On Writing by Stephen King: How to write a bestseller by Stephen King

Daily Mail​

31-07-2025

On Writing by Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton £22, 416pp)
Together with Grisham, Clancy and Crichton, Stephen King is one of the world's most successful authors, earning hundreds of millions of dollars from his stories, which are full of his trademark 'dread and wonder'.
Even if you've never read one of his actual books, everyone has seen a film adaptation: Carrie, The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, or Misery, in which an Academy Award-winning Kathy Bates smashes James Caan's ankles – Caan plays an author, Bates an over-besotted fan.
In On Writing, and at the risk of sounding like 'a literary gasbag,' King promises to divulge the secrets of his craft. That's to say, how 'ambition, desire, luck and a little talent' blend with one's personal knowledge of 'life, friendship, relationships, sex' to create, if not works of literature for the ages, then bestsellers.
King's lessons, originally published in 2000 and reprinted in this new edition, will hold few surprises to those of us taught English Language O-Level, back in the last century, when high standards pertained. Thus, delete extraneous verbiage, especially adverbs and clumsy exposition. 'Your main job is to take out all the things that are not the story.'
Secondly, be plain and direct. A fancy vocabulary is pretentious. Don't ever say 'at this point in time' or 'at the end of the day,' or assume 'my angry lesbian breasts' is clever. Obscurity belongs solely with student poetry groups.
King is correct to say writers must be compulsive readers. 'I take a book with me everywhere I go,' he asserts.
If you want to pull the reader in and get them to keep turning the pages, focus is essential. 'Once I start work on a project, I don't stop and I don't slow down unless I absolutely have to.' There must be no distractions in the study, such as a television set, video games, or intrusive music.
Which is all well and good – highly sensible. But in the end, King can't explain how he became Stephen King. Inspiration, to him, remains a complete mystery. 'It came from nowhere . . . It arrived whole and complete, in a single bright flash,' he says of a typical novel's gestation.
It's what he lives for, it's what gives him joy, 'that sudden flash of insight when you see how everything connects', and the next thing we know, King is pouring out his fables about vampires invading New England, people being trapped in cars by rabid dogs, policemen going berserk and viruses wiping out 99 per cent of the human race.
King was born in Portland, Maine, in 1947 and brought up in poverty by a hardworking single mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, 'a sharecropper living a largely cashless existence'. He never knew his father (who had walked out when he was a toddler) or had a father-figure, only horrible nannies, who'd 'just all of a sudden wind up and clout the kids'.
Most of his childhood recollections involve acute pain: wasp stings, dropping a brick on his foot, 'mashing all five toes'. Taken short outside, King wiped his bottom with poison ivy. Gigantic blisters appeared, leaving 'deep divots of raw pink flesh'.
There are terrifying descriptions of having an infected eardrum repeatedly lanced. 'The pain was beyond anything I have ever felt since . . . I screamed so long and so loud I can still hear it.'
His mother Nellie's main memory was seeing a body fall from a building. 'He splattered. The stuff that came out of him was green.' Children don't forget being told things like that – King certainly didn't.
For a year, King was bedbound with complications from tonsillitis. He read loads of comics, watched lots of television and began imagining his own macabre scenarios about robot monsters, teenage grave-robbers and 'radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers'.
He also had a penchant for anything involving 'girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash' and for watching Vincent Price's screen victim Hazel Court 'wandering around in a lacy low-cut nightgown'.
King became expert in fantasy-horror and science fiction. His own works would be notable for a 'hallucinatory eeriness', and, while at school – where he edited a magazine called The Village Vomit, which got him into trouble with his teachers – King was cranking out short stories for pulp magazines. He received heaps of rejection slips before getting his first acceptance in 1967, aged 20.
There were plenty of dead-end jobs: in factories overrun by rats as big as dogs; in laundries, where tablecloths and motel bedsheets 'stank to high heaven and were often boiling with maggots'.
King did his writing after work, in a cubicle in a caravan, where he couldn't afford a telephone.
As a janitor in a high school, he noticed the tampon machine in the girls' showers. This, coupled with his awareness of bullying ('teasing became taunting'), and something he'd read in a newspaper about poltergeist activity and telekinetic phenomena, gave him the idea for Carrie – his thriller about a misfit traumatised by her first period.
The book was published by Doubleday in 1974. Paperback rights were instantly sold for $400,000. There was a classic film in 1976, starring a blood-drenched Sissy Spacek.
So, farewell cubicles in caravans.
'Do you do it for the money, honey?' King was asked by an interviewer. I absolutely disbelieve him when he answered, no, the work is always its own reward. None but a blockhead writes for anything other than money, and King is no blockhead.
What he was, for a spell, was an alcoholic. 'By 1985, I had added drug addiction to my alcohol problem,' he recalls. He shoved cotton wool up his nose to stem the flow of cocaine-induced bleeding.
Managing still to produce novels whilst stoned, King saw himself as belonging to that proud tradition of literary inebriates – Dylan Thomas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway. Eventually, King saw sense: 'We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter.'
It's a paradox that King came nearest to death when sober and clean. In 1999, he was knocked down by a minivan, which threw him 14 ft into the air.
Before losing consciousness, he just about remembers 'wiping palmfuls of blood out of my eyes' from the lacerations in his scalp. King's lung collapsed. His leg was broken in nine places, the bones turned into Scrabble tiles. His right knee was split apart, his hip smashed, his spine chipped and four ribs cracked.
There were to be many operations, much rehabilitation, but King (no stranger to agony) pulled through to write many more books, win many more Lifetime Achievement awards and earn lots more money.
Such vivid slices of autobiography are what make this book vastly more than worthwhile.