Running on empty, with nothing left in me but doubt
I picked up a pen
And I wrote my way out

“Wrote My Way Out” from the Hamilton Mixtape

“No one writes a long novel alone,” Stephen King states at the beginning of his introduction to ‘Salem’s Lot. He’s officially referring to the other people involved in the drafting and publishing process, but on a deeper, more symbolic level, one might imagine he’s referring to all the people who have fundamentally influenced the novelist to become the person they are–constituted largely by their attendant emotional baggage. It often seems that the people who have the most fundamental influence in packing the emotional baggage are a person’s parents. Then there’s the question of how larger cultural factors influence and interact with an individual’s emotional baggage and/or upbringing–the whole nature-v.-nurture thing. 

Apparently the King doesn’t really “get” why his fans and readers would be interested in his personal life, and in what his personal baggage might be. It’s a defining difference of certain schools of academic literary criticism whether you read and analyze a fictional text through the gloss of its author’s biography, or ignore the person of the author entirely and focus solely on the text (Roland Barthes’ whole “death of the author” movement). But since King is an author whose work deals in the horrors of the mind in particular, reading that work through his biography could offer an interesting illumination of how the act of writing itself can serve to exorcise and/or exacerbate one’s personal demons. 

So what are the King’s demons? 

As I mentioned in a post on ‘Salem’s Lot, Joseph Reino dedicates the first chapter in his academic text Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary (1988) to the representation of father-son relationships in King’s early work, mentioning that King’s father “left for cigarettes” when King was two years old–King was born in 1947–and was never heard from again. On top of this, a few years later, King discovered a cache of rejected horror manuscripts in the attic that his father had submitted to magazines. So…there’s a lot going on there. 

Lisa Rogak’s King biography Haunted Heart (2008) fills in more details, after opening with a prologue in which King notes himself to be a particularly fearful person–and those fears to be the fruitful engine of his fiction writing. King paints himself as someone who writes specifically to expel at least some of his excessive fears, which is interesting to think about from a therapeutic perspective and an idea I’ll return to. 

Once King’s father left, his mother Ruth had to move young Steve and his older brother Dave around constantly to try to support them. Frequently left to his own devices, King read and wrote often (devouring pulp magazines in particular) as an apparent escape from the impoverished and unstable circumstances he grew up in. Somehow, impressively, his mother found the time and energy to encourage her younger son’s writing–paying him a quarter for each story he wrote and thereby creating a possibly fundamental association between fiction-writing and earning potential, not to mention the cultivation of an ability to write not only in lieu of but in response to extreme and difficult circumstances that might help explain his consistently prolific output over a span of decades. In this way, perhaps the “gothic tendency” of the death drive leading to a new beginning defined by Julia Kristeva (mentioned in my last post) might apply to King’s career: the death drive tied to the loss of his father potentially led to the circumstances that cultivated his prolificacy. Could you have one without the other? We’ll never know for sure… 

Financial circumstances also dictated King’s choice of college, the University of Maine at Orono. According to the bios, by this point he’d been reading and writing fiction steadily for a decade. He wrote his first novel-length manuscript his freshmen year, railed against the English department for their literary snobbery and failure to teach Shirley Jackson, got swept up in anti-Vietnam War movements and demonstrations, and met Tabitha Spruce, his future wife, in a creative-writing workshop. Tabitha got pregnant and had their first child, Naomi, right after King graduated in the summer of 1970 and Tabitha had another year to go. He published his first story in Cavalier magazine in the fall of 1970, and married Tabby in 1971. He’d graduated with a teaching certificate, but had to work in an industrial laundry until a position opened up at the academy where he’d student-taught. It did not pay well. He managed to send a novel manuscript to the publisher Doubleday that ended up with editor Bill Thompson, who started corresponding with King about revisions, which King dutifully submitted, but after a long process, the novel was ultimately rejected. This same process happened with a second novel manuscript that also eventually culminated in rejection. In the meantime, he earned extra income from publishing short stories in “men’s magazines,” and a second child, Joe, came along in 1972. 

Here’s where things get (more) interesting. According to the Rogak biography, around this time a friend of King’s asked him why he “continued to write this macho crap for the titty magazines.” (Notably, King refused to show these stories to his mother.) His retort to his friend could be condensed into one word: money. These were the magazines that paid. (Rogak notes one instance where without a check from one of these magazines, King wouldn’t have been able to afford some necessary medication for his daughter.) Nonetheless, this friend bet King that he couldn’t write from a woman’s point of view. Thus motivated, King gave it a shot. But he ran into two problems as he began work on what would become Carrie: it was too long for a short story, and he couldn’t write from a woman’s point of view. So he threw it in the trash. 

Well, as the legend goes, Tabby fished the pages out of the wastebasket, told him the story was good, and encouraged him to keep working on it. (Here’s where we see that the modern word processor would have essentially aborted King’s career before it could get off the ground…) When he protested that he didn’t know anything about “girls,” she said that she would help him. 

Thanks, Tabby. 

With his wife’s assistance and his ongoing close-up high-school experience as a teacher, he dashed off the novella-length manuscript relatively quickly. Despite enduring anxiety that he’d get stuck as an English teacher for perpetuity, he didn’t send the manuscript to Bill Thompson, due to the previous two rounds of emotionally exhausting hope-then-rejection. Instead he stuck it in a drawer, started talking about a new idea with Tabby inspired by some books he was teaching in his English classes, and began work on what would become ‘Salem’s Lot. 

Tabby was always supportive and protective of her husband’s limited writing time: when an opportunity for extra cash came up coaching the debate team, she told him he couldn’t take it if it would interfere with his writing schedule, even though they desperately needed the money. King started drinking more in response to the financial stress. Rogak quotes King on this period: 

“It was a vicious circle: the more miserable and inadequate I felt about what I saw as my failure as a writer, the more I’d try to escape into the bottle, which would only exacerbate the domestic stress and make me even more depressed. Tabby was steamed about the booze, of course, but she told me she understood.”

Rogak, Lisa. Haunted Heart (p. 70). St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Eventually Bill Thompson asked why King hadn’t sent him anything in awhile, and King sent him the Carrie manuscript. Thompson was more confident about his ability to sell this particular manuscript of King’s because it fell into the category of “horror,” while the first two manuscripts he’d sent had not. Horror was trending at the time, thanks to novels-turned-movies like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. King was reluctant to go through the cycle of publishing hell again, but he made Thompson’s suggested revisions, expanding the story from novella to full novel by interspersing it with epistolary snippets reflecting on the narrative’s major incident after the fact. This time, it worked. Doubleday bought Carrie with an advance of $2500 in March of 1973. 

I’d like to pause to note how it was always King’s motivation and goal to write for money–to make a living as a writer. He seems to have had an instinctual grasp from early on that what was touted as “literature” in his English classes was different from what made money in mass markets; when King was a teenager, the sci-fi pulp magazines (where Scientology founder and sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard got his start) were in their heyday. Yet King also seems to have appreciated a certain merit in pop cultural texts, other than their earning potential, that his literature professors refused to recognize, as evidenced by King’s petitioning the English department at the University of Maine to let him teach a class on pop culture when he was still an undergraduate (they let him co-teach it with a professor). At any rate, we can basically see in King’s early career trajectory how he was completely willing to make any revisions to his work demanded by an editor who was connected to a network that could pipe him a paycheck. (Rogak notes that the check that came through for his daughter’s medicine from Cavalier was for $500–that’s a significant sum to receive for a short story now, let alone in the early ’70s.) 

The stories for the men’s magazines reflect King’s willingness to adapt for paying markets, as do the revisions he made on the the novels that got rejected before Carrie and on Carrie itself. For the work in the men’s magazines in particular, that means the stories might be more reflective of cultural interests than King’s interests, though his successful ability to so easily write content for these markets (or so it would seem, since these are stories he’s frequently described as “churning out”) is probably reflective of his own interest in them…

The initial Carrie advance helped ease some financial burden, but King assumed he would have to continue teaching, until he got another call two months later. Bill Thompson had told King that Doubleday might sell the paperback rights to Carrie for $5-10k, of which King would get half. But the rights ended up going for $400k. 

The initial sale of Carrie must have felt significant, but this is really King’s critical, life-changing moment. When Bill Thompson relayed the figure over the phone, Steve initially thought he said “$40k.” It took a bit for the magnitude of the figure to sink in. Long enough for King to sink to the floor from where he’d been standing. Long enough to get up and go out to buy Tabby a hair dryer, worrying the whole time he’d be struck by a car and killed in the process. (This is definitely something I would think if something good had happened to me.) Shortly after came the sale of the movie rights. King was able to quit teaching (after only two years). He finished work on ‘Salem’s Lot, and Bill Thompson elected to publish that next over Roadwork, cultivating King’s brand as a mainstream horror writer. King’s mother was able to quit her job at a retirement home and move in with Steve’s brother, but she died of cancer in December of 1973, before Carrie could see official print in April of 1974. 

Despite finally being a published novelist who had signed a multi-book contract, King was depressed and drinking more after his mother’s death; in On Writing he says he was drunk when he delivered her eulogy (which, as a former drunk myself, I’m inclined to say I understand). King and the family decided to move, randomly choosing Colorado. Once there, he had trouble finding an idea for his next book, but struck gold when he and Tabby took a weekend trip to Estes Park and stayed in room 217 of the Stanley Hotel. 

In talking about The Shining, King describes consciously expressing the unexpected rage he felt in fatherhood (compounded by not having had a model of fatherhood himself). He would add later that he didn’t realize he was writing about his own drinking at the time, which was worsening despite the easing of the financial burdens that had plagued him his whole life and that had of course intensified with fatherhood. (Even though Carrie didn’t meet sales targets, the paperback rights for ‘Salem’s Lot still went for $500k.) During this Colorado interlude, King also finished The Stand, the one where most of humanity is killed off by a superflu. By 1975, the family was back in Maine, around the same time ‘Salem’s Lot was released, which should give you some idea of the lag in the publishing process (slash how fast King works). By the time his second novel was published, he had completed full drafts or his third and fourth, which are both gargantuan (The Stand perhaps more so). At this point, he is not even thirty years old. 

‘Salem’s Lot didn’t meet sales projections either, but all that changed when Brian De Palma’s film adaptation of Carrie was released in November of 1976, an unexpected box office hit that garnered Oscar nominations for lead actress Sissy Spacek and supporting actress Piper Laurie. Book sales shot up, and audiences were primed for the release of King’s third novel. His name was officially on the map. King loved pop culture, and it looked like pop culture loved him.

Of course, King already had much more up his sleeve, not just The Shining and The Stand, but manuscripts he’d written in college that he felt he now had the name recognition to publish. Problem was, Doubleday would only publish one book by an author per year, believing more than that would eat into other books’ sales. So King adopted a pseudonym, an author whose publisher would be the same one that had been cutting King fat checks for his paperback rights: New American Library. King’s first Richard Bachman novel, Rage, was published in 1977, the same year as The Shining, and the same year his third and final child, Owen, was born. 

The potential instability of the nuclear family unit is a major theme of King’s work that seems to spring directly from his own experiences. That his experiences in this regard are not unique is probably one key ingredient in the success of his work. And yet, this is a fairly common theme in literature. In considering why King’s take on the topic caught on with readers to such a degree, I recalled Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success, the basic premise of which is that success might be largely determined by when you were born. (Alexander Hamilton couldn’t have “written financial systems into existence” if he hadn’t been in the right place at the right time.) One of the examples Gladwell analyzes in support of this theory–or two, I guess–are Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, both born in 1955, eight years after King: 

By 1975, if you are too old, you would be working in some reputed company like IBM.. you might not take the risk of leaving the job, starting a new business and moving to a new, unfamiliar world. By 1975, if you were a few years out of college, you had just bought a house, recently married. Then you would be in no position to give up a job and try Altair. By 1975, If you were too young, in high school, then you cannot afford Altair. So, you could rule out people who were born before 1952 and after 1958. If you were born between 1952–58, you would be old enough to utilise the opportunity provided by Altair and become part of the computer revolution. Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955.

Quoted here.

In this case Gladwell seems to frame the importance of when you’re born on a willingness to take risks–which is largely dependent on being in a feasible financial position to take risks. In King’s case, timing also strikes me as integral to his success in a couple of ways: first, horror trending in popular culture (which according to Cohen’s monster theory analysis would be a product of larger historical/political/cultural fears at the time); second, the women’s movement being in full swing at the time of Carrie’s publication, and third, the success of the Carrie film adaptation. 

This will likely seem a strange metaphor, but I’ve been watching a lot of Project Runway lately, and it strikes me how a designer’s success in the challenges on that show, while largely a product of skill, are also frequently influenced by seemingly random factors: luck. King’s case strikes me similarly. I am not disputing the man’s skill, or his intelligence, or his insight into the human psyche, or his ability to translate those insights into striking, resonant images that stick with you. I’m merely entertaining the possibility that there might be other writers with a comparable skill set whose work hasn’t caught fire in the same way due to a convergence of circumstances beyond their control. 

I do think it’s important to consider how King’s impoverished upbringing was not only an influence on his using writing as a way to manage difficult circumstances, but on how it gave him first-hand experience with subject matter that might resonate with more people: manual labor. When you look at who writes “literature,” its writers frequently come from privileged backgrounds, and are educated at elite institutions. This to me really seems to be the key to King’s success at horror in particular: he was intimately familiar with, if not essentially defined by, the horrors of blue-collar small-town life. 

I also think it’s important to acknowledge that King worked his ass off, and a good thing for writers to remember that his first two novels were rejected. (What if Bill Thompson hadn’t bothered to go out of his way to call and ask for more of King’s work?) Another factor critical for King is his ego: while he probably went through periods of doubt, like most white men, it seems, he ultimately believed that his voice deserved to be heard, and he was willing to shout. 

Of course, this was all decades ago; the publishing industry works differently now (not only from when King was starting out, but from just a month ago, probably). King did not have an agent until after he had a book deal; an editor at a major publishing house read King’s unsolicited manuscript. I don’t think this would ever happen today. 

Perhaps one takeaway from all of this, at least for writers, is that rejection and failure to write your way from rags to riches might not necessarily mean you’re a talentless hack. You might have just been born under a bad sign. 

-SCR