stephen king's writing style essays

Literary Writing Style of Stephen King

Stephen king’s word choice.

We were on our front porch when we had this conversation, drinking glasses of Sprite, and Dad cocked a thumb up our road (dirt, like most of them in Harlow) to Mr. Harrigan’s house. Which was really a mansion, complete with an indoor pool, a conservatory, a glass elevator that I absolutely loved to ride in, and a greenhouse out back where there used to be a dairy barn (before my time, but Dad remembered it well).

Stephen King’s Sentence Structure / Syntax

Two girls stood beside a battered MG at the bottom of one dip. They were wearing tight summer shorts, middy blouses, and sandals. There were cheers and whistles. The faces of these girls were hot, flushed, and excited by something ancient, sinuous, and, to Garraty, erotic almost to the point of insanity. He felt animal lust rising in him, an aggressively alive thing that made his body shake with a palsied fever all its own.

Stephen King’s Figurative Language

He made a determined effort to push them from his mind, but they kept creeping back in. How must it have been, dry-humping that warm, willing flesh? Her thighs had twitched, my God, they had twitched, in a kind of spasm, orgasm, oh God, the uncontrollable urge to squeeze and caress . . . and most of all to feel that heat . . . that heat.

Stephen King’s Rhythm and Component Sounds

Stebbins. He hadn’t thought about Stebbins in a long time. He turned his head to look for Stebbins. Stebbins was there. The pack had strung out coming down the long hill, and Stebbins was about a quarter of a mile back, but there was no mistaking those purple pants and that chambray work shirt. Stebbins was still tailing the pack like some thin vulture, just waiting for them to fall.

Stephen King’s Rhetorical Pattern

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Stephen King’s Novels

Analysis of Stephen King’s Novels

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 31, 2018 • ( 3 )

Stephen King (born. September 21, 1947) may be known as a horror writer, but he calls himself a “brand name,” describing his style as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s.” His fast-food version of the “plain style” may smell of commercialism, but that may make him the contemporary American storyteller without peer. From the beginning, his dark parables spoke to the anxieties of the late twentieth century. As a surrogate author in The Mist explains King’s mission, “when the technologies fail, when… religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night” is a “cheerful” thought in the context of a “dissolving ozone layer.”

King’s fictions begin with premises accepted by middle Americans of the television generation, opening in suburban or small-town America—Derry, Maine, or Libertyville, Pennsylvania—and have the familiarity of the house next door and the 7-Eleven store. The characters have the trusted two-dimensional reality of kitsch: They originate in clichés such as the high school “nerd” or the wise child. From such premises, they move cinematically through an atmosphere resonant with a popular mythology. King applies naturalistic methods to an environment created by popular culture. This reality, already mediated, is translated easily into preternatural terms, taking on a nightmarish quality.

King’s imagination is above all archetypal: His “pop” familiarity and his campy humor draw on the collective unconscious. In Danse Macabre , a study of the contemporary horror genre that emphasizes the cross-pollination of fiction and film, he divides his subject according to four “monster archetypes”: the ghost, the “thing” (or human-made monster), the vampire, and the werewolf. As with his fiction, his sources are the classic horror films of the 1930’s, inherited by the 1950’s pulp and film industries. He hints at their derivations from the gothic novel, classical myth, Brothers Grimm folktales, and the oral tradition in general. In an anxious era both skeptical of and hungry for myth, horror is fundamentally reassuring and cathartic; the tale-teller combines roles of physician and priest into the witch doctor as “sin eater,” who assumes the guilt and fear of his culture. In the neoprimitivism of the late twentieth century, this ancient role and the old monsters have taken on a new mystique. In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argues that the magic and terrors of fairy tales present existential problems in forms children can understand. King’s paranormal horrors have similar cathartic and educative functions for adults; they externalize the traumas of life, especially those of adolescence.

Stephen King’s first published novel, Carrie , is a parable of adolescence. Sixteen-year-old Carrie White is a lonely ugly duckling, an outcast at home and at school. Her mother, a religious fanatic, associates Carrie with her own “sin”; Carrie’s peers hate her in a mindless way and make her the butt of every joke. Carrie concerns the horrors of high school, a place of “bottomless conservatism and bigotry,” as King explains, where students “are no more allowed to rise ‘above their station’ than a Hindu” above caste. The novel is also about the terrors of passage to womanhood. In the opening scene, in the school shower room, Carrie experiences her first menstrual period; her peers react with abhorrence and ridicule, “stoning” her with sanitary napkins, shouting “Plug it up!” Carrie becomes the scapegoat for a fear of female sexuality as epitomized in the smell and sight of blood. (The blood bath and symbolism of sacrifice will recur at the climax of the novel.) As atonement for her participation in Carrie’s persecution in the shower, Susan Snell persuades her popular boyfriend Tommy Ross to invite Carrie to the Spring Ball. Carrie’s conflict with her mother, who regards her emerging womanhood with loathing, is paralleled by a new plot by the girls against her, led by the rich and spoiled Chris Hargenson. They arrange to have Tommy and Carrie voted king and queen of the ball, only to crown them with a bucket of pig’s blood. Carrie avenges her mock baptism telekinetically, destroying the school and the town, leaving Susan Snell as the only survivor.

As in most folk cultures, initiation is signified by the acquisition of special wisdom or powers. King equates Carrie’s sexual flowering with the maturing of her telekinetic ability. Both cursed and empowered with righteous fury, she becomes at once victim and monster, witch and White Angel of Destruction. As King has explained, Carrie is “Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book.”

Carrie catapulted King into the mass market; in 1976 it was adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by Brian De Palma. The novel touched the right nerves, including feminism. William Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), which was adapted into a powerful and controversial film, had touched on similar social fears during the 1960’s and 1970’s with its subtext of the “generation gap” and the “death of God.” Although Carrie’s destructive power, like that of Regan in The Exorcist , is linked with monstrous adolescent sexuality, the similarity between the two novels ends there. Carrie’s “possession” is the complex effect of her mother’s fanaticism, her peers’ bigotry, and her newly realized, unchecked female power. Like Anne Sexton’s Transformations (1971), a collection of fractured fairy tales in sardonic verse, King’s novel explores the social and cultural roots of evil.

King’s Carrie is a dark modernization of “Cinderella,” with a bad mother, cruel siblings (peers), a prince (Tommy Ross), a godmother (Sue Snell), and a ball. King’s reversal of the happy ending is actually in keeping with the Brothers Grimm; it recalls the tale’s folk originals, which enact revenge in bloody images: The stepsisters’ heels, hands, and noses are sliced off, and a white dove pecks out their eyes. As King knows, blood flows freely in the oral tradition. King represents that oral tradition in a pseudodocumentary form that depicts the points of view of various witnessess and commentaries: newspaper accounts, case studies, court reports, and journals. Pretending to textual authenticity, he alludes to the gothic classics, especially Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). ‘Salem’s Lot , King’s next novel, is a bloody fairy tale in which Dracula comes to Our Town.

‘Salem’s Lot

By the agnostic and sexually liberated 1970’s, the vampire had been demythologized into what King called a “comic book menace.” In a significant departure from tradition, he diminishes the sexual aspects of the vampire. He reinvests the archetype with meaning by basing its attraction on the human desire to surrender identity in the mass. His major innovation, however, was envisioning the mythic small town in American gothic terms and then making it the monster; the vampire’s traditional victim, the populace, becomes the menace as mindless mass, plague, or primal horde. Drawing on Richard Matheson’s grimly naturalistic novel I Am Legend (1954) and Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955), King focused on the issues of fragmentation, reinvesting the vampire with contemporary meaning.

The sociopolitical subtext of ‘Salem’s Lot was the ubiquitous disillusionment of the Watergate era, King has explained. Like rumor and disease, vampirism spreads secretly at night, from neighbor to neighbor, infecting men and women, the mad and the senile, the responsible citizen and the infant alike, absorbing into its zombielike horde the human population. King is especially skillful at suggesting how small-town conservatism can become inverted on itself, the harbored suspicions and open secrets gradually dividing and isolating. This picture is reinforced by the town’s name, ‘Salem’s Lot , a degenerated form of Jerusalem’s Lot, which suggests the city of the chosen reverted to a culture of dark rites in images of spreading menace.

King’s other innovation was, paradoxically, a reiteration. He made his “king vampire,” Barlow, an obvious reincarnation of Stoker’s Dracula that functions somewhere between cliché and archetype. King uses the mythology of vampires to ask how civilization is to exist without faith in traditional authority symbols. His answer is pessimistic, turning on the abdication of Father Callahan, whose strength is undermined by secret alcoholism and a superficial adherence to form. The two survivors, Ben Mears and Mark Petrie, must partly seek, partly create their talismans and rituals, drawing on the compendium of vampire lore—the alternative, in a culture-wide crisis of faith, to conventional systems. (At one point, Mears holds off a vampire with a crucifix made with two tongue depressors.) The paraphernalia, they find, will work only if the handler has faith.

It is significant that the two survivors are, respectively, a “wise child” (Petrie) and a novelist (Mears); only they have the necessary resources. Even Susan Norton, Mears’s lover and the gothic heroine, succumbs. As in The Shining , The Dead Zone, and Firestarter , the child (or childlike adult) has powers that may be used for good or for evil. Mears is the imaginative, nostalgic adult, haunted by the past. The child and the man share a naïveté, a gothic iconography, and a belief in evil. Twelve-year-old Mark worships at a shrinelike tableau of Aurora monsters that glow “green in the dark, just like the plastic Jesus” he was given in Sunday School for learning Psalm 119. Mears has returned to the town of his childhood to revive an image of the Marsten House lurking in his mythical mind’s eye. Spiritual father and son, they create a community of two out of the “pop” remnants of American culture.

As in fairy tales and Dickens’s novels, King’s protagonists are orphans searching for their true parents, for community. His fiction may reenact his search for the father who disappeared and left behind a box of Weird Tales . The yearned-for bond of parent and child, a relationship signifying a unity of being, appears throughout his fiction. The weakness or treachery of a trusted parent is correspondingly the ultimate fear. Hence, the vampire Barlow is the devouring father who consumes an entire town.

The Shining

In The Shining , King domesticated his approach to the theme of parent-child relationships, focusing on the threat to the family that comes from a trusted figure within it. Jack Torrance, a writer, arranges to oversee a mountain resort during the winter months, when it is closed due to snow. He moves his family with him to the Overlook Hotel, where he expects to break a streak of bad luck and personal problems (he is an alcoholic) by writing a play. He is also an abused child who, assuming his father’s aggression, in turn becomes the abusing father. The much beloved “bad” father is the novel’s monster: The environment of the Overlook Hotel traps him, as he in turn calls its power forth. As Jack metamorphoses from abusive father and husband into violent monster, King brilliantly expands the haunted-house archetype into a symbol of the accumulated sin of all fathers.

In Christine, the setting is Libertyville, Pennsylvania, during the late 1970’s. The monster is the American Dream as embodied in the automobile. King gives Christine all the attributes of a fairy tale for “postliterate” adolescents. Christine is another fractured “Cinderella” story, Carrie for boys. Arnie Cunningham, a nearsighted, acne-scarred loser, falls “in love with” a car, a passionate (red and white) Plymouth Fury, “one of the long ones with the big fins,” that he names Christine. An automotive godmother, she brings Arnie, in fairy-tale succession, freedom, success, power, and love: a home away from overprotective parents, a cure for acne, hit-andrun revenge on bullies, and a beautiful girl, Leigh Cabot. Soon, however, the familiar triangle emerges, of boy, girl, and car, and Christine is revealed as a femme fatale— driven by the spirit of her former owner, a malcontent named Roland LeBay. Christine is the medium for his death wish on the world, for his all-devouring, “everlasting Fury.” LeBay’s aggression possesses Arnie, who reverts into an older, tougher self, then into the “mythic teenaged hood” that King has called the prototype of 1950’s werewolf films, and finally into “some ancient carrion eater,” or primal self.

As automotive monster, Christine comes from a variety of sources, including the folk tradition of the “death car” and a venerable techno-horror premise, as seen in King’s “Trucks” and Maximum Overdrive . King’s main focus, however, is the mobile youth culture that has come down from the 1950’s by way of advertising, popular songs, film, and national pastimes. Christine is the car as a projection of the cultural self, Anima for the modern American Adam. To Arnie’s late 1970’s-style imagination, the Plymouth Fury, in 1958 a mid-priced family car, is an American Dream. Her sweeping, befinned chassis and engine re-create a fantasy of the golden age of the automobile: the horizonless future imagined as an expanding network of superhighways and unlimited fuel. Christine recovers for Arnie a prelapsarian vitality and manifest destiny.

Christine’s odometer runs backward and she regenerates parts. The immortality she offers, however—and by implication, the American Dream—is really arrested development in the form of a Happy Days rerun and by way of her radio, which sticks on the golden oldies station. Indeed, Christine is a recapitulatory rock musical framed fatalistically in sections titled “Teenage Car-Songs,” “Teenage Love-Songs,” and “Teenage Death-Songs.” Fragments of rock-and-roll songs introduce each chapter. Christine’s burden, an undead 1950’s youth culture, means that most of Arnie’s travels are in and out of time, a deadly nostalgia trip. As Douglas Winter explains, Christine reenacts “the death,” during the 1970’s, “of the American romance with the automobile.”

The epilogue from four years later presents the fairy-tale consolation in a burnedout monotone. Arnie and his parents are buried, Christine is scrap metal, and the true Americans, Leigh and Dennis, are survivors, but Dennis, the “knight of Darnell’s Ga Rage ,” does not woo “the lady fair”; he is a limping, lackluster junior high teacher, and they have drifted apart, grown old in their prime. Dennis narrates the story in order to file it away, all the while perceiving himself and his peers in terms of icons from the late 1950’s. In his nightmares, Christine appears wearing a black vanity plate inscribed with a skull and the words, “ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE.” From Dennis’s haunted perspective, Christine simultaneously examines and is a symptom of a cultural phenomenon: a new American gothic species of anachronism or déjà vu, which continued after Christine ’s publication in films such as Back to the Future (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), and Blue Velvet (1986). The 1980’s and the 1950’s blur into a seamless illusion, the nightmare side of which is the prospect of living an infinite replay.

The subtext of King’s adolescent fairy tale is another coming of age, from the opposite end and the broader perspective of American culture. Written by a fortyish King in the final years of the twentieth century, Christine diagnoses a cultural midlife crisis and marks a turning point in King’s career, a critical examination of mass culture. The dual time frame reflects his awareness of a dual audience, of writing for adolescents who look back to a mythical 1950’s and also for his own generation as it relives its undead youth culture in its children. The baby boomers, King explains, “were obsessive” about childhood. “We went on playing for a long time, almost feverishly. I write for that buried child in us, but I’m writing for the grown-up too. I want grownups to look at the child long enough to be able to give him up. The child should be buried.”

Pet Sematary

In Pet Sematary , King unearthed the buried child, which is the novel’s monster. Pet Sematary is about the “real cemetery,” he told Winter. The focus is on the “one great fear” all fears “add up to,” “the body under the sheet. It’s our body.” The fairy-tale subtext is the magic kingdom of our protracted American childhood, the Disney empire as mass culture—and, by implication, the comparable multimedia phenomenon represented by King himself. The grimmer, truer text-within-the-text is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein ( 1818).

The novel, which King once considered “too horrible to be published,” is also his own dark night of the soul. Louis Creed, a university doctor, moves with his wife, Rachel, and their two children (five-year-old Ellie and two-year-old Gage) to Maine to work at King’s alma mater; a neighbor takes the family on an outing to a pet cemetery created by the neighborhood children, their confrontation with mortality. Additionally the “sematary,” whose “Druidic” rings allude to Stonehenge, is the outer circle of a Native American burial ground that sends back the dead in a state of soulless half life. Louis succumbs to temptation when the family cat, Church, is killed on the highway; he buries him on the sacred old Native American burial grounds. “Frankencat” comes back with his “purr-box broken.” A succession of accidents, heart attacks, strokes, and deaths—of neighbor Norma Crandall, Creed’s son Gage, Norma’s husband Jud, and Creed’s wife Rachel—and resurrections follows.

The turning point is the death of Gage, which Creed cannot accept and that leads to the novel’s analysis of modern medical miracles performed in the name of human decency and love. Louis is the father as baby boomer who cannot relinquish his childhood. The larger philosophical issue is Louis’s rational, bioethical creed; he believes in saving the only life he knows, the material. Transferred into an immoderate love for his son, it is exposed as the narcissistic embodiment of a patriarchal lust for immortality through descendants, expressed first in an agony of sorrow and Rage , then ghoulishly, as he disinters his son’s corpse and makes the estranging discovery that it is like “looking at a badly made doll.” Later, reanimated, Gage appears to have been “terribly hurt and then put back together again by crude, uncaring hands.” Performing his task, Louis feels dehumanized, like “a subhuman character in some cheap comic-book.”

The failure of Louis’s creed is shown in his habit, when under stress, of taking mental trips to Orlando, Florida, where he, Church, and Gage drive a white van as Disney World’s “resurrection crew.” In these waking dreams, which echo the male bond of “wise child” and haunted father from as far back as ‘Salem’s Lot , Louis’s real creed is revealed: Its focus is on Oz the Gweat and Tewwible (a personification of death to Rachel) and Walt Disney, that “gentle faker from Nebraska”—like Louis, two wizards of science fantasy. Louis’s wizardry is reflected in the narrative perspective and structure, which flashes back in part 2 from the funeral to Louis’s fantasy of a heroically “long, flying tackle” that snatches Gage from death’s wheels.

In this modernization of Frankenstein , King demythologizes death and attacks the aspirations toward immortality that typify contemporary American attitudes. King’s soulless Lazaruses are graphic projections of anxieties about life-support systems, artificial hearts, organ transplants—what King has called “mechanistic miracles” that can postpone the physical signs of life almost indefinitely. The novel also indicts the “waste land” of mass culture, alluding in the same trope to George Romero’s “stupid, lurching movie-zombies,” T. S. Eliot’s poem about the hollow men, and The Wizard of Oz: “headpiece full of straw.” Louis worries that Ellie knows more about Ronald McDonald and “the Burger King” than the “ spiritus mundi .” If the novel suggests one source of community and culture, it is the form and ritual of the children’s pet “sematary.” Its concentric circles form a pattern from their “own collective unconsciousness,” one that mimes “the most ancient religious symbol of all,” the spiral.

In It , a group of children create a community and a mythology as a way of confronting their fears, as represented by It , the monster as a serial-murdering, shape-shifting boogey that haunts the sewers of Derry, Maine. In 1958, the seven protagonists, a cross-section of losers, experience the monster differently, for as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), It derives its power through its victim’s isolation and guilt and thus assumes the shape of his or her worst fear. (To Beverly Rogan It appears, in a sequence reminiscent of “Red Riding Hood,” as her abusive father in the guise of the child-eating witch from “Hansel and Gretel.”)

In a scary passage in Pet Sematary , Louis dreams of Walt Disney World, where “by the 1890s train station, Mickey Mouse was shaking hands with the children clustered around him, his big white cartoon gloves swallowing their small, trusting hands.” To all of It’s protagonists, the monster appears in a similar archetypal or communal form, one that suggests a composite of devouring parent and mass-culture demigod, of television commercial and fairy tale, of 1958 and 1985: as Pennywise, the Clown, a cross between Bozo and Ronald McDonald. As in Christine, Pet Sematary, and Thinner , the monster is mass culture itself, the collective devouring parent nurturing its children on “imitations of immortality.” Like Christine, or Louis’s patched-up son, Pennywise is the dead past feeding on the future. Twenty-seven years after its original reign of terror, It resumes its seige, whereupon the protagonists, now professionally successful and, significantly, childless yuppies, must return to Derry to confront as adults their childhood fears. Led by horror writer Bill Denborough (partly based on King’s friend and collaborator Peter Straub), they defeat It once more, individually as a sort of allegory of psychoanalysis and collectively as a rite of passage into adulthood and community.

It was attacked in reviews as pop psychology and by King himself as a “badly constructed novel,” but the puerility was partly intended. The book summarizes King’s previous themes and characters, who themselves look backward and inward, regress and take stock. The last chapter begins with an epigraph from Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-1850) and ends with an allusion to William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” from which King takes his primary theme and narrative device, the look back that enables one to go forward. During the 1970’s, King’s fiction was devoted to building a mythos out of shabby celluloid monsters to fill a cultural void; in the postmodern awareness of the late 1980’s, he began a demystification process. It is a calling forth and ritual unmasking of motley Reagan-era monsters, the exorcism of a generation and a culture.

Other 1980’s Novels

As for King the writer, It was one important rite in what would be a lengthy passage. After It’s extensive exploration of childhood, however, he took up conspicuously more mature characters, themes, and roles. In The Eyes of the Dragon (written for his daughter), he returned to the springs of his fantasy, the fairy tale. He told much the same story as before but assumed the mantle of adulthood. This “pellucid” and “elegant” fairy tale, says Barbara Tritel in The New York Times Book Review (February 22, 1987), has the “intimate goofiness of an extemporaneous story” narrated by “a parent to a child.” In The Tommyknockers , King again seemed to leave familiar territory for science fiction, but the novel more accurately applies technohorror themes to the 1980’s infatuation with technology and televangelism. In The Dark Tower cycles, he combined the gothic with Western and apocalyptic fiction in a manner reminiscent of The Stand . Then with much fanfare in 1990, King returned to that novel to update and enlarge it by some 350 pages.

King and Bachman

The process of recapitulation and summing up was complicated by the disclosure, in 1984, of Richard Bachman, the pseudonym under whose cover King had published five novels over a period of eight years. Invented for business reasons, Bachman soon grew into an identity complete with a biography and photographs (he was a chicken farmer with a cancer-ravaged face), dedications, a narrative voice (of unrelenting pessimism), and if not a genre, a naturalistic mode in which sociopolitical speculation combined or alternated with psychological suspense. In 1985, when the novels (with one exception) were collected in a single volume attributed to King as Bachman, the mortified alter ego seemed buried. Actually Bachman’s publicized demise only raised a haunting question of what “Stephen King” really was.

Misery , which was conceived as Bachman’s book, was King’s first novel to explore the subject of fiction’s dangerous powers. After crashing his car on an isolated road in Colorado, romance writer Paul Sheldon is “rescued,” drugged, and held prisoner by a psychotic nurse named Annie Wilkes, who is also the “Number One Fan” of his heroine Misery Chastain (of whom he has tired and killed off). This “Constant Reader” becomes Sheldon’s terrible “Muse,” forcing him to write (in an edition especially for her) Misery’s return to life. Sheldon is the popular writer imprisoned by genre and cut to fit fan expectations (signified by Annie’s amputations of his foot and thumb). Like Scheherazade, the reader is reminded, Sheldon must publish or literally perish. Annie’s obsession merges with the expectations of the page-turning real reader, who demands and devours each chapter, and as Sheldon struggles (against pain, painkillers, and a manual typewriter that throws keys) for his life, page by page.

Billed ironically on the dust jacket as a love letter to his fans, the novel is a witty satire on what King has called America’s “cannibalistic cult of celebrity”: “[Y]ou set the guy up, and then you eat him.” The monstrous Reader, however, is also the writer’s muse, creation, and alter ego, as Sheldon discovers when he concludes that Misery Returns —not his “serious” novel Fast Cars —was his masterpiece. Just as ironically, Misery was King’s first novel to please most of the critics.

The Dark Half

The Dark Half is an allegory of the writer’s relation to his genius. The young writer-protagonist Thaddeus Beaumont has a series of headaches and seizures, and a surgeon removes from his eleven-year-old brain the incompletely absorbed fragments of a twin—including an eye, two teeth, and some fingernails. Nearly thirty years later, Beaumont is a creative writing professor and moderately successful literary novelist devoted to his family. For twelve years, however, he has been living a secret life through George Stark, the pseudonym under which he emerged from writer’s block as the author of best-selling crime novels. Stark’s purely instinctual genius finds its most vital expression in his protagonist, the ruthless killer Alexis Machine. Beaumont is forced to disclose and destroy his now self-destructive pseudonym, complete with gravesite service and papier mâché headstone. A series of murders (narrated in Stark’s graphic prose style) soon follows. The pseudonym has materialized, risen from its fictional grave literally to take Thad’s wife and children (twins, of course) hostage. What Stark wants is to live in writing, outside of which writers do not exist. However, the writer is also a demon, vampire, and killer in this dark allegory, possessing and devouring the man, his family, friends, community.

Drawing on the motif of the double and the form of the detective story—on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (c. fifth century b.c.e.), as well as Misery and Pet Sematary —King gluts the first half of the book with Stark/Machine’s gruesome rampages. The last half is psychological suspense and metafiction in biological metaphor: the struggle of the decently introspective Beaumont against the rawly instinctual Stark for control of both word and flesh, with the novel taking shape on the page as the true author reclaims the “third eye,” King’s term for both child’s and artist’s inward vision. Once again, the man buries the terrible child in order to possess himself and his art. The book ends in a “scene from some malign fairy tale” as that child and alter ego is borne away by flocks of sparrows to make a last appearance as a black hole in the fabric of the sky.

In dramatizing the tyrannies, perils, powers, and pleasures of reading and writing, Misery and The Dark Half might have been written by metafictionists John Fowles (to whose work King is fond of alluding) or John Barth (on whom he draws directly in It and Misery). Anything but abstract, however, The Dark Half is successful both as the thriller that King’s fans desired and as an allegory of the writer’s situation. Critic George Stade, in his review of the novel for The New York Times Book Review (October 29, 1989), praised King for his tact “in teasing out the implications of his parable.” The Dark Half contains epigraphs instead to the novels of George Stark, Thad Beaumont, and “the late Richard Bachman,” without whom “this novel could not have been written.” Thus reworking the gothic cliché of the double, King allows the mythology of his own life story to speak wittily for itself, lending a subtle level of selfparody to this roman à clef. In this instance, his blunt literalness (“word become flesh, so to speak,” as George Stark puts it), gives vitality to what in other hands might have been a sterile exercise.

Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne

Some have criticized King’s negative depiction of women, which King himself admitted in 1983 was a weakness. A decade later, King would address, and redress, this in his paired novels Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne . Both present a strong but besieged female protagonist, and both feature the total solar eclipse seen in Maine in 1963, during which a moment of telepathy, the books’ only supernaturalism, links the two women.

Gerald’s Game is the story of Jessie Burlingame, a young wife who submits to her husband’s desire for bondage in a deserted cabin, only to have him die when she unexpectedly struggles. Alone and helpless, Jessie confronts memories (including the secret reason she struck out at Gerald), her own fears and limitations, and a ghastly visitor to the cabin who may or may not be real. In a bloody scene—even by King’s standards—Jessie frees herself and escapes, a victory psychological as well as physical. The aptly named Dolores Claiborne is trapped more metaphorically, by poverty and an abusive husband, and her victory too is both violent and a sign of her developing independence and strength.

Initial reaction from critics was sometimes skeptical, especially given the prurient aspect of Jessie’s plight and the trendy theme of incestuous abuse in both novels. However, King examined family dysfunction in works from Carrie and The Shining to It, and he continued his commitment to women’s issues and realistic strong women in Insomnia, Rose Madder , and other novels. Archetypal themes also strengthen the two books: Female power must overcome male dominance, as the moon eclipses the sun; and each woman must find her own identity and strength out of travail, as the darkness gives way to light again. (King uses mythology and gender issues more explicitly in Rose Madder, which evenly incorporates mimetic and supernatural scenes.)

The books are daring departures for King in other ways. In contrast to King’s sprawling It or encyclopedic The Stand , these books, like Misery, tightly focus on one setting, a shorter period of time, and a small cast—here Misery’s duet is replaced by intense monologues. In fact, all of Dolores Claiborne is her first-person narrative, without even chapter breaks, a tour de force few would attempt. Moreover, King challenges our ideas of the genre horror novel, since there is little violence, none of it supernatural and all expected, so that suspense is a function of character, not plot (done previously by King only in short fiction such as “The Body” and “The Last Rung of the Ladder”).

Character and voice have always been essential to King’s books, as Debbie Notkin, Harlan Ellison, and others have pointed out. Dolores Claiborne is especially successful, her speech authentic Mainer, and her character realistic both as the old woman telling her story and as the desperate yet indomitable wife, the past self whose story she tells. In these novels, King reaches beyond childhood and adolescence as themes; child abuse is examined, but only from an adult point of view. Dolores and Jessie—and the elderly protagonists of Insomnia—reveal King, perhaps having reconciled to his own history, exploring new social and psychological areas.

Bag of Bones

Bag of Bones , which King calls a “haunted love story,” opens with narrator Mike Noonan recounting the death of his wife, Jo, who collapses outside the Rite Aid pharmacy from a brain aneurysm. Both are relatively young, and Jo, Mike learns, was pregnant. Because Mike is unable to father children, he begins to question whether Jo was having an affair. As Mike slowly adjusts to life without Jo, he is forced to make another adjustment. Formerly a successful writer of gothic romance fiction, he now finds that he is unable to write even a simple sentence. In an attempt to regain his muse and put Jo’s death behind him, Mike returns to Sarah Laughs (also referred to as “TR-90” or the “TR”), the vacation cabin he and Jo purchased soon after he became successful. As Mike quickly learns, Sarah Laughs is haunted by ghosts, among them the ghost of blues singer Sarah Tidwell.

While at Sarah Laughs, Mike meets Mattie Devore, her daughter Kyra, and Mattie’s father-in-law, Max Devore, a withered old man of incalculable wealth who is accustomed to getting anything he wants. Having rescued Kyra from walking down the middle of Route 68, Mike quickly becomes friends with both Kyra and Mattie. Mattie is the widow of Lance Devore, Max’s stuttering son. Lance had nothing to do with his father after learning that his father had tried to bribe Mattie into not marrying him. After Lance’s death from a freak accident, Max returned to Mattie’s life in an attempt to get acquainted with his granddaughter, Kyra. The truth is, however, that Max wants to gain custody of Kyra and take her away to California; he will do whatever it takes to accomplish that.

To help Mattie fight off Max’s army of high-priced lawyers, Mike uses his own considerable resources to retain a lawyer for Mattie named John Storrow, a young New Yorker unafraid to take on someone of Max Devore’s social stature. As Mike is drawn into Mattie’s custody battle, he is also exposed to the ghosts that haunt the community. As Mike sleeps at night, he comes to realize that there are at least three separate spirits haunting his cabin. One, he is sure, is Jo, and one, he determines, is Sarah Tidwell. The third manifests itself only as a crying child, and Mike cannot tell whether it is Kyra or some other child. Mike and Kyra share a special psychic connection that allows them to share dreams and even to have the same ghosts haunting their homes—ghosts who communicate by rearranging magnetic letters on each of their refrigerator doors.

As Mike becomes further embroiled in the custody battle with Max Devore, his search to determine the truth about Jo’s affair finally leads him to a set of journals Jo was keeping, notes from a research project that was her real reason for sneaking away to Sarah Laughs. Jo’s notes explain how everyone related to the people who murdered Sarah Tidwell and her son have paid for this sin by losing a child of their own. Sarah Tidwell’s ghost is exacting her revenge by murdering the children of those who murdered her own child. Mike, related to one of the people who murdered Sarah’s child, has been drawn into this circle of retribution from the beginning, and the death of his unborn daughter, Kia, was not the accident it seemed to be. Mike also realizes that Kyra, the last descendant of this t Rage dy, is to be the final sacrifice used to put Sarah Tidwell to rest. Mike’s return to the ironically named Sarah Laughs, it seems, has been a carefully orchestrated t Rage dy. Everything is tied to the ghost Sarah Tidwell’s purposes, even Mike’s writer’s block. Mike’s writing abilities return while he is at Sarah Laughs, but by the end of the novel he realizes it was simply to lead him to the information he needed to put Sarah’s spirit to rest. Sarah’s ghost may have destroyed his wife and child, but Jo’s ghost gives him the means to save Kyra.

The usual King trademarks that fans have come to expect are present in Bag of Bones . The novel, moreover, shares much with the southern novel and its themes. Guilt is a predominant theme of many southern works, especially those of William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and Tennessee Williams. Racism, not a theme usually associated with northern writers, has been successfully transplanted by King via the traveling Sarah Tidwell. By the end of the novel the evils of the community have become so entrenched in the soil (another similarity to Faulkner’s fiction) that they begin to affect Mike himself, and he has to fight the urge to kill Kyra. Only by reburying the past—in this case, by literally reburying Sarah Tidwell’s body—can matters finally be put to rest. Mike dissolves Sarah’s body with lye and her spirit finally leaves Sarah Laughs. Jo’s spirit also leaves, and all is quiet once more at the cabin.

By the 1980’s, King had become a mass-media guru who could open an American Express commercial with the rhetorical question “Do you know me?” At first prompted to examine the “wide perceptions that light [children’s] interior lives” (Four Past Midnight) and then the cultural roots of the empire he had created, he proceeded to explore the phenomenon of fiction, the situations of reader and writer. During the 1990’s, King continued to develop as a writer of both supernatural horror and mimetic character-based fiction. His novels after Dolores Claiborne—from Insomnia through Lisey’s Story—all provide supernatural chills while experimenting with character, mythology, and metafiction.

Financially invulnerable, King became almost playful with publishing gambits: The Green Mile was a serial, six slim paperbacks, in emulation of Charles Dickens and as a self-set challenge; Richard Bachman was revived when The Regulators was published in 1996. Although he is still thought of as having no style, actually King maintained his compelling storyteller’s voice (and ability to manipulate his reader emotionally) while maturing in the depth and range of his themes and characters.

King, perhaps more than any other author since Faulkner and his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, also creates a sense of literary history within the later novels that ties them all together. In Bag of Bones , King references several of his other novels, most notably The Dark Half, Needful Things , and Insomnia . For longtime fans, this serves both to update King’s readers concerning their favorite characters and to unify King’s body of work. King’s ironic sense of humor is also evident. When Mike’s literary agent tells him of all the other best-selling novelists who have novels coming out in the fall of 1998, the most notable name missing from the list is that of Stephen King himself.

Major Works Long Fiction : Carrie, 1974; ‘Salem’s Lot , 1975; Rage , 1977 (as Richard Bachman); The Shining , 1977; The Stand , 1978, unabridged version 1990; The Dead Zone , 1979; The Long Walk, 1979 (as Bachman); Firestarter , 1980; Cujo, 1981; Roadwork, 1981 (as Bachman); The Gunslinger, 1982, revised 2003 (illustrated by Michael Whelan; first volume of the Dark Tower series); The Running Man, 1982 (as Bachman); Christine, 1983; Cycle of the Werewolf, 1983 (novella; illustrated by Berni Wrightson); Pet Sematary, 1983; The Eyes of the Dragon, 1984, 1987; The Talisman, 1984 (with Peter Straub); Thinner, 1984 (as Bachman); The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King, 1985 (includes Rage , The Long Walk , Roadwork, and The Running Man); It, 1986; Misery, 1987; The Drawing of the Three, 1987 (illustrated by Phil Hale; second volume of the Dark Tower series); The Tommyknockers, 1987; The Dark Half, 1989; Needful Things, 1991; The Waste Lands, 1991 (illustrated by Ned Dameron; third volume in the Dark Tower series); Gerald’s Game, 1992; Dolores Claiborne, 1993; Insomnia, 1994; Rose Madder, 1995; Desperation, 1996; The Green Mile, 1996 (six-part serialized novel); The Regulators, 1996 (as Bachman); Wizard and Glass, 1997 (illustrated by Dave McKean; fourth volume in the Dark Tower series); Bag of Bones, 1998; Storm of the Century, 1999 (adaptation of his teleplay); The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, 1999; Black House, 2001 (with Straub); Dreamcatcher, 2001; From a Buick Eight, 2002; Wolves of the Calla, 2003 (fifth volume of the Dark Tower series); Song of Susannah, 2004 (sixth volume of the Dark Tower series); The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident, 2004 (written under the pseudonym Eleanor Druse); The Colorado Kid, 2005; Cell, 2006; Lisey’s Story, 2006 Short Fiction : Night Shift, 1978; Different Seasons, 1982; Skeleton Crew, 1985; Dark Visions, 1988 (with Dan Simmons and George R. R. Martin); Four Past Midnight, 1990; Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 1993; Hearts in Atlantis, 1999; Everything’s Eventual: Fourteen Dark Tales, 2002. Screenplays : Creepshow, 1982 (with George Romero; adaptation of his book); Cat’s Eye, 1984; Silver Bullet, 1985 (adaptation of Cycle of the Werewolf); Maximum Overdrive, 1986 (adaptation of his short story “Trucks”); Pet Sematary, 1989; Sleep Walkers, 1992. teleplays: The Stand , 1994 (based on his novel); Storm of the Century, 1999; Rose Red, 2002. Nonfiction : Danse Macabre, 1981; Black Magic and Music: A Novelist’s Perspective on Bangor, 1983; Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, 1988 (Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, editors); On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000; Faithful: Two Diehard Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season, 2004 (with Stewart O’Nan). Children’s literature : The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-up Book, 2004 (text adaptation by Peter Abrahams, illustrated by Alan Dingman). Miscellaneous : Creepshow, 1982 (adaptation of the DC Comics); Nightmares in the Sky, 1988. Source: Notable American Novelists Revised Edition Volume 1 James Agee — Ernest J. Gaines Edited by Carl Rollyson Salem Press, Inc 2008.

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Exploring Stephen King’s Unique Writing Style: What is it?

Stephen King’s writing style is greatly recognized for his ability to create identifiable characters , apply a deep understanding of the human condition , and use metaphor to enhance storytelling . The attributes of King’s writing style have placed him among the most celebrated writers in the genre of horror and speculative fiction.

Character Building

One of the hallmarks of King’s writing is his ability to create three-dimensional, dynamic characters . From Carrie , the ostracized high school girl, to Nick Andros , the deaf-mute from The Stand , his characters elicit immediate sympathy from readers as they are inherently flawed but human.

Using Prolific Narrative Modes and Themes

The narrative mode King chooses also forms an integral part of his writing style. Evident in books such as IT , which is mostly told in third-person all-seeing mode, his stories are interleaved between different time periods . His writing style also reveals his repeated exploration of themes like the omnipotence of memory , childhood suffering , and the monstrosity lurking behind classic sect values .

Use of Metaphorical Devices

Stephen King has mastered the use of metaphor to intensify the themes of his stories. His metaphors range from symbolic representations, like the evil car in Christine symbolizing the end of innocence, to using the fear-inciting clown called IT to represent our own childhood and adult fears.

Importance of Conflict, Foreshadowing, and Suspense

In remarkable literature, conflict, foreshadowing, and suspense are key dynamics. Stephen King applies these literary devices in all his novels and short stories to create dynamic characters who react to events but also experience a pronounced psychological change due to adaptation or relenting to influential events.

The Process and Craft of Writing

King’s book On Writing provides insightful advice on craft. From the importance of rewriting and focusing on the story, the balance between vocabulary and simplicity, avoiding overuse of adverbs, to the significance of reading a lot in parallel to writing to learn and evolve your style.

Conclusions

In essence, the writing style of Stephen King that has taken him to the pinnacle of his genre, combines character-driven stories, recursive themes, use of metaphoric devices, well-placed conflict, foreshadowing, suspense, and a religious belief in process and craft of writing. Aspiring writers can learn a great deal from his approach to creating truly riveting literature.

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The writing style of

Stephen King

Stephen King’s writing style is often described as direct and vivid, with a strong narrative voice that pulls readers into his stories. His approach is characterized by an accessible, conversational tone that makes even the most fantastical elements seem believable. King has a knack for creating realistic dialogue and richly detailed settings, which are instrumental in building suspense and horror.

King’s sentence structure varies widely to suit the pacing of his narrative. In tense scenes, he employs short, choppy sentences to ramp up the suspense. Conversely, when developing characters or setting a scene, he uses longer, more descriptive sentences that allow readers to fully immerse themselves in the world he has created. This flexibility in sentence structure helps maintain a dynamic rhythm throughout his novels, keeping readers engaged from start to finish.

One of King’s most notable techniques is his use of an active voice, which lends immediacy and intimacy to his storytelling. This choice helps to create a sense of urgency and draws readers closer to the characters’ experiences. Additionally, King often employs adverbs and adjectives sparingly, choosing instead strong, vivid verbs that convey action and emotion effectively. This not only tightens his prose but also enhances the visual imagery in his writing.

King’s use of foreshadowing and flashback is also adept, weaving complex narratives that span different times and perspectives. These elements are not just stylistic; they are integral to unfolding the multilayered plots for which he is known. This narrative complexity, combined with his straightforward prose, allows King to explore deep, often dark themes without losing his audience.

Stephen King’s writing style is a blend of straightforward narrative, vivid description, and careful pacing. His ability to balance detailed character development with gripping plotlines is what has made him a master of modern American literature, particularly in the horror genre. His style is both accessible and engaging, explaining his enduring popularity and influence.

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What Writing is Stephen King Analysis

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Writing News – Peculiarities of Stephen King’s Writing Style

But what makes King unique among scores of other authors writing in the same genre? Most commonly horror/thriller is considered to be a rather lowly literature genre, which is usually not treated very seriously, with few exceptions, one of which is Stephen King. So what is special about him?

It wouldn’t be news for anybody who has more than a passing acquaintance with stylistics that it is style, language and imagery which are the most important factors in fiction – not even the most fascinating plot can live by itself. If a writer doesn’t have a decent style, his works will be unreadable, even if their plot is brilliant.

Stephen King’s style is to a very much degree characterized by his usual choice of characters: he likes three-dimensional, human, flawed characters, people with traumatic past and subdued memories, with psychological problems.

Another approach is showed in his first published novel, Carrie . It tells the story of a high school girl who is bullied and ostracized from the society of her peers because she is different from them in many ways – it is something most if not all people can sympathize with. And although there is strong supernatural undercurrent in the novel, its characters still stay human, understandable and realistic.

King is in general very partial to children as protagonists. Probably it is so because of the way children view the world – as something only half-understood and full of unknown, unknowable, mysterious and terrifying entities. Just like the world of It , another King’s bestselling novel, in which a horrible extradimensional being terrorizes and kills children simply because they find it so easy to believe in it.

Yet another theme that is often found in King’s books is the image of a small American town as a background for the most horrific and unbelievable events – it has since became a usual trope in many other works of fiction.

All in all, it can be said that due to his approach to style Stephen King has managed to raise horror genre higher than anyone before him .

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Author Study: Stephen King Curated by Eric Zhang '18: Criticism and Analysis

• Criticism and Analysis

Criticisms and Analysis

• Despite the definite popularity of Stephen King's writings, their status as high art is a hotly debated topic. Can King's writings be considered 'literature'?
• King's work is often categorized only as horror. Do all (if any) of his works deserve this classification? This article provides analysis about Stephen King's writing, and his generic influences.
• In this serious analysis of The Stand,  a scholar aims to prove whether or not Stephen King's works bear serious literary merit.
• An analysis of Stephen King's diction and how his emphasis on plot may be a hindrance to his ability as a writer.
• An introduction of King as a writer. Introduces his works, critical reception and gives excerpts of criticisms of his work.

Literary Themes and Motifs

Death and Fear – These two are the bread and butter of any horror writer. Every one of King's works involves these themes in one way or another, although some feature fear and death more than others. For example, death plays a relatively small role in  The Shining  (it is seldom mentioned or discussed explicitly, and does not come into play until the climax of the story), while fear is omnipresent in all parts of the book. 

Memory – Memory is an oft-recurring theme in King's novels. The past of each characters adds depth and meaning. Jack Torrance in  The Shining  is tormented by the faults and regrets of his own personal past throughout the novel, which help drive on his descent into madness. In  It,  the repressed memories of the seven protagonists serve as the driving force behind the novel's plot – as each character recalls more about his troubled childhood, he is increasingly driven to defeat the demon that caused his trauma.

Childhood – King's novels tend to place childhood and adolescence in high regard, or at least give it a great deal of attention.  The Shining, Doctor Sleep,   Carrie and The Stand  all involve child protagonists who are unnaturally, perhaps supernaturally, gifted. The power of childhood innocence is often explored in Stephen King's writing, but more often, King tends to explore childhood itself.  It, The Body, Rage  and others bring childhood and adolescence into the spotlight.

A video in which Stephen King discusses writing style and creative tips.

Soap Box: What are people saying about Stephen King?

What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.

Harold Bloom

 King has an extraordinary eye for the details of life on the edge, and his characters try, in believable ways, to resist the false empowerments of violence and anger. 

Joshua Rothman

His are works of heroics and villainy, fortune and fate all lost in the karmic chaos that pits man vs. man, and humanity vs. horror.

Bill Gibron

Dickens has stood the test of time. Today no-one disputes his worth. The best of Stephen King’s work is has become so embedded in the culture I suspect he faces a similar fate.

Jane Ciabattari

• << Previous: Works
• Last Updated: Dec 13, 2016 2:34 PM
• URL: https://library.concordiashanghai.org/StephenKing

Stephen King on Writing, Fear, and the Atrocity of Adverbs

By maria popova.

While he may have used a handful of well-placed adverbs in his excellent recent case for gun control , King embarks upon a forceful crusade against this malignant part of speech:

The adverb is not your friend. Adverbs … are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They’re the ones that usually end in -ly . Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. … With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across. Consider the sentence He closed the door firmly. It’s by no means a terrible sentence (at least it’s got an active verb going for it), but ask yourself if firmly really has to be there. You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between He closed the door and He slammed the door , and you’ll get no argument from me … but what about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before He closed the door firmly ? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn’t firmly an extra word? Isn’t it redundant? Someone out there is now accusing me of being tiresome and anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day . . . fifty the day after that . . . and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s — GASP!! — too late. I can be a good sport about adverbs, though. Yes I can. With one exception: dialogue attribution. I insist that you use the adverb in dialogue attribution only in the rarest and most special of occasions . . . and not even then, if you can avoid it. Just to make sure we all know what we’re talking about, examine these three sentences: ‘Put it down!’ she shouted. ‘Give it back,’ he pleaded, ‘it’s mine.’ ‘Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll,’ Utterson said. In these sentences, shouted, pleaded, and said are verbs of dialogue attribution. Now look at these dubious revisions: ‘Put it down! she shouted menacingly. ‘Give it back,’ he pleaded abjectly, ‘it’s mine.’ ‘Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll,’ Utterson said contemptuously. The three latter sentences are all weaker than the three former ones, and most readers will see why immediately.

King uses the admonition against adverbs as a springboard for a wider lens on good and bad writing, exploring the interplay of fear, timidity, and affectation:

I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one’s own pleasure, that fear may be mild — timidity is the word I’ve used here. If, however, one is working under deadline — a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample — that fear may be intense. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him. […] Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. Affectation itself, beginning with the need to define some sorts of writing as ‘good’ and other sorts as ‘bad,’ is fearful behavior.

This latter part, touching on the contrast between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, illustrates the critical difference between working for prestige and working for purpose .

Complement On Writing with more famous wisdom on the craft from Kurt Vonnegut , Susan Sontag , Henry Miller , Jack Kerouac , F. Scott Fitzgerald , H. P. Lovecraft , Zadie Smith , John Steinbeck , Margaret Atwood , Neil Gaiman , Mary Karr , Isabel Allende , and Susan Orlean .

— Published March 13, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/03/13/stephen-king-on-adverbs/ —

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Breaking Down the Key Lessons of Stephen King’s On Writing

In On Writing , his seminal work on the craft of creative writing, Stephen King said, “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.”

As King put it, writers are uniquely positioned to leave a lasting impact on people’s lives. Writers combine experience with empathy and imagination to build worlds people can get lost in.

As a craft, writing is simultaneously generous and self-centered. At first, writing might be about scratching an internal itch — to clarify an idea in your mind or find catharsis for a pent-up emotion. But for your inner world to mean something to someone else, you need to learn how to communicate ideas well. In short, you need to learn how to write.

No resource can better teach you the art of the craft than Stephen King’s  On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft . The famous horror author’s memoir is part autobiography, part how-to guide.

King draws from his experiences in the writing industry to provide aspiring writers with practical tips on storytelling, editing, publishing, and life. For fans of his work, he breaks down certain chapters and scenes from his books and explains why he wrote as he did. For instance, he explains his reasoning behind an early chapter of  The Dead Zone , and why he put protagonist Johnny Smith into a carnival backdrop.

There are plenty more pearls of wisdom to find from the king of the genre, and to give you a taste of what the book has to offer, here are some of its key learning points.

Only those with the time to read have the time and tools to write. That’s how King puts it.

It makes sense: Reading expands your knowledge of grammar, sentence structure, storytelling, character development, and more. Additionally, through reading, you’ll discover what you like and don’t like, which can influence how you write.

Refine your writer’s toolbox

To improve your writing, turn to these three main tools: vocabulary, grammar, and style.

Vocabulary refers to your word choices. According to King, it is always best to use the first word that comes to mind. If you force yourself to use words outside of your normal vocabulary, you risk diluting your authentic voice.

Don’t be ashamed of having a simple vocabulary. As King puts it, how you use your words matters more than how big your words are.

Grammar refers to the rules of language. Brush up on things like punctuation, tense, and subject-verb agreement to ensure that your readers understand what you’re trying to say.

Style refers to how you structure your sentences. According to King, the best style resource for writers is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style . It contains many tips for improving the clarity and power of your sentence structure. King, in particular, has two style pet peeves: adverbs and the passive voice. As we mentioned in our article  ‘The Road To Hell Is Paved With Adverbs’ , adverbs can make your writing sound lazy. Instead of showing a reader how an action plays out, adverbs tell the reader how they should perceive the action. Passive voice, on the other hand, can make your sentences sound weak and hard to follow. If you want your readers to have a clearer idea of what’s going on, start with the noun, then the action.

Write with the door closed…

When King said, “Write with the door closed,” he meant, don’t take input from others before completing your first draft.

Why seek criticism for something that isn’t finished? Feedback at this stage of the writing process might interrupt that initial surge of inspiration. Worse, you might end up compromising your authentic voice to earn approval from others.

To keep your work focused, don’t think about anybody else’s opinions when writing your first draft.

…and rewrite with the door open

Only when your first draft has been completed can you seek feedback from others. Because the draft has been completed, the people reviewing your work will have a clearer idea of what you’re trying to accomplish.

Instead of intercepting your message (as they would have if you let them criticize an unfinished draft), they can instead help you find the most effective way to say what you want to say. Outside perspectives can help you identify what is unclear, what is missing, and what is unnecessary. When Stephen King wrote On Writing , he already had about 30 years of experience in the publishing industry. And because he shared his story, readers can learn from three decades’ worth of writing knowledge in a 320-page book!

Note: All purchase links in this post are affiliate links through BookShop.org, and Novlr may earn a small commission – every purchase supports independent bookstores.

Stephen King’s Guide: Reading to Write Effectively

Stephen King , one of the most popular writers of our time, once said, “If you want to be a writer , you must do two things: read a lot and write a lot.” In this section, we will explore how reading can strengthen your writing skills , and how Stephen King , through his unique insights, can help you achieve this goal.

By understanding King’s approach to reading and learning how to cultivate a critical eye when analyzing other authors’ writing techniques , you can develop your own writing style and expand your literary horizons . Incorporating reading into your writing routine can help you overcome writer’s block and spark creativity when you need it most.

Key Takeaways:

• Reading is crucial for writers to improve their craft.
• Stephen King’s personal approach to reading can influence your own writing career.
• Cultivate a critical eye when reading to analyze and learn from other authors’ techniques .
• Diversify your reading choices to broaden your creative horizons.
• Integrating reading into your daily writing routine can enhance your skills and productivity.

Importance of Reading as a Writer

Reading is not only a pastime but also an essential activity for writers. It enables writers to learn from others’ experiences, styles, and techniques , broadening their literary horizons and developing their writing skills . To improve your writing, it is crucial to read.

Reading fosters creativity and imagination, expanding one’s knowledge and understanding of different genres and writing styles . It serves as a source of inspiration and ideas, giving writers a unique perspective that they can integrate into their own writing. Moreover, reading enhances a writer’s vocabulary and grammar, improving their language skills.

To further illustrate the importance of reading for writers, here are a few relevant statistics:

As we can see from the statistics, reading is a vital aspect of a writer’s journey towards success.

Stephen King’s Approach to Reading

Stephen King is widely known for his prolific writing career, as well as his extensive reading habits . King believes that reading is an essential activity for writers and has been a major influence on his own craft. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal , King stated, “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”

King reads voraciously and has a preference for horror and suspense genres. However, his reading choices often extend beyond his preferred genres, as he believes in the importance of diversifying one’s reading choices. King typically reads for several hours a day and sets aside specific times for reading and writing. He views reading as a form of relaxation and enjoyment, as well as a means of improving his writing skills .

“I like to get 10 pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book.”

King also stresses the importance of paying attention to the techniques of other writers. By analyzing the works of other authors, King is able to identify what works and what doesn’t in storytelling. He even offers a suggested reading list for aspiring writers in his memoir, On Writing . In it, he recommends works from a variety of genres, emphasizing the importance of reading widely to expand one’s literary horizons .

King’s approach to reading illustrates how integral it is to the writing process. By making reading a daily habit and analyzing the works of others, writers can hone their craft and develop their own unique styles.

Developing a Critical Eye

Reading extensively is the foundation for developing a critical eye in writing. However, it is not enough to simply read; aspiring writers must learn to analyze and evaluate the techniques and styles employed by experienced authors to improve their own writing.

“Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out.” – William Faulkner

One way to analyze writing critically is to practice identifying the author’s intent and how it is conveyed through their choice of words, sentence structure, and literary devices. The goal is to gain insights into the underlying meaning, style, and techniques of the text and apply them to one’s own writing.

Creating a table to keep track of notable quotes, themes, or stylistic elements can be a useful tool for analysis . For example, a table may include columns such as “Author”, “Book/Article Title”, “Technique Used”, and “Impact on Reader”. This can help to organize and compare different texts and techniques used by various writers.

Example Table:

By cultivating a critical eye through extensive reading and analysis , aspiring writers can improve their writing skills and develop their own unique style.

Expanding Your Literary Horizons

As a writer , it’s easy to fall into the habit of consuming similar content repetitively, limiting your knowledge of different writing styles . Literary horizons describe the vast expanse of diverse literature styles that can help you sharpen your writing skills. Exploring a variety of genres and authors can broaden your creativity and expand your writing style.

Reading different genres can also inspire you to explore unconventional ideas that you may not have discovered otherwise. So, pick up a book outside of your genre of preference once in a while and dive into a new world of possibilities.

Moreover, reading diverse authors exposes you to varying perspectives and backgrounds, leading you to write more inclusively. Today’s readers crave characters that represent the wide range of diverse cultures and lifestyles that make up our world.

This quote by Maya Angelou highlights the importance of literary diversity: “It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.”

Cultivating a love for reading diverse literature can open doors to new writing possibilities, which can lead to growth as a writer .

Mining Inspiration from Books

Books serve as a valuable source of inspiration for writers, providing a wealth of ideas to fuel the creative process. Reading widely across genres, styles, and time periods can spark new perspectives and fresh ideas. From character development to inventive plot twists, books can inspire writers to experiment with different writing techniques and explore new possibilities.

One key strategy for mining inspiration from books is to keep a reading journal. Jot down your favorite quotes, scenes, and characters from the books you read, along with any ideas that come to mind while reading. This can serve as a reference and source of inspiration for future writing projects.

Another effective approach is to analyze the writing style and techniques of your favorite authors. Take note of their use of language, pacing, and tone, and consider how you can apply these techniques to your own writing.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss

Analyzing Writing Styles and Techniques

Reading widely is an essential aspect of improving your writing craft . By examining different writing styles and techniques, you can gain valuable insights that can significantly enhance your own writing.

One effective way to analyze writing styles is to break down a piece of writing into its fundamental components, such as sentence structure, tone, and characterization. Take notes on how the author uses language and imagery to convey their message. Observe how the writer builds suspense or creates an emotional impact through their language choices. Pay attention to how the writer transitions between scenes or sections and how they structure their plot.

Another useful method is to read reviews or critiques of books written by literary experts or fellow writers. These analyses can provide a broader perspective on the technical aspects of writing and highlight specific techniques that can be applied to your own writing.

One of the critical benefits of analyzing writing styles and techniques in your reading is to develop a better understanding of how to create an engaging and memorable experience for your readers.

Examples of Writing Techniques to Analyze

“The best way to analyze writing is to read it carefully and thoughtfully, paying attention to the structure, style, and details that make it great. By studying different writing techniques, you can develop your own unique style and voice as a writer.”

Incorporating Reading into Your Writing Routine

Developing a consistent writing routine is crucial to honing your craft, but it’s equally important to include frequent reading habits within this routine. Here are some practical tips to help you integrate reading into your daily writing practice :

1. Set Aside Dedicated Time for Reading

Allocate specific time slots for reading, just as you would for writing. This could be during your commute, during lunch breaks, or before bed. By creating a routine for reading, you’re more likely to commit to it and see the benefits.

2. Vary Your Reading Material

Don’t limit yourself to one genre or style of writing. Expanding your reading horizons can inspire new ideas and techniques for your own writing. Whether it’s classic literature or contemporary non-fiction, keep your reading material diverse and stimulating.

3. Take Notes While Reading

Cultivate a critical eye while reading by taking notes on writing techniques and styles that pique your interest. Jot down passages that resonate with you or inspire you to try new things in your own work.

4. Discuss Your Reading with Other Writers

Join a book club or writer’s group to discuss your reading and gain insights from other writers. Sharing your thoughts and opinions on literature can deepen your understanding of writing techniques and help refine your own work.

“Reading is essential to writing, both as a source of inspiration and a way to improve your craft.” -Stephen King

Integrating regular reading habits into your writing routine can have a significant impact on your skills and productivity as a writer. Embrace the joys of reading and watch as it enhances your writing practice .

Overcoming Writer’s Block Through Reading

At some point, every writer faces creative blocks, known as writer’s block . This can be frustrating and demotivating, but there’s no need to despair; taking a reading break can help reignite your creativity.

When you’re struggling with writer’s block , taking a break to read can help spark new ideas and provide inspiration. Allow yourself a reading break , and you might find yourself inspired by new characters, settings, or plot twists. Sometimes, all it takes is a few moments of immersion in a new story to help you energize your creativity and find new writing directions.

Reading can also help you clear your mind and give you a fresh perspective. When you take a break to read, it can be just what you need to recharge your writing skills and refresh your creativity.

To overcome writer’s block, try setting a routine of taking regular reading breaks during your writing. If you find yourself getting stuck, take a moment to read a few pages of your favorite book, or explore new genres and authors to expand your literary horizons.

The Benefits of Reading for Writing Craft

Reading is an essential practice for every writer. It provides numerous benefits that help improve their writing craft . Here are some of the specific advantages of reading:

• Expanding Vocabulary: Reading a wide range of materials, from newspaper articles to novels, can increase a writer’s vocabulary. This can help them choose the right words to convey their ideas effectively.
• Improving Writing Style: Exposure to different styles of writing, such as poetic prose or tight and concise business language, can help writers find their voice and develop their personal style.
• Gaining New Perspectives: Reading diverse materials from different authors can help writers understand perspectives different from their own. This can help them develop characters with more depth, unique viewpoints, and a broader range of experiences.
• Stimulating Creativity: By experiencing different worlds and characters presented in various writing styles, writers can spark their own creativity and develop new and innovative ideas for their writing projects.
• Developing Critical Reading Skills: By critically analyzing other authors’ writing techniques, writers can develop a more critical eye to improve their own writing and apply these new insights to their own writing process.

To fully harness these benefits, writers need to develop effective reading strategies . It is essential to read widely and diversely, trying different genres, authors, and formats. Writers should also seek to analyze and understand what they are reading, taking notes, and asking questions to improve their critical reading skills. Incorporating reading into your daily writing routine will help develop these strategies and allow you to gain more fully from reading’s many benefits.

In conclusion, reading is a vital aspect of improving your writing skills. As Stephen King has emphasized, reading can help you develop a critical eye, expand your literary horizons, mine inspiration from books, analyze writing styles and techniques, and overcome writer’s block. By incorporating reading into your daily routine, you can enhance your writing practice and productivity.

Remember to diversify your reading choices and delve into different genres to broaden your creative horizons. Utilize effective reading strategies , such as analyzing and learning from other authors’ techniques, to improve your own writing.

Continuous growth as a writer requires the constant pursuit of knowledge and improvement. Reading is an excellent way to gain insights, inspiration, and new perspectives that can help you develop your writing craft .

How can reading improve my writing skills?

Reading exposes you to different writing styles, storytelling techniques, and vocabulary, which can inspire and influence your own writing. It helps you understand the mechanics of effective storytelling, character development, and plot structure.

Why is reading important for writers?

Reading is essential for writers because it enhances creativity, expands knowledge, and improves critical thinking. It allows writers to learn from established authors, explore different genres, and stay updated with current trends in literature.

What is Stephen King’s approach to reading?

Stephen King emphasizes the importance of reading widely and voraciously. He believes that writers should read for pleasure, but also analyze and study the works of other authors to understand their writing techniques and incorporate them into their own craft.

How can I develop a critical eye through reading?

To develop a critical eye, actively engage with the text while reading. Pay attention to the author’s tone, language choices, and narrative structure. Analyze the plot development, character arcs, and overall effectiveness of the storytelling. Take notes and ask yourself why certain writing techniques are successful or not.

Why should I expand my literary horizons?

Expanding your literary horizons exposes you to a diverse range of writing styles, perspectives, and storytelling techniques. It allows you to explore different genres, cultures, and themes, which can spark creativity, broaden your perspective, and inspire unique ideas in your own writing.

How can reading inspire my writing?

By reading widely, you expose yourself to a variety of narratives, characters, and settings, which can trigger new ideas and awaken your imagination. It helps you see how other authors tackle certain themes or develop compelling plots, serving as a catalyst for your own creative process.

How can I analyze writing styles and techniques?

To analyze writing styles and techniques, focus on the author’s use of language, sentence structure, dialogue, pacing, and descriptive imagery. Pay attention to their storytelling choices and how they evoke emotion or create a vivid sense of place. Consider how these techniques can be applied or adapted in your own writing.

How can I incorporate reading into my writing routine?

Make reading a regular part of your writing routine by setting aside dedicated time for it. Choose books that align with your writing goals and interests. Integrate reading breaks during your writing sessions or incorporate it as a reward after achieving writing milestones. Consider keeping a reading journal to record insights and reflections.

Can reading help overcome writer’s block?

Yes, reading can help overcome writer’s block by providing a break from your own writing process and immersing yourself in someone else’s story. It can reignite creativity, generate new ideas, and offer valuable perspective and inspiration. Sometimes, stepping away from your project and indulging in a good book can help you return to your writing with a fresh mindset.

What are the benefits of reading for writing craft?

Reading enhances your writing craft by improving your language skills, vocabulary, and understanding of narrative structures. It helps you develop a stronger sense of storytelling, character development, and pacing. Reading also exposes you to different writing voices, which can influence and shape your own unique writing style.

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Stephen King: The 'Craft' Of Writing Horror Stories

Stephen King working at his home office in Maine in the 1980s. Scribner hide caption

Stephen King working at his home office in Maine in the 1980s.

On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft By Stephen King Paperback, 288 pages Scribner List price: $16

In the summer of 1999, writer Stephen King was nearly killed while taking his daily walk. A driver had left the highway and struck King as he strode along the gravel shoulder of Route 5 in Maine.

While recovering from his injuries, King worked on a book called On Writing. The book was both a reflection on his craft and his thoughts about the accident that required months of rehabilitation to repair his broken bones.

In a 2000 interview on Fresh Air, King described his life-changing accident to Terry Gross but said it didn't change the way he approached his writing.

"Obviously, it has given me some new things to write about and some new experiences to put in stories, and I've already begun that procedure," he explained. "Given a choice, if somebody had walked up to me and said, 'Well, Steve, you can continue to live the same old, boring, healthy life and you won't have any real, new experiences and you can retire at 55, or you can go for the car accident: You can get hit by the van and put in the hospital, and you'll get some new experiences and you can write until you're 60. Which do you choose?' And immediately I would say, 'Give me the boring life. I'll stop at 55.' So I do have some new experiences, and I probably will write some other things and go on for a while."

More than 350 million copies of King's novels and short story collections are in print. He received the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. His most recent titles include Dreamcatcher, Under the Dome, Just After Sunset and Bag of Bones. The 10th-anniversary edition of his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft will be released on July 6.

This interview was originally broadcast on Oct. 10, 2000

Interview Highlights

On his accident seeming familiar

"It all seemed familiar to me in the sense that there was nothing involved with the whole deal that I didn't expect, but the odd thing is that when you've been seriously hurt, there's a kind of numbing shock that sets in, and as a result, everything is -- there's no surprise involved with any of the things that seem to go on. You just sort of -- the things come and you deal with them. It's like being cast adrift and riding the waves."

On the nurses who took care of him

"You know, they'd all read Misery, and they worked for an outfit called the Bangor Area Visiting Nurses. These are nurses who go into the home and give home care. And I think one of them told me toward the end of the period, where I needed full-time nursing, that they had all read it, and they had all been called into the office by their superior and told in no uncertain terms, 'You don't make any Misery jokes.' "

On addiction

"If I thought anything was unfair about what had happened to me, it was that after struggling and winning a battle to get off all sorts and drugs and alcohol [before the accident] -- [not only did I] have a problem with beer and cocaine; I was an addictive personality, period. I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. I loved Listerine. I loved NyQuil. You name it. Boy, if it would change your consciousness, I was all for that. And I was able to jettison almost all of those substances out of my life.

"And suddenly, you wake up in a hospital bed and you've got a phenyltol patch on your arm and you're jacked up on morphine and you've got all these different medications. I was as grossed out by that, I think, as I was by the injuries, thinking, 'My God, I'm a junkie again.' And the way that I deal with it, rightly or wrongly, is to try and make sure that you never exceed the dosage that you're supposed to have for things like Percocet or Vicodin ... and as long as you stay below the prescribed levels and as long as you're making a reasonable effort to get clean, that's a good thing to do. ... On the other hand, as other people say in those programs that I attend, 'I didn't get sober to suffer.' And if I'm in a situation where I'm miserable and medication will help that suffering, I'm going to take it."

On his religious beliefs

"I've always believed in God. I also think that's the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment, the capacity to believe, or at some point in your life, when you're in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement. 'I will believe in God because it will make my life easier and richer to believe than not to believe.' So I choose to believe. ... I can also say, 'God, why did this have to happen to me when if I get another step back, you know, the guy misses me entirely?' Then God says to me, in the voice that I hear in my head ... basically tells me to 'Get lost, I'm polishing my bowling trophies.' "

On purchasing the car that struck him

"I was in the hospital, mostly unconscious; my wife got a lawyer who's just a friend of the family. My son and his son went to school together, so we know him really well. And she got in touch with him and said, 'Buy it so that somebody else doesn't buy it and decide to break it up and sell it on eBay, on the Internet.' And so he did. And for about six months, I did have these, sort of, fantasies ... of smashing the van up. But my wife -- I don't always listen to her the first time. But sooner or later, she usually gets through. And what she says makes more sense than what I had planned. And her thought was that the best thing to do would be to very quietly remove it from this plane of existence, which is what we did."

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Stephen King’s “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes”

I. the first introduction.

THAT’S RIGHT. I know it sounds like an ad for some sleazy writers’ school, but I really am going to tell you everything you need to pursue a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction, and I really am going to do it in ten minutes, which is exactly how long it took me to learn. It will actually take you twenty minutes or so to read this essay, however, because I have to tell you a story, and then I have to write a second introduction. But these, I argue, should not count in the ten minutes.

II. The Story, or, How Stephen King Learned to Write

When I was a sophomore in high school, I did a sophomoric thing which got me in a pot of fairly hot water, as sophomoric didoes often do. I wrote and published a small satiric newspaper called The Village Vomit. In this little paper I lampooned a number of teachers at Lisbon (Maine) High School, where I was under instruction. These were not very gentle lampoons; they ranged from the scatological to the downright cruel.

Eventually, a copy of this little newspaper found its way into the hands of a faculty member, and since I had been unwise enough to put my name on it (a fault, some critics argue, of which I have still not been entirely cured), I was brought into the office. The sophisticated satirist had by that time reverted to what he really was: a fourteen-year-old kid who was shaking in his boots and wondering if he was going to get a suspension … what we called “a three-day vacation” in those dim days of 1964.

I wasn’t suspended. I was forced to make a number of apologies – they were warranted, but they still tasted like dog-dirt in my mouth – and spent a week in detention hall. And the guidance counselor arranged what he no doubt thought of as a more constructive channel for my talents. This was a job – contingent upon the editor’s approval – writing sports for the Lisbon Enterprise, a twelve-page weekly of the sort with which any small-town resident will be familiar. This editor was the man who taught me everything I know about writing in ten minutes. His name was John Gould – not the famed New England humorist or the novelist who wrote The Greenleaf Fires, but a relative of both, I believe.

He told me he needed a sports writer and we could “try each other out” if I wanted.

I told him I knew more about advanced algebra than I did sports.

Gould nodded and said, “You’ll learn.”

I said I would at least try to learn. Gould gave me a huge roll of yellow paper and promised me a wage of 1/2 cent per word. The first two pieces I wrote had to do with a high school basketball game in which a member of my school team broke the Lisbon High scoring record. One of these pieces was straight reportage. The second was a feature article.

I brought them to Gould the day after the game, so he’d have them for the paper, which came out Fridays. He read the straight piece, made two minor corrections, and spiked it. Then he started in on the feature piece with a large black pen and taught me all I ever needed to know about my craft. I wish I still had the piece – it deserves to be framed, editorial corrections and all – but I can remember pretty well how it looked when he had finished with it. Here’s an example:

(note: this is before the edit marks indicated on King’s original copy)

(after edit marks)

When Gould finished marking up my copy in the manner I have indicated above, he looked up and must have seen something on my face. I think he must have thought it was horror, but it was not: it was revelation.

“I only took out the bad parts, you know,” he said. “Most of it’s pretty good.”

“I know,” I said, meaning both things: yes, most of it was good, and yes, he had only taken out the bad parts. “I won’t do it again.”

“If that’s true,” he said, “you’ll never have to work again. You can do this for a living.” Then he threw back his head and laughed.

And he was right; I am doing this for a living, and as long as I can keep on, I don’t expect ever to have to work again.

III. The Second Introduction

All of what follows has been said before. If you are interested enough in writing to be a purchaser of this magazine, you will have either heard or read all (or almost all) of it before. Thousands of writing courses are taught across the United States each year; seminars are convened; guest lecturers talk, then answer questions, then drink as many gin and tonics as their expense-fees will allow, and it all boils down to what follows.

I am going to tell you these things again because often people will only listen – really listen – to someone who makes a lot of money doing the thing he’s talking about. This is sad but true. And I told you the story above not to make myself sound like a character out of a Horatio Alger novel but to make a point: I saw, I listened, and I learned. Until that day in John Gould’s little office, I had been writing first drafts of stories which might run 2,500 words. The second drafts were apt to run 3,300 words. Following that day, my 2,500-word first drafts became 2,200-word second drafts. And two years after that, I sold the first one.

So here it is, with all the bark stripped off. It’ll take ten minutes to read, and you can apply it right away … if you listen.

IV. Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully

1. Be talented This, of course, is the killer. What is talent? I can hear someone shouting, and here we are, ready to get into a discussion right up there with “what is the meaning of life?” for weighty pronouncements and total uselessness. For the purposes of the beginning writer, talent may as well be defined as eventual success – publication and money. If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented. Now some of you are really hollering. Some of you are calling me one crass money-fixated creep. And some of you are calling me bad names. Are you calling Harold Robbins talented? someone in one of the Great English Departments of America is screeching. V.C. Andrews? Theodore Dreiser? Or what about you, you dyslexic moron?

Nonsense. Worse than nonsense, off the subject. We’re not talking about good or bad here. I’m interested in telling you how to get your stuff published, not in critical judgments of who’s good or bad. As a rule the critical judgments come after the check’s been spent, anyway. I have my own opinions, but most times I keep them to myself. People who are published steadily and are paid for what they are writing may be either saints or trollops, but they are clearly reaching a great many someones who want what they have. Ergo, they are communicating. Ergo, they are talented. The biggest part of writing successfully is being talented, and in the context of marketing, the only bad writer is one who doesn’t get paid. If you’re not talented, you won’t succeed. And if you’re not succeeding, you should know when to quit. When is that? I don’t know. It’s different for each writer. Not after six rejection slips, certainly, nor after sixty. But after six hundred? Maybe. After six thousand? My friend, after six thousand pinks, it’s time you tried painting or computer programming. Further, almost every aspiring writer knows when he is getting warmer – you start getting little jotted notes on your rejection slips, or personal letters . . . maybe a commiserating phone call. It’s lonely out there in the cold, but there are encouraging voices … unless there is nothing in your words which warrants encouragement. I think you owe it to yourself to skip as much of the self-illusion as possible. If your eyes are open, you’ll know which way to go … or when to turn back.

2. Be neat Type. Double-space. Use a nice heavy white paper, never that erasable onion-skin stuff. If you’ve marked up your manuscript a lot, do another draft.

3. Be self-critical If you haven’t marked up your manuscript a lot, you did a lazy job. Only God gets things right the first time. Don’t be a slob.

4. Remove every extraneous word You want to get up on a soapbox and preach? Fine. Get one and try your local park. You want to write for money? Get to the point. And if you remove all the excess garbage and discover you can’t find the point, tear up what you wrote and start all over again . . . or try something new.

5. Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right – and breaking your train of thought and the writer’s trance in the bargain – or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don’t have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it … but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

6. Know the markets Only a dimwit would send a story about giant vampire bats surrounding a high school to McCall’s. Only a dimwit would send a tender story about a mother and daughter making up their differences on Christmas Eve to Playboy … but people do it all the time. I’m not exaggerating; I have seen such stories in the slush piles of the actual magazines. If you write a good story, why send it out in an ignorant fashion? Would you send your kid out in a snowstorm dressed in Bermuda shorts and a tank top? If you like science fiction, read the magazines. If you want to write confession stories, read the magazines. And so on. It isn’t just a matter of knowing what’s right for the present story; you can begin to catch on, after awhile, to overall rhythms, editorial likes and dislikes, a magazine’s entire slant. Sometimes your reading can influence the next story, and create a sale.

7. Write to entertain Does this mean you can’t write “serious fiction”? It does not. Somewhere along the line pernicious critics have invested the American reading and writing public with the idea that entertaining fiction and serious ideas do not overlap. This would have surprised Charles Dickens, not to mention Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Bernard Malamud, and hundreds of others. But your serious ideas must always serve your story, not the other way around. I repeat: if you want to preach, get a soapbox.

8. Ask yourself frequently, “Am I having fun?” The answer needn’t always be yes. But if it’s always no, it’s time for a new project or a new career.

9. How to evaluate criticism Show your piece to a number of people – ten, let us say. Listen carefully to what they tell you. Smile and nod a lot. Then review what was said very carefully. If your critics are all telling you the same thing about some facet of your story – a plot twist that doesn’t work, a character who rings false, stilted narrative, or half a dozen other possibles – change that facet. It doesn’t matter if you really liked that twist of that character; if a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with you piece, it is. If seven or eight of them are hitting on that same thing, I’d still suggest changing it. But if everyone – or even most everyone – is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.

10. Observe all rules for proper submission Return postage, self-addressed envelope, all of that.

11. An agent? Forget it. For now Agents get 10% of monies earned by their clients. 10% of nothing is nothing. Agents also have to pay the rent. Beginning writers do not contribute to that or any other necessity of life. Flog your stories around yourself. If you’ve done a novel, send around query letters to publishers, one by one, and follow up with sample chapters and/or the manuscript complete. And remember Stephen King’s First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don’t need one until you’re making enough for someone to steal … and if you’re making that much, you’ll be able to take your pick of good agents.

12. If it’s bad, kill it When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law.

That’s everything you need to know. And if you listened, you can write everything and anything you want. Now I believe I will wish you a pleasant day and sign off.

My ten minutes are up.

For more advice from Stephen King, check out his Reading List for Writers .

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Stephen King Has Strong Words For Critics Who Didn't Take Him Seriously As A 'Writer's Writer' Early In His Career

Stephen King weighs in on critics who judge his works for their popularity.

All art is naturally subjective… but what does it mean if a particular piece of art finds extreme popularity? Is said popularity a direct result of great quality, or does it suggest a level of accessibility that suggests that the work doesn’t do enough to challenge the audience? It’s a debate that has no real answer and only strong opinions – and this week, legendary author Stephen King threw his two cents in on the matter.

That, however, is only the lead story in this week’s edition of The King Beat , which also includes exciting casting news for an upcoming King adaptation as well as a brand new Recommendation Of The Week. There’s a lot to get into, so let’s dig in!

Stephen King Delivers A Blunt And Funny Response To His Early Critics

After more than 50 years as a published novelist, Stephen King has left an undeniable and indelible impact on the literary world. His books are beloved around the world, and his impact on pop culture at large is incalculable – particularly in the horror genre, but also well beyond it. He is one of the most celebrated writers of all time… but he still has a bone to pick with critics who think that his works can’t be taken “seriously” because of their popularity.

King reflected on his relationship with those critics recently during an interview with PBS News Hour discussing the full breadth of his career and his most recent book, the collection You Like It Darker . The author has known success throughout all five decades that have passed since the arrival of Carrie on bookstore shelves in 1974 (followed two years later by director Brian De Palma’s excellent adaptation), and he recalls not getting proper shrift because of a perception that anything that is properly “good” won’t be widely accepted by the masses. King said,

There was a time when I felt like nobody will ever take me seriously as a writer's writer, just as somebody who makes money. And it did make me angry, because it seemed to me that there was an underlying assumption about popular fiction, that if everybody reads it, it can't be very good. I have never felt that way. I have felt that people can read and enjoy on many different levels.

Of course, Stephen King is not the only creative to deal with this particular struggle. Movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been hit with constant scrutiny as filmmakers like Martin Scorsese have tried to draw a line between “art” and “entertainment,” and there isn’t a single award season that goes by without chatter regarding how the biggest box office hits of the year might or might not fit into the Oscar race. If a work is appreciated to a lot of people, assumptions are made about how it appeals to the lowest common denominator – which patently isn’t fair.

King has long dismissed the idea that the popularity of his books somehow make them “lesser,” but it’s also worth noting that he has had some standout crises with confidence. The most notable example of this is his stretch writing books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman (including Rage , The Running Man , Roadwork , The Long Walk and Thinner ). Part of the reason he started publishing works using the fake name was because he was unsure if all of his best-sellers were based on merit and the quality of the work or because of the reputation that he had earned from his early novels. He eventually made peace with his own success, as noted in his essay “The Importance of Being Bachman.”

Looking at the quote above, one might note from Stephen King’s tense use that he doesn’t take the criticism as harshly anymore, so what happened? The interviewer noted that he “got over worrying about that at some point,” to which King replied,

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I got old. And I think that probably a lot of the critics who didn't like my stuff are now dead, so fuck them!

They say that the best revenge is living well, but I suppose simply living on in general does the trick as well.

The Institute TV Series Adds Two Actors In Key Roles To Join Cast Including Ben Barnes And Mary Louise Parker

If you haven’t already noticed, now happens to be an exceptionally exciting time to be a Stephen King fan – particularly when it comes to upcoming King adaptations. Gary Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot is arriving for those with a Max subscription in October; Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck is premiering at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival; Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey is set for release early next year; Welcome To Derry will be debuting in late 2025 ; Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk started production this summer; and Edgar Wright’s remake of The Running Man is gearing up to begin filming this fall.

That’s a lot of goodness on the way – but not to be forgotten in the mix is the upcoming TV series based on the 2019 novel The Institute , and helping to remind us of that fact is news of two new cast additions this week.

It was announced this past June that MGM+ is developing The Institute from producers Jack Bender ( Mr. Mercedes ) and Benjamin Cavell ( The Stand ), and while the initial report revealed the involvement of Mary Louise-Parker and Ben Barnes , Deadline reported this week that the project has now also added Simone Miller and Jason Diaz in key parts.

In The Institute , gifted 12-year-old Luke Ellis wakes up one day to discover that he has been abducted from his home and brought to a mysterious facility that tests and experiments on children with psychic abilities – be they telekinetic or telepathic. Mary-Louise Parker is set to play Mrs. Sigsby, the horrible director of the titular establishment while Ben Barnes is playing Tim Jamieson, a retired police officer who finds his life intersecting with Luke’s when he moves from his home in Florida to a small town in South Carolina.

While the MGM+ series has not yet announced who will be playing Luke Ellis, Simone Miller is attached to play Kalisha, one of the older kids at The Institute who ends up becoming Luke’s first friend. Hailing from Toronto, Canada, Miller’s first big role was playing Raign Westbrook on the CBC Kids television series Detention Adventure , but she has been more recently playing Mannix in 13 episodes of the show Run The Burbs .

Jason Diaz, meanwhile, will be on the antagonist side of the plot in The Institute , aligned with the horrible Mrs. Sigsby. The actor will be playing Tony – who is an orderly who notably has a bit of a sadism streak in him. An up-and-comer, Diaz played Andre Dragomir in eight episodes of the series Vampire Academy , but he has also had recurring roles on shows including The 100 and the reboot of Charmed .

The only “bad” news to share is that the trade report doesn’t include any information regarding the start of production on the series. That being said, with the cast now starting to come together, it wouldn’t be surprising in the slightest to learn that The Institute is planning to start rolling cameras before the end of 2024. Needless to say, you can be sure that I’ll be keeping a close eye on the project here on CinemaBlend as new developments are announced.

Recommendation Of The Week: “Apt Pupil”

Did you know that it was 42 years ago this week that the incredible Stephen King collection Different Seasons was published? It was a work that started a notable tradition in King’s bibliography (namely the release of omnibuses collecting four distinct novellas instead of a mix of short stories), and each of the entries is independently fascinating. In past King Beat columns, I’ve found myself with opportunities to recommend three of the four tales in the tome – namely “Rita Hayworth And Shawshank Redemption,” “The Body,” and “The Breathing Method.” – but now I’m ready to propose you check out what is unquestionably the most controversial inclusion in the book: “Apt Pupil.”

One of the most disturbing stories that Stephen King has written, “Apt Pupil” is set in mid-1970s Los Angeles and follows troubled teenager Todd Bowden as he starts a relationship with Arthur Denker – an immigrant neighbor whom he’s discovered is actually a Nazi war criminal named Kurt Dussander. Rather than revealing Dussander’s identity to the authorities, Todd blackmails him into telling him dark details about the atrocities that he committed. As the two grow closer, the relationship between them becomes a dangerous, role-switching cat-and-mouse game, and it ends up having a devastating impact on Todd’s mental health. Suffice it to say, it’s not a novella to read before you go to bed.

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of The King Beat, but as always, I’ll be back here on CinemaBlend next Thursday with a brand new column for you recapping the biggest news from the world of Stephen King. And while you wait, you can check out my series Adapting Stephen King , digging into the long history of King’s works being brought to life in film and television.

Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.

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Stephen King reflects on his iconic career and latest release ‘You Like It Darker’

Jeffrey Brown Jeffrey Brown

Anne Azzi Davenport Anne Azzi Davenport

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/stephen-king-reflects-on-his-iconic-career-and-latest-release-you-like-it-darker

Fifty years ago, a 26-year-old rural Maine school teacher wrote the horror novel “Carrie.” That man, Stephen King, has gone on to write more than 60 books and many have been turned into such films as “The Shining” and “Shawshank Redemption.” Jeffrey Brown spoke with King about his latest book, “You Like It Darker,” and the long arc of his career. It's part of our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Read the Full Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Amna Nawaz:

Fifty years ago, a 26-year-old rural Maine schoolteacher wrote a horror novel titled "Carrie."

That man, Stephen King, has gone on to write more than 60 books since. They have sold between 400 million to 500 million copies worldwide and have been turned into films like "The Shining," "Shawshank Redemption," "Stand By Me," and many more.

King invited our senior arts correspondent, Jeffrey Brown, to his main home to talk about his latest book of short stories called "You Like It Darker" and the long arc of his career. It's part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown:

In his new collection, Stephen King writes of the eerie, the unsettling, the otherworldly raising its head in this one.

He calls it "You Like It Darker," and he clearly does.

Stephen King, Author:

Darker means spooky. It means scary. It means let's exercise our unpleasant emotions for a while, because I think that people like the idea of opening the door and saying, I want it darker. Do you want it darker? OK, we're in agreement, and now let's go into the woods together.

Millions of readers have taken that dark walk with King, but we had our own lighter one with the now-76-year-old.

Stephen King:

I feel a little bit like, if I was a car, I'd trade, you know?

Near his woods in Maine, a state where so many of his tales have been set.

I love Maine. I love the country. I'm not much of a city kid. I know the people. And I think that they are stand-ins for people everywhere.

I'm going to write about regular people, ordinary people, in the best way that I know how.

In the best way, even in their dark moments?

I'm interested in what happens when regular people are suddenly confronted with something that's totally out of their wheelhouse, something that's entirely different.

I think that literature in quotation marks is about extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances. And what I do are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

King himself grew up mostly in working-class rural Maine, his mother raising him and his brother after his parents divorced.

He began writing columns for his high school newspaper and then stories and more at the University of Maine, where he met Tabitha, another young writer, now his wife of 53 years. Early on, the young couple took on a variety of jobs to make ends meet.

I just wanted to support my family, to be able to say, I'm doing work. My wife also worked. She worked at Dunkin' Donuts. She would come home smelling like a cruller.

And she looked so cute.

"Carrie," the 1974 horror novel, and two years later, Brian De Palma-directed film changed everything, with Sissy Spacek as a shy, bullied high school girl with telekinetic powers. Unforgettable revenge ensues.

In his 2000 book "On Writing," King tells of battling his own demons, early on with alcohol and drugs, later after a van hit him on one of his local walks, leading to years of pain and physical difficulties felt to this day.

Can one write darker without having a kind of darkness himself?

Basically, I'm a perfectly nice fellow, good family man, good husband, good father, and all of this stuff that's on the dark side, it comes out in the stories.

And so it doesn't have to come out in life. I used to think to myself, I could have been a very bad person, except for the stories that I tell takes off a lot of the pressure.

Maybe that's how his stories work for all of us. Whatever it is, Stephen King is as much a cultural icon as any American writer today.

So we got all these movie posters from your…

Especially when you consider the number of films and series made from his stories, around 100.

My first editor, Bill Thompson, used to say, "Steve has a movie camera in his head."

Oh, really?

And the story…

Like you see the story in — yes.

Yes, the stories are very visual.

I grew up the first generation with movies and TV, and they made a big impression me. So I have a tendency to see things, and that's part of the pleasure, is the seeing.

More pleasure has come at times from rock 'n' roll, the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band King formed in the 90s with other writers, including Dave Barry and Amy Tan.

For all his success, King admits he wasn't always happy with the critical reception he got.

There was a time when I felt like nobody will ever take me seriously as a writer's writer, just as somebody who makes money. And it did make me angry, because it seemed to me that there was an underlying assumption about popular fiction, that if everybody reads it, it can't be very good.

I have never felt that way. I have felt that people can read and enjoy on many different levels.

But you got over worrying about that at some point, clearly.

I got old. And I think that probably a lot of the critics who didn't like my stuff are now dead, so (expletive deleted) them.

Bleep them.

Yes, bleep them.

You also wrote in your book "On Writing," you wrote about not only being the story's creator, but its first reader. You want to feel the suspense of the story yourself?

Not only do I want to feel the suspense of the story, I want to relish the good parts.

You want to enjoy the good parts.

Every now and then, you will say to yourself, I wrote a really good line there. Oh, boy, that's really cool.

But how does he do it and how generate so many ideas?

I can't explain it.

That's the beautiful thing about what I do. It's just like being belted by an idea.

He cites the example of the story "Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream" in the new collection.

I was getting out of bed one day, and I thought to myself, what if an ordinary guy had a psychic vision in a dream about where a body was buried, and actually went out there and found that body? Would anybody believe that he had that vision, or would they think that he did it? And…

All right, but wait a minute. You just woke up thinking that?

Yes. Well, no, I didn't wake up thinking that. I was putting on my pants when I had this idea, you know? And I put them on one leg at a time. And I had one leg in my pants. And I had this idea. And by the time I got the other leg in, I had almost the whole story.

See, and who wouldn't want to do something like that? I mean, that's so trippy, but it is just the way that my mind works.

Trippy, dark and clearly having a hell of a writing life.

I'm very fortunate to be able to do what I do. I love to tell stories. And, in a way, I get paid for something that, in the words of the late John D. MacDonald, I would do for free.

OK, that's good.

Coming soon in the Stephen King universe, several new film and TV adaptations of his work.

From the darker side in Western Maine, I'm Jeffrey Brown for the "PBS News Hour."

And, online, we have more from Stephen King, including what he watches and reads when he's not writing.

That's on our YouTube channel.

Listen to this Segment

Watch the Full Episode

In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists. Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with The New York Times.

Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS News Hour.

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9 things stephen king has said about stanley kubrick's the shining movie.

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Every Stephen King Movie Franchise, Ranked Worst To Best

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• Despite being one of the best horror films of all time, Stephen King has consistently expressed his disdain for the adaptation of The Shining.
• King initially had mixed thoughts about the film, praising aspects like its visuals, but has become more critical of it over time.
• King's main criticisms of the film revolve around the lack of character development for Jack Torrance and the portrayal of Wendy Torrance.

The Shining is one of the most celebrated horror films ever made, but Stephen King isn't a fan of the adaptation of his story and has been vocal about it for decades. Stephen King has been writing novels since the 1970s, making 1977's The Shining one of his earliest works. The film was adapted shortly after in 1980 by legendary director Stanley Kubrick. The Shining stars Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall as Jack and Wendy Torrance and is centered around the family's stay at a remote, haunted hotel during the winter in Colorado. As he unearths the hotel's secrets, Jack's sanity deteriorates.

The Shining is almost unanimously considered one of the best horror movies of all time , proving that Kubrick could succeed in any genre. Stephen King has had many of his stories adapted, even offering praise for the poorly received film The Dark Tower . However, he's been consistent with his stance on The Shining since the 1980s, expressing his disdain for the movie on multiple occasions. While his initial comments on the film from the '80s offer some amiable praise, his more recent opinions have been far more critical.

9 "There Are An Awful Lot Of Things About That Movie That I Think Are Flawless And Beautiful."

On The David Letterman Show in 1980, King began his commentary on The Shining with something positive. He said that he had mixed thoughts about the film but that there were things he found flawless and beautiful. Initially asked if he was pleased with Jack Nicholson's performance, King said, " I thought he did a wonderful job in The Shining. I enjoyed it very much." Over time, King has maintained that he thinks the film is visually beautiful, though he's since had some criticism about Nicholson's performance as the lead, Jack Torrance.

8 "I'd Given Stanley Kubrick A Live Grenade And He Heroically Threw His Body On It."

In the same David Letterman interview, Stephen King describes his negative feelings on the film, saying " There are other times when I feel as though I'd given Stanley Kubrick a live grenade, and he heroically threw his body on it," suggesting that Kubrick had taken his story in a different direction than King had anticipated. He went on to speak about the process of selling the rights to his novel and how he hadn't sought out any control over the film. He compared the process of selling a book to a movie studio to sending a child off to school, hoping it would do well.

Stephen King movie franchises are surprisingly rare, though many of them show why the author personally dislikes sequels based on his work.

7 "Jack Torrance Has No Arc In That Movie."

One of Stephen King's loudest critiques of The Shining was the adaptation of Jack Torrance. " The character of Jack Torrance has no arc in that movie. Absolutely no arc at all ," he says, comparing it to his book. He describes Nicholson's Jack Torrance as being crazy from the beginning. " All he does is get crazier. In the book, he’s a guy who’s struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. " (via IndieWire ) He insists that the book version of Jack's descent allows the reader to sympathize with the character better.

6 "It’s Like A Big, Beautiful Cadillac With No Engine Inside It."

Stephen King may have described the visuals of The Shining as beautiful, but he still believed the film lacked substance. He explained his feelings, saying " I think ‘The Shining’ is a beautiful film and it looks terrific and as I’ve said before, it’s like a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it." Many movie lovers would disagree with this opinion on account of the film's ambiguous nature. There are tons of theories about The Shining , as fans have continued discussing it in new ways for decades. The Shining certainly has its nuances, which can be attributed to Kubrick's meticulous attention to detail.

5 "In The Movie, There’s No Tragedy."

Stephen King has written many great horror novels with the ideology that scares work best when viewers care about the characters. He felt that Jack Torrance's arc in the book was a tragedy that viewers would sympathize with. Without that arc, Stephen King believed The Shining lacked the tragic elements of the original novel. The portrayal of Torrance is notably different from the book, with Jack Nicholson having written a scene for The Shining himself.

4 "With Kubrick's The Shining, I Thought It Was Very Cold."

A comparison Stephen King has made multiple times is that he felt that Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining was cold, while his book was warm. " The other real difference is at the end of my book the hotel blows up, and at the end of Kubrick’s movie the hotel freezes. That’s a difference ," he says. In another interview he simply says " I'm not a cold guy. " (via BBC ) He describes his books as being very warm and inviting, wanting to take the reader on a journey with the characters, whereas he felt the film version was like watching people who were " ants in an ant hill. "

3 "One Of The Most Misogynistic Characters Ever Put On Film."

Stephen King agrees with one of The Shining's biggest critiques , saying that the depiction of Wendy Torrance lacked substance. Regarding the matter, King said " Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the misogynistic characters ever put on film. She's basically just there to scream and be stupid, and that's not the woman I wrote about." The film adaptation takes away qualities from Wendy's character in the book, instead focusing primarily on her overwhelming fear in the nightmare situation.

2 "Stanley Kubrick Saw The Haunting As Coming From Jack Torrance."

In Turner Classic Movie's documentary A Night at the Movies: The Horrors of Stephen King , the author discusses his feelings for the film. He recalls a conversation between him and Stanley Kubrick where they exchanged their perceptions of ghost stories and ideas of the afterlife. In King's novel, he wanted to express the idea of malignant spirits haunting good people, whereas Kubrick saw the haunting coming from Jack Torrance. He believes they had a fundamental difference in opinion on the source of the evil in The Shining , which led to their tonally different stories.

1 "I Loved Everything Else The Man Did. I Just Didn't Like That One."

Despite not having much praise for The Shining , Stephen King expresses that he loved Stanley Kubrick's other work. In the IndieWire interview, Kubrick states "H e’s made some of the movies that mean a lot to me, ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ for one and ‘Paths of Glory,’ for another." Kubrick has such a wide variety of films that there's something for everyone to enjoy. It's understandable for Stephen King to have strong feelings about The Shining's book changes , as there are dramatic differences from his original novel.

Sources: BBC , IndieWire

• The Shining