Complete Transcript of Literary Editor Bryon Cahill's interview with
Stephen King
(As promised in the October 2006 issue of Writing Magazine)

"I'm Halloween's answer to Santa Claus."
     -Stephen King

Friday, April 22, 2005

What are your writing habits? Where do you write? When? Do you have any set rituals like drinking a glass of orange juice before you sit down to write?
I write in the mornings... well... it's never set, I don't know how it is with you... I have a time when I like to write. And that's usually from 8 until noon. That's when I feel the best. I get up in the morning and there's no grunge in my head. That time is usually dedicated time. I really don't have anything to do. Once breakfast is out of the way I can just go and sit until noon. That's on an ordinary day when the world doesn't intrude. But the world doesn't stop for me. It doesn't stop for any writer. And if I just have one project, that's the time that I do it. Generally speaking, if I have two things I have a column that I do for Entertainment Weekly, and I have a book that I'm working on so every third Monday I'll just not work on the book and I'll spend that day and work on that column. I have another book that I'm working on because these things sometimes don't wait, they just declare themselves. So I'm working a little bit at night, too. I don't like to do that and it doesn't always feel as good but the stories don't seem to feel any different when they're done. I work a little bit at night, too, but mostly I like to work days.

When you sit down to write a book, do you plot it out beforehand or do you just let the fingers go where they may?
No, I never plot out beforehand. But it's never a case of exactly letting the fingers go where they may. It's somewhere in-between those two things. I have a general story idea--a situation. That's where I like to start. Then I let it play out. And that always works as long as you're honest about what characters would do in a given situation. If you start to lie then things wander off-course. That is, if you start to make characters do things because it would be more convenient for you.

And you can tell the difference?
Oh yeah. You can tell the difference. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm working on a story right now where I really didn't want this lady to call the cops. Because it would be inconvenient for me. I would have to write about police procedure and bring people into the story that I didn't want there. But in the situation she was in, any sane person would call the police. So I let her call the police. And it was fine.

What role do you think a person's heritage, upbringing, and surroundings play in their writing?
Well first of all, it's a case of what you get from your parents for genes. My father wrote. I didn't know him. He left home when I was very little. But my mother told me that he wrote lots of stories, and he sent them off to magazines, and he got letters back saying "please send us more." He just was kind of lazy about it and never really did very much. But she said his stories were really good.

In your book On Writing you wrote some great stories about your mom encouraging you and giving you a quarter every time you wrote a story.
It's great to have people around you that care. You know what? They don't even have to care exactly. All they have to do is say "this is what you like to do. And that's OK." As long as they don't stomp on you and say "that's a stupid thing to do, go hoe the garden." It's OK to say "go hoe the garden" as long as you can still find an hour to go do what you want because somebody recognizes that's important to you. And it's the same way whether it's the guitar, trumpet, chess, whatever. And most parents do. Most peers do as well. So it's usually OK but you've got to get some kind of a background in it. And that always manifests itself because you have an interest in it.

What is the one thing that you, as a writer, cannot live without?
Books. Books. You gotta have books. You gotta read. I go with a book everywhere just about.

Do you have a favorite author?
Somebody asked me that question recently and all these names jam up the circuits. There's so many different people that I like that it's hard to say. I love Ian McKewan. I got his new novel, Saturday, but I haven't read it yet. I've set it aside like you would your favorite dessert.

Are you ever not writing in your head?
Sure. Yeah. You know what's funny is how often you find that you are and you don't even realize it. I'll be someplace and an idea will surprise me. You'll see something and you'll think, maybe I can use that. I think that the more that you train yourself to do it, the more that it goes on almost behind your back, behind the scenes. 

Do you ever hop out of bed at night and run to your computer with an idea?
No. Because if it's a good idea it will stay and if it's a bad idea it will fall through the cracks. People ask me sometimes: 'Do you keep a notebook?' And the answer is no. I have a few stickies on my computer and on my desk but that's the extent. There's this wonderful story about Keith Richards getting the idea for the song Satisfaction in a dream and waking up and hearing those guitar chords and starting to get up and play them and then saying "oh if it's any good I'll remember them when I get up in the morning." And he did.

What makes a scary story really scary?
I don't know. That's a really tough question. That's like asking someone: 'What makes a funny story really funny?' Scary things are personal. People come up to me sometimes and say "You know, I really love that book IT because I was always terrified of clowns." But other people come up to me and say "why would you say such mean things about clowns? I'm married to a guy who's a clown. Children love it! It's so mean to say that about clowns." When I was a kid, clowns just scared me and I've seen other kids cry about clowns and to me there's something scary, something sinister about such a figure of happiness and fun being evil. Lon Chaney once said, "Nobody laughs at a clown at midnight." So I guess that sometimes what makes a scary thing scary is that when we realize there's something sinister behind a nice face. I think things are scarier when we take away some sensory deprivation, when we take away our ability to sense things, when we take away escape--that makes thing scary. We're afraid of things that are different than we are. A lot of times what somebody does when they're writing scary stories is they're giving us permission to be politically incorrect, to say "it's all right to be afraid of things that are different than you are." And Weekly Reader itself will say "you have to be nice to people that are different than you are." And we understand that that's true and we try to do it but nevertheless, there's always that little bit of fear that says "maybe they're going to eat us up." And the person who writes a scary story says that it's all right to feel that way because you have to find a place to get rid of that.

What, if anything, scares you?
Well clowns freak me out and scare me. I think that any kind of situation that I'm trapped in, certainly claustrophobia or turbulence at 40,000 feet freaks me out a lot. I hate that. Any kind of a situation where I'm not in control and somebody else is... those things freak me out. 

Could you talk a little bit about how you build suspense in a book?
The most important thing about building suspense is building identification with character. You have to take some time and make your reader care about the characters in the story. There's a difference between horror and terror. You can go to a movie like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and you can be horrified because you don't know what's going to happen next and you don't know when Leatherface is going to jump out and carve somebody up with that chainsaw or Friday the 13th or Freddy with his fingers that are all scalpels and you don't know what terrible things are going to happen or who's going to get their head chopped off. But you don't necessarily know any of those people. They're very two dimensional. But if you take somebody and you put them in a situation. I'm thinking about Misery where you've got this writer, Paul Sheldon, and little by little you get to know this guy and you get to understand him a little bit and you get to see different aspects of him and you start to feel for him--this person. Then you start to empathize with him and you start to put yourself in his shoes and then you start to be very very afraid because you don't want anything bad to happen to him. It isn't a question anymore of when something will happen to him. It's more like thinking, "I don't want anything to happen." But because it's the kind of story that it is, you know that something is gonna, so one by one you close off the exits and things get more and more nerve-wracking until finally there's an explosion. You know that's going to happen. 

Do you have any rituals when you finish a book? Is there a sense of release when that comes?
I don't have any. Paul Sheldon would have wine and a cigarette. Obviously, the cigarette in that story was part of the plot. I'm not going to give away anymore than that, but he needed the match. But I don't really have a ritual. I'm always very happy when I'm done. Sometimes I take my wife out to dinner. Beyond that, I'm just nice to the dog.

Do you ever feel bad about having to kill off a character?
Yeah I do. Those people become very real to me. I wrote a series of books that were called The Dark Tower and I lived with those characters in that book from the age of about 22 up until when I finished the last one when I was 56. So that's a lot of years. That's like 35, 36 years all told. And they became very important to me. I'd been with some of those characters longer than I've been with my children and some of them had to die and that was tough. They become very real. Anybody will tell you that imaginary friends are as real as real people sometimes. I still know the difference or else they'd put me away in a room. 

Out of all the characters you have created over the years, who is your favorite, and why?
Oh in some ways, I think Annie Wilkes. There's also a character in the book I'm working on now named Lucy Landon who's a widow. She's by herself and she's really the main character in the story and I like her because she's very resourceful, she's very brave. And she's somebody that I've lived with for about two years now so of course I like her. You know she's been my constant companion and I'm sort of in love with her. But of the characters that I've created that people know about, I would say Annie Wilkes is my favorite. She always surprised me; she never did exactly what I thought she would do. And that's why I liked her. She had a lot more depth and she actually generated a lot more sympathy in my heart than I expected. When I wrote Misery, I thought, well here's a story about a writer who's going to be caught by a psychotic fan. And that was as far as it went but she had her own story to tell so I got to like her. BUT YOU GET TO LIKE THEM ALL! And the thing is, whether they're good or they're bad I can't remember who said this, but somebody said "Everybody's a hero in their own life" and I try to remember that. To most of us, we seem like good people even if we're doing terrible things. So everybody gets their own story.

In many of your books, your protagonist is a writer. In works like The Dark Half, Secret Window, Secret Garden, and The Shining, your writer is somehow driven to insanity. How close to home does this hit? I'm not suggesting that you're nuts, but do you think that to be a successful writer, one has to be a little cuckoo?
Yeah, you do have to be a little nuts to be a writer at all because you have to imagine worlds that aren't there. OK, you're hearing voices, you're making believe, you're doing all of the things that we're told as children not to do. Or we're told to distinguish between reality and those things. As children, grownups put up with it, don't they? "You have an invisible friend, oh that's very nice, you'll outgrow that." Writers don't outgrow it. You'll look at writers--this is true of a lot of different kinds of artists, but it's very true of writers--if you look at their faces, they have young faces, they have child faces a lot of the times, especially around the eyes. And it's because you spend your life making believe. And that's an interesting little quirk of our society--that we set aside part of American society that the play yard. And all these kids who read Weekly Reader they know about the play yard--some of them still go there and some of them go to gym or wherever it is that they go to but for people like me, we still get to go to the playground. We talked about my schedule, from 8 to 12 I go to the play yard. I sit here and I get to make believe. That's what I do and they pay me to do it!

What is the most important element of storytelling to you?
They all have their part to play but for me the most important thing is I want the reader to turn the page. So I would say that it's an almost intangible thing that adds up to readability. That makes somebody want to sit down and read the story that you wrote. It's a kind of modesty almost where you say to yourself this is not about me, this is about the person who reads my stories. It's not psychoanalysis, it's not about showing off (although it always is, we know that). You just hope that it goes out to somebody who's going to connect with what you said. And that you're going to tell them the story that makes them want to continue to read. Different writers feel different ways about this. I want to make a connection with them that's emotional. I want them to read the story and I want to make them sweat a little bit, laugh, and cry. I'm less interested in their thought processes than I am their lower emotion.

You once said, "I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries."
Yeah, and I'm still paying for that. What I meant by that is I'm tasty. I go down smooth. And I don't think that a steady diet of Stephen King would make anybody a healthy human being. I think that you oughtta eat your vegetables, and you oughtta find other things, you oughtta find some Dickens, some Ian McKewan you oughtta range widely and read all kinds of different stuff. You shouldn't just settle on one thing. I'd feel the same way about people that said they didn't read anything but Harry Potter. I'd say, "There's something wrong with you, buddy." If you're gonna read fiction, read all kinds of things and challenge yourself, read some stuff that's really tough. An 8th grader who's bright and is just still reading at an 8th or even a 10th grade level is lazy. Go out and get Crime and Punishment, read that.

If you were a teacher, what is the most important lesson you would impart to your students? What writing advice do you have for our readers?
As writers, I'd say write every day. If you want to write and you want to write well, do it a lot. Practice it. The same way that you would anything else that you want to do all the time. Baseball players know about it, trombone players know about it, swimmers know about it. Use it or lose it. Get better. Work at it. Feel comfortable with it. Feel comfortable with sentences, feel comfortable with paragraphs until those things just roll off your fingertips. And the better you feel about it, the better it's going to go for you.

For a young teen who hasn't read any Stephen King and wants to get a taste of your writing, which book would you recommend he or she read first?
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I've never written down to people. I've never tried to write a young adult book or an adult novel. But if there was such a thing as a Stephen King young adult novel, it would be The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

How has the Internet transformed your approach to the writing process? How do you think it is helping (or hurting) today's young writers?
I don't think it's really changed my writing process at all because it's too late for that. I am what I am, like Popeye says. But as far as what it's done for younger writers, I'm surprised that it hasn't improved writing skills more than it has. Young people are online a lot, they write a lot of emails, they interact a lot with the net and yet their writing skills remain pretty primitive.

What themes do you see running through all your works?
I would say that if there's one theme that runs through my work it would be "Live according to the truth and try to be brave." And "it's better to do the right thing than the wrong thing even at costs." 

What is your favorite line, phrase, or excerpt that you ever wrote? Why is it your favorite?
Right off the top of my head, I would have to say, Annie Wilkes telling Paul Sheldon in Misery, not to be "a cockadoodie brat."

After you were hit by a van in '99, rumors were circulating that you would never write again. If that tragedy couldn't stop you, do you think you'll ever retire?
Sure, I'll die. Or I'll get Alzheimer's Disease, or something. You see, I'm a horror writer, I can think of all sorts of nasty reasons to stop.