King’s English: The Making of a Writer
Stephen King Shares His Life’s Story and Creative Process in ‘On Writing’
The adolescent Stephen King collected rejection slips. He’d write a short story and pitch a publication. They’d say no, and he’d pin the rejection note to a nail on his bedroom wall, one after another, after another, until he filled up the nail and began impaling the incoming slips on a large spike.
He received encouragement along the way. He published some, and a negatively inclined editor might occasionally add a positive note to his rejection, such as: “Not for us, but good. You have talent. Submit again.” He did, but it could have gone another way.
There’s an alternative timeline in which mega-bestselling author Stephen King runs a laundromat, teaches high school, or dies of an overdose. He wanted to be a writer from his youth, but, as in any life, there were so many moments on which the future turned that you could easily imagine another outcome—when, for instance, his famous persistence almost failed him, a story he tells in his memoir On Writing, originally published in 2000.
How Stephen King Became Stephen King
King had written a few novels, none of them yet published. Then something came together. “Good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere,” he says, “sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun.”
Working as a high-school janitor, he found himself tasked with scrubbing down the walls of the girl’s shower. The scene came back to him later as he imagined a young woman getting her period and fellow classmates teasing her. “She thinks she’s dying, that the other girls are making fun of her even while she’s bleeding to death,” he says. “She reacts . . . fights back . . . but how?”
Later, while working at laundry, he recalled reading a piece in Life magazine about telekinesis, the supposed ability to move objects solely by the power of one’s mind.
There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first—
Pow! Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I had an idea.
He began writing what became Carrie, his first published novel and which set the trajectory for his entire career. But he almost didn’t finish it. He sat on the idea for while. When he finally committed part of it to paper, he disliked the result. By then he was teaching high-school English and living in a trailer with his wife Tabitha (“Tabby”) and young son and daughter. He didn’t believe he could make an entire novel out of a setting he found too foreign and a lead character he didn’t enjoy. He crumpled it up and tossed it in the can.
The next day Tabitha noticed the balled-up pages in the trash. She plucked them from bin, shook off the cigarette ash, and flattened them out. After reading, she confronted him. It was good, she told him. Why had he thrown it out?
He explained his rationale, but she blew off his concerns. “You’ve got something here,” she said and agreed to help him nail the unfamiliar particulars for a horror novel about high-school girl politics gone terribly wrong.
It served as an important lesson. “Stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea,” he realized. “Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all your managing is to shovel $#!+ from a sitting position.”
King ended up selling the book to Doubleday for a small advance (“better than indentured servitude, but not much”). Then the paperback house Signet bought the mass-market rights for—his publisher asked if he was sitting down when he relayed the news—$400,000! It sold a million copies its first year in paperback.
And just like that, Stephen King became Stephen King—all from a project he initially crumpled and dropped in the trash.
Books on Writing, Ugh
Here I confess something: I don’t actually enjoy books about writing. (Neither does King, for what it’s worth; he says most are full of that stuff he thought he was shoveling with his early work on Carrie.)
But I’d somehow forgotten my dislike when deciding to read King’s On Writing—part life story, part writers’ guide—for my 2024 classic memoir goal. I imagined I might pair it with Annie Dillard’s famous The Writing Life and Anne Lamott’s equally popular Bird by Bird. I have a lot of respect for Dillard and Lamott, but after dipping in I realized I just couldn’t sustain the requisite attention.
If you love either of those books, I get it: They’re highly regarded and justifiably so. Just not by me. There is a lot of very practical writing help out there, and as a professional editor I think writers should take advantage of it. Get all the assistance and mentoring you think you need. But when, for instance, Dillard goes on about how hard writing is, I either suppress a groan or stifle a yawn. There are few things less sympathetic or interesting to an editor than a writer complaining about writing.
What immunizes King’s book from this reaction? His advice is thoroughly framed and contextualized by his personal story. The book has four parts: first, his autobiography; second, his tips on the craft; third, a postscript on surviving a roadside accident that nearly took his life in 1999; fourth, a bundle of useful appendices.
King’s development as a writer helps validate his advice as a writer, and it makes a compelling story on its own. He presents something he struggled to find in Carrie White: a sympathetic character.
King had a hard childhood, raised with his brother by a single mom in extreme poverty after his father abandoned the family. Mom encouraged his writing from early on, and he learned through a combination of practice and failure—such as when he created a spoof student newspaper as a sophomore in high school, The Village Vomit, and was nearly suspended for an unflattering reference to a particular teacher.
He escaped with a formal apology and detention, but the school guidance counselor figured King needed more direction. He reached out to the editor of the local paper, John Gould, and landed the young King a job on the sports page—his first paid gig as a writer. Gould marked up his copy with a black pen, mentoring him along the way.
“I took my fair share of English Lit classes in my two remaining years at Lisbon [High School],” said King, “and my fair share of composition, fiction, and poetry classes in college, but John Gould taught me more than any of them, and in no more than ten minutes.”
Gould explained the difference between writing (“you’re telling yourself the story”) and rewriting (“taking out all the things that are not the story”). “Gould said something else that was interesting on the day I turned in my first two pieces,” said King:
write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.
While relating what he learned from Gould, King reproduces an example of Gould’s editorial markups and then provides a more extensive fictional example in one of the appendices so readers can follow the editorial process and see its results.
There’s plenty more writerly advice for those who want it. King offers what he calls the toolbox: thoughts on vocabulary, grammar, how paragraphs work, and the like. He then looks at larger questions, such as what it takes to be a writer (“read and write a lot” with plenty of suggestions) and how to think about plot (forget about it; focus on narration, description, and dialog instead).
But the best feature of On Writing?
Family Affair
The edition I read was published in 2020, and contributions from King’s two sons, Owen and Joe, fatten the appendices. Both are writers themselves, the latter publishing under the name Hill. Joe interviews his father in a delightful exchange, one that sheds some light on moments in the memoir and then goes beyond it. And it’s in the essay by Owen that we learn King likes to revise while listening to AC/DC “at jet-engine volume.”
Owen tells how his dad would pay him to narrate homemade audiobooks back before the format was widely available or featured many options. “One day, in 1987,” he said, “he presented me with a handheld cassette recorder, a block of blank tapes, and a hardcover copy of Watchers, by Dean Koontz, offering nine dollars per finished sixty-minute tape of narration.” Owen was just ten but a decent reader.
King enlisted his two other kids as well, Joe and daughter Naomi. “He claimed that he wasn’t trying to broaden our literary horizons,” said Owen; “he just wanted to hear the books. Nonetheless, they broadened mine.” Owen read some two-dozen books for his dad. It was, he recalled, “excellent practice for writing.”
These and other anecdotes serve as a reminder of a basic truth: While writing can feel like a solitary activity—“write with the door closed”—we don’t just “rewrite with the door open,” we live our whole lives that way, too, dependent on a vast web of relationships and their influence.
King and his wife Tabitha have been married since 1971. A successful novelist herself, she’s his first critic on most anything and in many ways responsible for his success. Not only did she pull his future career out of the waste basket, she tough-loved him into rehab for his alcohol and drug addiction. King’s substance abuse was crippling; he says he barely remembers writing Cujo (1981) and was so dissociative he “felt evicted from life.”
In all these stories of love and family, going back to his mother and extending through is wife and children, what emerges is perhaps the best of all bits of writing wisdom, the essential insight, one that could only come from the description of a life: Anything we have to offer the world, we have because of what others have offered us.
On Writing was the seventh book in my classic memoir goal for 2024. Here’s what I’ve reviewed so far and what’s in store for the rest of the year:
January: Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
February: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
March: Richard Wright, Black Boy
April: Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
May: Tété-Michel Kpomassie, Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland
June: John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
July: Stephen King, On Writing
August: Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
September: Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
October: John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
November: C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
December: Beryl Markham, West with the Night
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When I decided to writer a memoir, I read KIng's book, also Mary Karr's book on writing memoir. I liked King's mix of advice and his own story. I think the most inspiring thing I got from King's 'On Writing,' was his advice, or his recounting, of the importance of 'being with' a book completely, for as many months or years required, keeping all else at bay. But you can only do this is you have a very understanding wife or husband, or... you are not in a relationship.
Anyway... as the old guy says, after I read up on the writing of memoir, I did exactly that. But I have no partner. I'm older now and live with a cat. So I was able to take King's advice. It all worked out and I got the book written and it's now sitting in about a dozen publishing houses, waiting to be read by some volunteer or junior staffer. So far no bites. But I did it. And the only people who suffered as a result were the neighbors who watched the weeds slowly take over my front yard.
On Writing is the only Stephen King book I’ve read, and have actually reread—I respect and admire his writing and perseverance immensely, even if I’m not a fan of his main genre.