Stephen King on His Writing Career

 

Fifty years ago, a 26-year-old rural Maine schoolteacher named Stephen King wrote a horror novel.

That man has gone on to write 60 books since.

They have been turned into films like The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me, and many more.

King invited Jeffrey Brown to his Maine home to talk about his latest book of short stories and the long arc of his career.

It is part of our arts and culture series.

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

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

Darker means spooky and scary, and let's exercise our unpleasant emotions for a while.

I think people like the idea of opening the door and saying, "I want it darker." Do you? OK.

We are in agreement.

Let's go into the woods together.

Millions of readers have taken the dark walk with King, but we had a later one with the 76-year-old.

I feel like if I was a car, I would rust.

I love Maine.

I love the country. I'm not much of a city kid. I love the people.

And I think they are stand-ins for people everywhere.

I want to write about regular people, ordinary people, in the best way I know how.

Even in their dark moments?

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

I think that literature, in quotation marks, is about extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances.

And what I do is ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

King himself grew up in mostly rural, working-class Maine.

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 and would smell like a cruller.

With Sissy Spacek as a bullied high school girl with telekinetic powers, unforgettable revenge ensues.

In his 2000 book On Writing, he talks about battling his own demons early on with alcohol and drugs, and later years of pain and physical difficulties that continue to this day.

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

Basically, I'm a perfectly nice fella, a good family man, a good husband and father.

And all of this stuff that is on the dark side comes out in the stories.

It doesn't have to come out of life.

I used to think to myself, I could have been a very bad person except for the stories that I tell.

It takes off a lot of the pressure.

Maybe that is how his stories work for all of us.

Whatever it is, Stephen King is as much a cultural icon as any American writer today.

You have all of these movie posters, especially when you consider the number of films and movies based on his stories.

My first editor used to say that Steve has a movie camera in his head.

Like you see the story.

The stories are very visual.

I grew up in the first generation of movies and TV, and they made a big impression on me, so I have a tendency to see things, and that is part of the pleasure.

Pleasures at times have come from rock 'n' roll.

Through his success, he admitted that he is not always happy with the critical reception that he got.

There was a time when I thought no one would ever take me seriously as a writer's writer.

Just as someone that makes money.

It seemed to me there was an underlying assumption about popular fiction that if everyone reads this, it can't be very good. I've never felt that way.

I've felt that people can read and enjoy on many different levels.

But you got over worrying about that at some point.

I got old.

And I think that probably a lot of the critics that didn't like my stuff are now dead. So -- them.

Bleeped 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 in the story, I want to relish the good parts.

I want to enjoy the good parts.

Every now and then you say to yourself, "I wrote a good line there. That is cool."

How does he generate so many ideas?

I can't explain it.

That is the beautiful thing about what I do. It is just like being visited by an idea.

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 he had that vision, or would they think he did it?

You just woke up thinking that?

I was putting on my pants when I had this idea.

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.

And who wouldn't want to do something like that? That is so trippy.

It is just the way my mind works.

Trippy, dark, and having a writing life.

I'm very fortunate to do what I do.

I love to tell stories, and in a way I got paid for something that, in the words of the late John D. MacDonald, I would do for free.

OK, that is good.

Coming soon, several new film and TV adaptations of his work.

From the darker side in western Maine, I'm Jeffrey Brown for the PBS NewsHour.

Amna: And online we have more from Stephen King, including what he watches and reads when he is...