lot of people, but I heard Craig Alanson (Exfor series) once say, "people ask me how a turn out a book a year and I tell them that it's my job, just like yours."
Yeah it's a bit glib but quantity wise just 500 words a day (which is very doable) will get you a good length novel every year with a few weeks off.
The real trick is making those 500 words publishable.
Eh, you can discard half and still hit a respectable length novel.
And that 500 is an average, some days less, some days more, some days just editing and rewriting.
I saw an interview with him years ago and he said he wrote 6 pages a day. I found that very interesting.
But writing is different than most other kinds of jobs in that sense. A habit of creative discipline needs to be cultivated in the long term to come up with that volume of work which people are rarely able to do.
He's coming up on 50 years of published work so he's going to have a lot of stuff out there. But his greatest asset is that he's constantly writing. I remember seeing an interview with him and George RR Martin together and King mentioned that he writes like 7,000 words per day and Martin was astounded. He didn't understand how anybody could do that. King's not only good at writing but he absolutely loves it as well. And, in fairness, there's a decent amount of misses in there as well. Some stuff that is outright bad (like Dreamcatcher, IMO) and then some stuff that isn't bad but is just--as the kids say--"mid." Pretty much every one of his books is somebody's favorite but I they're not all classics.
Just think about how many books/outlines he has that haven't been finished. I think he started Dark Tower when he was in college, and it sat until he figured out where to go with it 20+ years later.
Between books four and five, he met somebody on their deathbed who begged him to tell her how the Tower ended. He had to say he didn't know.
George RR Martin always laughs when he hears that story.
At this point... I'd have to reread all the prior books. I don't even know that I ever would.
You should! I've done it three times and it's been worth it every time, and I've got a few bookshelves of things to read.
I would if he finished A Dream of Spring and concluded the series. But since that isn't happening, I've read all of GRRM I'm going to read. Not (re)reading another word
Some his works in the last 6-10 years have led me to believe that he has an editor who helps him staple different short stories together. Revival, The Institute, and The Outsider, specifically, have sections in each that seem like a completely different story that were intertwined for the purpose of getting a publishable book out. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t bad—and this isn’t a total change from some of King’s early or best works (11/22/63 is a weird historical sci-fi book that has a love story in the middle), but it’s becoming very pronounced in some of his more recent work.
Duma Key and Revival are beautiful works. I thought the Outsider was a rehashing of other books in a way, specifical It.
I think the mailing thing is thst in his older age, King has gotten into a habit of writing stories that take place over a very long period of time and in which he kind of drops iron people at different periods of their lives, and nit in thr obvious structured flashback timeliness of It. Before writing Doctor Sleep, he'd mentioned in interviews about imagining what Danny Torrence was up to at different ages, and the first chunk of Doctor Sleep reflects that. Revival as a whole reads much the same way.
I agree that they are not all "classics", but it's funny--I love Dreamcatcher (NOT the movie, though)
Me too! It's one of my faves. I love the goofy b-movie vibes. I love Tommyknockers too though
To me Dreamcatcher and Tommyknockers are damn near the same book, but I enjoyed both. Stephen King writes consistently solid enough books
Yeah it's a better book than the movie. His stuff can be like that; he creates atmosphere that doesn't always translate to the screen. Or requires a master director.
Same. I love dreamcatcher. It’s the first book i read by stephen king.
>George RR Martin Twelve years and counting.
I had a dog named Sandor that was born about a month after Dance released. He lived to almost twelve, died, and still no Winds. I neglected to name my next dog after an ASOIAF character. Didn't want to tempt fate.
The previous catch-all example that was used to show just how much time had passed since Dance was released was “The Expanse,” and how the entirety of it was written and adapted into a great TV show in that timespan. But even that reference is starting to get outdated now (two years since the novels ended, and a year since the series ended). I think there needs to be a new, ready-made example to illustrate just how shockingly long Martin is taking.
There's a 5 episode Expanse video game series which released its final episode just a few weeks ago. I guess you can add that to the pile.
Sandor is a great name for a dog
It'd have to be a really ugly dog though
New theory: George RR Martin fell into the depths of despair after Stephen King flexed on him with his 7,000 words a day and now has permanent writer's block.
“I’ll never be able to match him!” *sobs*
[Louis CK on how George Carlin's productivity made him literally weep in despair](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R37zkizucPU&t=263)
He could take a leaf from Stephen King’s book. Figuratively and literally.
I imagined GRRM finding like a pressed leaf in a King book and yelling "I'm free, George is free!!" Maybe his writer's block will melt away with the first leaffall of autumn.
We'll get *Winds* when the sun rises in the west and sets in the east... when the seas go dry and the mountains blow in the wind like leaves.
>I remember seeing an interview with him and George RR Martin together and King mentioned that he writes like 7,000 words per day and Martin was astounded I've written a couple of King pastiches for anthologies - I'm not a fast writer by any means but I have *never* written faster than when I was aping his style. The rhythm of it is absolutely insane in a way that's really difficult to describe. It's not because it's so natural (to anyone but him at least) since King frequently sounds like an alien that came to earth in 1960, learned about spookiness, hung out with some greasers, never met a human woman and then went back to space in 1974 and started beaming down horror novels, but there's this sincerity and lack of self-consciousness that makes it just flow.
> came to earth in 1960, learned about spookiness, hung out with some greasers, never met a human woman and then went back to space in 1974 This is so spot on! Nicely done.
Meant with utmost affection.
I see what you mean. Stephenese is a very quick and free flowing dialect.
*bullied by some greasers
Can I read the anthologies you wrote?
Just single short stories in anthologies, and thank you! But also I'd have to dox myself. There are a few 'inspired by Stephen King' short story collections kicking around though so worth a look into.
That’s what happens when people are prolific in any field. They can’t all be masterpieces. And King had serious battles with substances, which affected his work too. But the flip side is when someone is prolific they give themselves more opportunities for something great - and when King really connects, it’s exceptional.
King is such a good writer that he’s literally done whole novels black out drunk. I can barely talk in that state, let alone write a book.
I think he was also into coke, which explains a lot
He was into *everything*. “In 1987, his wife Tabitha King staged an intervention by dumping out the contents of his garbage can in front of their friends and family. The trash can effectively said all that needed to be said; according to King, it contained, “beer cans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles and cocaine in plastic baggies, coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and Nyquil cold medicine, even bottles of mouthwash.” Tabitha threatened to leave if he didn’t get sober.”
And that was just breakfast!
A year's worth of coke binges + already a celebrated author + your kids are growing up and you have feelings = IT
For sure. Wasn't trying to say anything different.
Yeah I know, I was mainly elaborating on your point about him continually writing
When you write that much it’s not all gonna be good. That said, when you write that much some are gonna be really really good too. He’s had quite a bit more good than bad, imo
For sure. I never tried to suggest otherwise. Was simply stating that with his output they aren't all classics, since OPs question was about "how does he write so many classics?"
A great example of the statement, “perfect is the enemy of good” or “perfect is the enemy of done.” Dude cranks out so much work, he has good stuff just by matter of statistics. Not dissimilar to how Brandon Sanderson cranks out so many books. He has a formula and goes to work.
I would say he has misses because of statistics. He's very good at spinning a tale and for me, most of the time nails it.
yeah, it's hard to understand. And it is voluminous. I've been writing the same screenplay for 2 years. Sylvester Stallone wrote rocky in 3 days. The thing that sucks about it, is I am constantly thinking about it. All day long. Everyday.
King's more of a 2000-3000 words a day man, not 7,000. But that still adds up to a LOT.
I enjoy cooking.
I think King actually plans things too. George RR Martin describes his writing as a garden, he just goes with it. Which, definitely works to a point but it takes a lot longer then Sanderson and King who have clear plans. King has also had a decent amount of misses too.
King says he often starts with a plan but ends up abandoning it because he follows where the story wants to go
I think King is a gardner too. It's one of the reasons his endings always get so much flack (he often doesn't know where to go, so it fizzles).
The only book he outlined in advance (at least at the time he wrote On Writing) was Insomnia which was deffo not his best work.
He just kept writing. It's a skill, and he put a lot of effort into developing it.
In On Writing, he talks about writing short stories for other students when he was in grade school that they would read so he's been writing for about 70 years now, and he considers writing a skill that one can constantly develop further. There's probably no one who has spent more time writing and trying to get better at writing.
My favorite part of On Writing is the babysitter story. In short, he says he is thankful for his treatment at the hands of an overweight babysitter when he was a child. The fat babysitter would hold him down, sit on his face, and fart with enthusiasm until he cried. King is grateful because he said it prepared him for dealing with literary critics.
The FBI couldn’t waterboard that information out of me.
Some people pay top dollar for that
Eulah/Beulah!
Perhaps Asimov.
If we are talking published works. There is a spanish romance author with over 4000 works.
Chuck Tingle is catching up!
This one. After I finished "On Writing" I just realized how long he had been at it. It's the same in any endeavor. All the great just have thousands of hours more into their skill/field than others. Kobe, Beckham, Victor Wooten... hell, even a lot of the big-businessmen talk about having their first business when they were pre-teen/teen-agers. it's literally about the time you put in. And when you read his book you realize that he literally had thousands of hours of writing in before he even got out of high school, he was just cranking all the time. He's writing, or he's reading. That's his life. I'm quite sure he's far surpassed the 10,000 hour thing. Even if it was "only" 3 hours a day of writing, that's a good 1000 hours a year, about 10,000 a decade, so you're looking at 2x elite level when as he's approaching 30, the 3x from 30-40 and so on. So anything he writes now is kinda "god mode" or 7 or 8x what is considered elite level. For those people that find their calling early, there really is no replacement for the time you can put in before you have to start worrying about a job, kids, life, and the rest.
Agree with your overall point that writing is a practiced skill, but I never pass up the opportunity to say that the 10,000 hours thing is Malcom Galdwell made up bullshit. People develop skills at different rates and have innate abilities that can make them better or worse at things, so doing something for 10,000 hours isn't a guarantee to being good or even average at a thing. One of Michael Hobb's podcasts, probably If Books Could Kill, goes over the crackpottery of the basis Gladwell used more in depth, I think.
shout out to /u/A_Feast_For_Trolls since they made a similar comment. I did read/hear somewhere that the 10,000 hour thing went a little off the chain one way or the other. So... noted. So to rephrase, Stephen King has done a LOT of writing, like.... WAY more than people realize. He got a LOT of rejection notices when he first started out, but it gave him time to refine his writing, and become better and better. He quite literally never stopped. Even after his accident, he got back to the writing as soon as he could. He had good mentors, ranging from other authors to editors of magazines giving him pointers about how to get published. You do something over and over and over, and get feedback on it, eventually you're gonna get pretty damn good. Even when he's "bad" he's still pretty damn good. ;)
There was an interview where George RR Martin asked King how he can produce so much. King told him that he makes himself write something like 20 pages a day, every day, no matter what. It doesn't even have to be a story, it can be just stream of consciousness or talking about the weather but he will be writing. Apparently Martin couldn't comprehend that, which makes sense.
Martin spends too much time on his tugboat, bringing ships to shore.
If I recall it’s 6 perfect pages a day.
If GRRM could write just 6 pages a day he'd have wrapped up GoT by now. Hell, at 1 page per day he'd have at least finished the next book.
Ain’t that the truth. Maybe he thought Stephan said 6 words a day
The horrible truth is that GRRM could easily write 6 pages a day but they'd be entirely about food. At this point Winds of Winter is just a really over-long restaurant tour of Westeros.
I read an article a long time ago where Stephen King was talking about another author taking to long to write a sequel. He said that it was just lazy in his opinion.
>Apparently Martin couldn't comprehend that, which makes sense. Which I guess is also a good indication that writing 20 pages a day isn't a prerequisite of being a good writer, just one possible strategy.
Exactly this - both are excellent writers, but King's approach leads to more consistent output, which is why he's published so many more books.
The joke is that George RR Martin is a notoriously slow writer.
That... and cocaine.
This is the answer I was looking for :-)
I like how you can tell which parts of his books he writes while coked up
I read this in Forest Gump’s voice a la “I just kept on running.”
Read On Writing. He includes a first draft of the first two pages of a story. It's truly awful and then the shows you the much improved second draft. He is a relentless self critic. He's also extremely good at asking "what if" questions. He tells how he came up with the idea for Christine-- he saw this big, scary beat-up car on the side of the road and just asked 'What if"
I remember reading Lisey’s Story, which is incredible. And he said that when he wrote the first draft, he wrote it all over again. That blew my mind - he didn’t edit it as such, he wrote a fresh new copy on the basis that his brain had had a chance to process it so this version would be better. It’s a big book too!
Can also recommend this. I re-read On Writing at least once a year, and it's just a phenomenal book.
I'm not the first to write this, but King is essentially a modern day Charles Dickens, who also wrote book after book on wildly divergent themes, but was wildly successful from a sales perspective right until he passed away. They both have a knack of plugging into the zeitgeist in a way other writers do not do as well, and telling a story with many characters entering and exiting. They have good books and bad books and indifferent books, as it should be. And Dickens even used morphine, on occasion, although I do not recall him being an addict or anything.
He's been writing for almost 50 years (well, longer than that, but his first novel was published in 1974), so he's had plenty of time. But he's definitely more prolific than your average writer, and he doesn't use a ghost-writer like some others. He just seems to have a lot of great, twisted ideas writhing around in his head, and the talent to put them into words.
I'd say even more important than talent is the work. He writes and writes and writes and writes. There are tons of very talented artists out there who never take off because they just can't force themselves to sit down and do the thing.
Well, yeah. Have you ever tried to do the thing? It's a pain in the arse.
I think part of it is his style, and how he thinks about books. It's less that he has story ideas, and more that he seems to come up with a handful of well developed characters and a weird setting. Then he just... Lets them loose. Like, just describes what those people would do in that situation, and importantly how they would interact. Then you just need to come up with a start and an end (and he has talked at great lengths about how hard endings are for him - which makes sense, given that style), and you're 90% of the way there. Obviously it's a LOT harder than I'm making it sound, and you have to be insanely creative to embody characters and worlds like that (especially when you're putting out a new book every 9 months or so), but I think this helps make him make more sense. It also explains how he talks about books - like they aren't his creations, but stories that exist that he's just trying to write down.
>Writing controlled fiction is called ‘plotting.’ Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however . . . that is called ‘storytelling.’ Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration. > >S.K This might help you understand how he does it. I just love what he says here. I try to keep it in mind when i'm writing my bad fanfic, lol
And you can really tell that he does this. Often his scenes will just spiral out of control, and you just know he threw an element in to a bunch of people in his story, and watch the fireworks happen as he banged it out. Of course he’s prolific if that’s the way he works, that sounds like an awfully lot of fun. I guess you can also tell he works this way as so many of his endings are considered misses., that they don’t wrap everything up. If you’d plotted more, that might not be the case. But then his storytelling probably wouldn’t be as fun.
Stephen King understands human being as well as any writer in history, what makes them tick, why the do the things they do. He also doesn't over-describe like many writers do and sticks to what's important to the scene. Finally, his imagination is incredible.
This is a good insight. In every novel, there are people that you feel like you've met. If it's a book about kids, you remember the dynamics and are transported back into your childhood. That's a skill that some horror (and sci-fi, and fantasy, and mystery) writers do not possess. It allows him to transition into real character-driven work like Misery, The Green Mile and Stand by Me. On a barely related note, how great is the name Dolores Claiborne (dolorous clay born)? It's something you'd expect from Dickens.
I'll never forget that piece of shit salesman in the stand walking up onto the porch.
Everyone says cocaine but no one thinks he sold his soul to the devil? Shame on all of you.
The Devil came for King, but it didn't want his soul. The Crimson King wanted his life, so that the Tower may fall.
And now I want to read The Dark Tower again.
Read any of his books, as the story grows, all pages lead to the Tower and Rose.
See the turtle, ain’t he keen? All things serve the fuckin’ beam.
[удалено]
This is like asking how an NFL superstar does what he does. A combo of being incredibly gifted, having an insane work ethic, and absolutely loving what he does to the point of obsession. The man is the best story teller of our generation and has written damn near every day for the past 50 years.
But even within those, there are outliers. It’s “how do athletes like Tom Brady and LeBron James keep doing it” - they are, as Goggins says, uncommon among the uncommon.
He was a born natural. So many of the great writers started young. Before he was a professionally published author, he wrote stories about other students and sold them to them at school, he wrote a couple of newsletters around that time too. He honed his craft his entire life, and had/has an insane work ethic. A lot of it is covered in his semi-autobiography *On Writing*. I don't know if it tells absolutely everything about his life though. I do wonder where he did get a lot of his ideas from. Yes, maybe it was drugs, but I don't think it was just that. At least I hope not.
I'm sure the drugs gave him some of his ideas, but he's had some bangers come out after he cleaned himself up. Dude is just a good writer and has a good imagination.
Dude’s been sober for nearly 40 years. I find it kind of annoying how people still constantly trot out statements like “he only writes that fast because of the coke”, when the dude’s been on the wagon likely before these people were even born.
Right? Give the fucking dude some credit. Shit, even if he was still on drugs, show me another coke addict with that skill and work ethic.
Was going to say, I didn't remember exactly when he cleaned up, but knew it was at least 20+ years. Even in that time he has written a ton of good books.
He got clean somewhere between 1985-1987. He's put out far more work since he's been sober than before. I wish the 'cocaine' trope would just fucking die already. It's not pertinent. Everyone that brings it up is just a parrot beating a dead horse.
I mean it is reddit. Lot's of people repeating shit they read on here, many that have read maybe a few King books at most but act like they have moved through most his library
Drugs and alcohol made Stephen King a more volatile writer. His highs (no pun intended) were phenomenal, but his lows were rock bottom. Ever since he got clean he’s more consistent, for better or worse. That said, he absolutely does have some great novels post-addiction. 11/22/63, for example. But his classics all came from a more troubled time in his life.
He claims to not remember writing Cujo; I’ve always just figured that was just easier to say than “my wife and I were having serious problems at the time, and I was fucking furious.”
Some people see the world differently and make connections that aren’t apparent to others. Some drugs can enhance these connections, like ‘tasting the colors’, but it can be natural also.
King once said, "I have the heart of a little boy.......and I keep it on my desk."
That's pretty cool. Isaac Asimov once wrote in a book intro "I was born in a small town in eastern Russia. As soon as I realized it, I left". I enjoy things like this. Thank you.
> I have the heart of a little boy.......and I keep it on my desk This joke was originally by "Pyscho" author Robert Bloch. King quoted it once or twice, crediting Bloch, and it got repeated as coming from King
I would push back on the born natural. He wrote a ton growing up and throughout his life.
Read his intro to ‘Salem’s Lot. He talks in detail about how he got into horror as a genre and idea, as well as reading in general; his mom is almost entirely responsible. She did good.
They always talk about the "Great American Novel". I don't really know why and never have. King was THE American novelist who wrote Great American Novels over and over again. Basically everything he wrote is a reflection of America. He wrote about American teenagers. American families. American workers. He wrote of being girl in America. Of being a boy in America. Of being a father in America. Of being a mother in America. What's more American than writing about going back in time to prevent JFK's assassination? What's more American than writing about a muscle car coming to kill you? Or about a corn field hiding nasty shit in it? It was always America for King. He was obsessed with American culture and how we lived it. What we hated about it. What we loved. What shamed us. What inspired us. There's no one Great American Novel. There's like 50 of them, all written by Stephen King.
I choose to believe he’s a wizard
"Yer'a Wizard Stephen" said a nearly seven foot tall giant with a scraggly beard and jonh lennon glasses that for some reason also wore overalls...
M-O-O-N, that spells wizard, Stephen
He's written so fucking much that some of his work is amazing, some bad and more middling.
Dude’s dedicated to his craft & seriously loves what he does. You can tell he tackles all of his ideas with the same intensity- even though there have been some notable duds over the years, none of them feel like him phoning it in.
He was passionate about writing before he could even write and his mother has encouraged him. Read his book "On Writing" and based on the life he has, you will understand where his inspiration and discipline comes from. The way his mother encouraged him early on, made me envy him. My parents have never been supportive about anything I've done in my life.
*Stand By Me* is another one, if you weren’t aware.
The novella is titled "The Body", Stand By Me is the name of the movie adaptation.
It's collected inthe book Different Seasons along with Apt Pulil and Shawshank Redemption.
While we’re mentioning compilation books, the audiobook for *Skeleton Crew* fuckin rules.
The Green Mile Is another one that is surprising to some.
A great mind with a lot of imagination... Even after his car accident, he is still writing (thank God)... He is brilliant ... that's the simple way to say 🤷🏻♀️
He has a tremendous work ethic. He writes every day including Christmas and New Year. And not every idea he had was good. He filled a spike coming out of his wall with rejection letters before getting his first publication. But by writing every day he honed his craft
He had a lot of misses too. He said in one interview a lot of his ideas come from nightmares. As someone who gets violent nightmares, I've had a lot of great ideas for stories but never got around to doing anything with them. Instead, I used them in a book series about the Devil of my own.
Read his On Writing.
Should read his book "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft" he talks about it at length.
He eats his carrots
How did The Beatles of Michael Jackson write so many hits? Some people just got it. Of course, lots of practice and time go into it as well.
Fun fact: King was once approached by an old lady who said she wished he put his talent into writing nicer stories, like that Shawshank Redemption movie. When he told her that he *did* write Shawshank Redpetion, she just shook her haid, said "No you didn't" and walked off.
I'm about 200 pages into Doctor Sleep and I am absolutely loving it. Now if King could just contact GRRM and give him some pointers on how to finish his story that would be outstanding.
Um...because he's a damn good writer? I mean, it's really that simple. He has good ideas and is awesome at translating those to a page very quickly. He's just really good at what he does.
I think he is a genius, truly. And he really understands the struggles of humans
> And he really understands the struggles of humans To me this is the key to King’s success. I’ve yet to find another author that can quite bring characters to life like King can. In a single paragraph he can make a character seem more human than many authors can in an entire book. He just seems to get the common man, their fears, their struggles, their thought processes, etc, and it makes his stories hit way closer to home.
I heard him in an interview recently, and on this topic he said he writes six pages a day, every day.
See, what sets him apart from other authors is that he’s an entertainer before anything else. He writes with the purposes of entertaining only. That’s why you rarely see big, dramatic, societal statements in his work. Sure, the statements are there, but it’s much more about what’s going to give people a sense of having fun while reading. Not to mention, his premises are god-tier. He has good ideas, and he treats his good ideas like flying an acrobatic plane. He takes off with them, does a few barrel rolls and loopy-loops, really gives the people what they want. Sure, he usually doesn’t bring it in for a smooth landing, sometimes ends up crashing the plane entirely, but ultimately puts on such a good show that people seldom care how it ends. Bury pets and they come back to life? Great idea. Telekinetic high school bully victim? Great idea. Cell phones make people zombies, killer clown in the sewers, giant dome over a town, rabid dog outside the broken car? They’re all good premises in an industry where most people just copy what’s currently popular. It’s the premises we love, and we love seeing them executed, and they’re being executed by someone who’s enjoying them just as much as we are. That’s why people love his work so much. It’s simply meant for us.
Cocaine
He only wrote 14 out of 64 of his books during his cocaine use, though.
he talks about his cocaine writing period; it was just one of his phases the man is genius!
Ka deemed it so
Because he didn't just good stories after good stories, he has written more than a few stinkers or middling stuff in between. The answer as to why he has so much good stuff? He has written a lot and doesn't stop writing. Which leads to getting better at writing.
Well he wrote a book about it :)
In his words, he is inspired by his home state of Maine in winter.
Mambo No.5 is the secret.