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Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King was born
in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie
Ruth Pillsbury King. After his  parents
separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his older brother,
David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were
spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at
the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. Stephen attended the
grammar school in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School, graduating
in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at
Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE
MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving
as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war
movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative
view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated
from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, with a B.S. in
English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft
board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on
grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and
punctured ear drums. He and Tabitha Spruce married in January
of 1971. He met Tabitha in the stacks of the Fogler Library at
the University of Maine at Orono, where they both worked as students.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching high school English
classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden,
Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued
to produce short stories and to work on novels. In the spring
of 1973, Doubleday & Co. accepted the novel Carrie for publication.
On Mother's Day of that year, Stephen learned from his new editor
at Doubleday, Bill Thompson, that a major paperback sale would
provide him with the means to leave teaching and write full-time.
Carrie was published in the spring of 1974. That same fall, the
Kings left Maine for Boulder, Colorado. They lived there for
a little less than a year, during which Stephen wrote The Shining,
set in Colorado. Returning to Maine in the summer of 1975, the
Kings purchased a home in the Lakes Region of western Maine.
At that house, Stephen finished writing The Stand, much of which
also is set in Boulder. The Dead Zone was also written in Bridgton.
Stephen King wrote and directed the movie Maximum Overdrive
in 1985. Creepshow II was released in 1987. Many of his works
have been adapted for the screen including Carrie, The Dead Zone,
The Shining, Christine, Salem's Lot, Firestarter, Cujo, Pet Sematary
(for which King wrote the screenplay and had a bit part as a
minister), and Misery, as well as several others. The popular
movie, Stand By Me, was adapted from his novella, "The Body"
from Different Seasons. In 1992, Sleepwalkers was produced from
an original screenplay by King. Stephen is a regular contributor
to the American Cancer Society, provides scholarships for local
high school students through Hampden Academy and contributes
to many other local and national charities. Having written over
40 books, including a 4 part series of novels, a 6 part serial
novel, and numerous short stories, he is amongst the worlds most
popular all time writers, and is undoubtedly the worlds leading
horror writer.
Q: How did Lisey's Story begin? Was it a character, or a
particular image?
King: Yes, it was a character, and it was a situation. I was in the
hospital for pneumonia, and my wife decided to redo my studio. When I
came back, she said, "I wouldn't go in there; it's disturbing." So of
course I went in there, and it was disturbing. I was still in deep
recuperation, and I felt like a ghost anyway. But going in there, I felt
even more like a ghost, because the books were all off the shelves, and
the furniture had been pulled out because my wife was getting it
reupholstered, and the rugs had been rolled up. I thought, This is what
this place is going to look like after I die. Because I'd cleaned out my
mother's house, and I knew that that was true. When I thought of my wife
cleaning out my papers, a light went on. Lisey's Story bloomed from
that.
I started to write it because I thought it would be really great to
write a story about a writer's wife behind the scenes, because they're
always behind the scenes. You know, academics and critics are the
biggest sexists in the world. They would holler and scream and say it
isn't true, but if you have a famous writer, unless their spouse is
somebody like Sylvia Plath, you never hear about them. They're totally
ignored, even though they can be very influential in that writer's work.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and his wife told
him it was an awful book. So he threw it in the fire, and burned it up,
and rewrote the whole thing from scratch. For years, critics have
mourned that, and thought that he probably threw away a masterpiece and
wrote a lesser book. That is errant sexism, right there. They're
assuming that the wife couldn't recognize meretricious quality. For all
we know, she was looking at something that was bad, and the second book
he wrote was the masterpiece, and the one he threw away was crap.
So I wanted to write a book where the woman who was behind the scenes
was always saving this guy's bacon. I saw it almost as a kind of a
comedy, but it didn't turn out that way. It turned out to be a love
story, instead.
Q: Private language, like that between Lisey and Scott, which has been a
theme in your other books as well, is much more pronounced here. Was
that a conscious choice before you started writing the novel, or was
that something that developed as the characters evolved?
King: It was a conscious choice. If you're writing about a marriage,
particularly a long marriage — and that's what I wanted to write about,
the world of a long marriage — it seemed to me, and it seems to me, that
that creates its own ecosystem that has all sorts of aspects. For
example, a kind of telepathy develops over the years, and that's why you
stay married, that's one of the benefits of a long marriage. If you're
at a party, you're able to look across the room at each other, and you
get a certain kind of look and you both know it's time to leave the
party. It's that sort of thing, with both big decisions and little
decisions.
Because you're together, all that time, you develop your own language
for things, inside that ecosystem. They might start as jokes, or
punchlines of jokes, and they become part of that inner vocabulary.
That's also part of the benefit of a long marriage; it's part of
creating your own world. People sometimes describe it as building a wall
between you and the outside world, but I don't think it's a wall. I
think it's a dome that you can actually look through, that's permeable.
Q: One of the last lines of the Newsday review of the book is
"Language is where we go when we're gone," which I thought worked on two
levels with your book: Lisey going to the pool, which is the source of
language and story, to bring back Scott and Amanda, when both of them
were "gone," mentally, and she also retreated to their private language
to grieve him and to draw strength from.
King: Yes. I heard the concept of the pool from a lecture in 1968 in
English class, where Burton Hatlen talked about the pool where we all go
down to drink. He talked about the myth-pool. I can't remember if he was
talking about the Odyssey or the Iliad; it might have even been Hans
Christian Andersen, for all I know. But it's true that those things are
global, shared. A myth like Cinderella, for instance — every culture has
a Cinderella story. The names change, but the story of ostracism, the
third sister from the family, always remains the same. But, I thought to
myself, if you believe in a thing enough, and if you have a powerful
enough imagination to actually find another world, at the center of that
world would be that pool of imagination. Imagination is a wonderful
thing, but it's also a terrible thing. I tried to make that other world,
Boo'ya Moon, a place that had two sides, two faces, like Jekyll and
Hyde. It's sweet in the daytime and awful at night. A lot of times
that's the way our imaginations are.
Q: Certain objects in your books can take on a kind of mythical, totemic
quality — sometimes from being in the right place at the right time, and
other times because of the intensity of the characters' belief in those
objects. In Lisey's Story, one of those would be the silver shovel that
ends up saving both Scott and Lisey's lives.
King: The silver shovel is a saving object, and it's silver for a
reason. Like silver bullets. There are things that are supposed to be
good at killing monsters. Dooley is a monster; Gerd Allen Cole was a
monster. It's more of a goof than anything else, but it's also symbolic
in the sense that silver is supposed to be purifying.
Q: Also, though, the lesson I took from Dickens is that nothing should
be wasted. Nothing should be wasted, in a book. There's nothing that's
coincidental in the world of fiction. One of the great pleasures of
fiction is that you enter a world where coincidence is allowed and
characters come back and things recur, so that the shovel becomes a part
of Lisey's life again, after it's sat in the barn for all those years.
It's the only time, in my view, that Scott in the book ever really
speaks to Lisey from beyond the grave. He says, Find the shovel. So she
does, and it's perfectly logical that she should want that shovel and
that the shovel should be where it is. That's one of the pleasures of
fiction, that Dickensian feel, that things should recur.
You know, I played for a long time with the idea of Dooley actually
turning out to be Gerd Allen Cole.
Q: There are definitely similarities between the two.
King: Yes; I compromised on that, because that felt too Agatha Christie
to me. That felt a little bit too far. But you can see that some of the
clues were planted there. There's the Southern thing, and I thought to
myself, Well, yeah, it's possible because Cole never really says that
much, and his hair isn't blonde anymore, it's brown, and that could be
him. Then I thought, no — that's a step too much. Coincidence is
allowed, because coincidence is a part of our lives.
Q: Often the parts we remember the most strongly.
King: Reality is Ralph.
Q: Something else I've noticed in your books is the
importance of accuracy of experience. I'm thinking in Lisey's Story when
Lisey's setting the scene with her car, when she's gone up to rescue
Amanda, when she's fixing the details in her mind, the license plate,
the bumper sticker, and thinks...
King: Something's not quite right.
Q: And that happens frequently in your characters' memories, as
well; there's a kind of "click" moment when everything lines up
perfectly.
King: Yes. What's a concern with me when I write is — I'm an imagist.
When I was in college I turned on to a lot of modern poetry,
particularly James Dickey and William Carlos Williams and a lot of the
disciples of Williams, though not all of them. I always liked Wallace
Stevens, although I didn't have a fucking clue what that man was talking
about. Not even in "On Sunday Morning." As a matter of fact, there is
one that I did know what he was talking about, and that was "The Emperor
of Ice Cream." I just loved that poem. There's also Randall Jarrell, W.
H. Auden, and all those people — another one is Dylan Thomas. A lot of
them are a little bit old-fashioned now, but there's a new-fashioned
poet that I like, too, a guy from Pittsburgh named Chard deNiord who's
really, really good. He's got a book out called Night Mowing.
What these people do is what formed me in that last great period when
you're plastic, when you're in college and you're still kind of a
sponge, you're still open to change in every way. It goes on a little
while after that, but not a long while after that. That's when you say,
Teach me. I'm ready to learn; teach me what to do. What I was taught was
really be specific in your writing. Never, never, never, never tell the
reader. Always show. And you know, I tripped on that a bit, particularly
in my reading that didn't have anything to do with school. People like
Raymond Chandler. I always loved Chandler, and I never really connected
with Dashiell Hammett. But I loved Chandler. Chandler was crystal clear
to me. When I read him, it was like being in ecstasy, almost. Somebody
else was Thomas Wolfe, although he never met an adverb he didn't like,
I'll tell you that.
I'm like that with what Lisey's doing in that scene. It's a case of
saying, I want to be able to visualize this place exactly, and come back
to where I left these things. It was a pleasure to write that scene,
because it's like a total visualization. The more I can do that, the
more excuse I have to do that, the better I like it.
Q: Is there anything you're too scared to write about?
King: No. If I write about things, then I don't have to worry about
them. You know what I mean? This is the best gig in the world, I can't
even tell you, because other people pay like eighty bucks an hour to go
to a shrink — and it's not even a full hour, it's a fifty-minute hour. I
write these things down and people pay me. It's great! It's wonderful.
People say to me, Do you have bad dreams? And the answer is, yes — when
I don't write, then I get bad dreams.
Q: When you received your medal at the National Book Awards in 2003, you
talked about building bridges between popular and literary fiction. Are
you satisfied that those bridges are being built?
King: No. The problem, I think, is that there's almost no understanding
in the serious critical establishment, and when I say that, I mean in
the journals — everything from Harold Bloom to Ploughshares to — pick
your poison, the Antioch Review, etc. I read these things. Do the people
who publish them read me? That's a good question. If they do, a lot of
them probably don't admit it. If their literary friends come over, they
might put my books under the bed like... lit-porn. You people may have
faced this; some friends will come over and say, "Oh, you read him?
Really? You read Stephen King? Well, all
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