Stephen King: A Study of His Works and Writing Advice

Stephen King was born in 1947 in Portland, Maine. With his first novel, Carrie, published in 1974, King gained massive success and has been highly praised since for his extensive writing talents and genre bending horror works. He has published many books, a few under the pen name Richard Bachman, and some you might even recognize: Carrie, The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978), Cujo (1981), Different Seasons (1982), Pet Sematary (1983), It (1986), Misery (1987), The Green Mile (1996), Under the Dome (2009), 11/22/63 (2011). His most recent work Holly was published in September of 2023. With this list you can see that King has had a very successful writing career that has spanned almost 50 years. While not unheard of, it is becoming more rare to hear of a writer with this much success and this many novels published.

Early Life

Although born in Maine, his early childhood was split between Indiana and Connecticut due to his parents’ split. His mother moved King and his brother back to Maine in order to see to the needs of his grandparents’ health. He graduated from Lisbon Falls High School in 1966.

During his time at the University of Maine, Stephen King became involved in student politics and graduated in 1970 with a B.A. in English. From here he started to teach high school, worked in industrial laundry, and served as a janitor. His first short story sale was to a men’s magazine, Startling Mystery Stories, in 1967. “The Glass Floor” focuses on main character Charles Wharton whose sister died and her room has been sealed shut since, and Wharton will stop at nothing until he finds a way into the room.

Throughout the 1970s, the King family—Stephen, his wife Tabitha, and their two children—moved around quite a lot, hopping from different regions of Maine to Colorado, and then back to Maine—they also spent three months in England in 1977, but cut their stay short to return once again to Maine. These days, Stephen and Tabitha have three grown children and split their time between two homes in Maine and spend winters in Florida.

When Doubleday accepted Carrie in 1973 and agreed to buy the book, King received a $2,500 advance. Him and Tabitha were very happy as they had been struggling financially and thought that if King pursued his writing full time, their struggles might end. King had moved on from Carrie onto his next novel within the next few months, so when Doubleday called back to tell him that Carrie’s paperback rights were sold for $400,000, King was in shock. From here moving forward, Stephen King has been one of the most recognizable names in the literary and horror world.

Stephen King’s Impact

With more than 70 books published, King’s cultural impact is unprecedented in modern times. There’s been countless other writers who have been inspired by him—Lauren Groff and Gillian Flynn among them—and numerous movie and film adaptations from his novels—a Carrie film in 1976 and 2013, The Shawshank Redemption in 1994, Under the Dome in 2013, and It in 2017, which is the highest grossing horror film which grossed over $700 million.

Perhaps one of the reasons why King is so prolific amongst the reader and writer communities is his ability to bend the genres he writes in. Many of his works and film adaptations usually fall into the horror or thriller category. But his writing tends to take it one step further. Yes, there are scary and keep-you-on-the-edge-of-your-seat scenes, but there are also themes and allegories and hope present in many of these stories. King has also dipped into the fantasy world a bit with novels like The Eyes of the Dragon (1984), The Talisman (1984), and Elevation (2018). King has also contributed to genres mystery and crime, western, science fiction, and supernatural. If you’re just getting started on Stephen King, check out this Esquire list for a ranking on King’s novels by writer Neil McRobert.

Current writers of today have cited King as being one of the top inspirations in their writing process and who they personally enjoy reading. What makes King’s works so cherished is his ability to pull from deeper levels of humanity, prioritize characterization, and create engaging, masterful storylines and settings.

Many of his King’s novels juxtapose good and evil. His 1978 novel The Stand is a great example of this. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world where there are very few survivors of global pandemic. The survivors attempt to find each other. While on their crusade to converge, the survivors are divided into two groups that either see visions from a “good” and motherly source or visions from an “evil” and gluttonous source. There are also themes of religious influence in The Stand which heavily influences each of the survivors and the decisions they make throughout the novel. Good and evil are also personified in King’s novels like Salem’s Lot (1975), It (1986), and Misery (1987).

Selling over 400 million copies of his books, Stephen King has created some of the most memorable characters of our modern times. For the last few years I have seen a particular spike in Pennywise—from It—and Carrie costumes amongst millennials and even Gen Z. It just goes to show that King’s works are still reaching new heights and new audiences. It was published almost 40 years ago and has gained an entirely new life with the 2017 film adaptation which was highly successful, gaining viewership and box office earnings that were unprecedented—and even went on to have a sequel film as well.

Richard Bachman

Richard Bachman was born in New York and joined the Coast Guard and the United States Merchant Marine. His wife, Claudia Bachman, and him lived on a dairy farm in New Hampshire where they mourned the death of their only son—who sadly drowned in a well. In 1982, Richard Bachman survived a brain tumor and then tragically died in 1985 due to the “cancer of the pseudonym,” as described by Stephen King’s publicist when it was determined by bookstore clerk, Steve Brown, that King had actually authored Bachman’s 1977 novel Rage.

King has described Bachman as “low rage and simmering despair.” He became almost entirely a different person when writing as Bachman and readers can practically feel the anger and rawness when reading a Richard Bachman novel. King ultimately decided to create the pseudonym because he wanted to do see if his success was purely based on his talent as a writer or if he just got lucky and his rising success even after Carrie was only based on his name.

King put in less effort into marketing the Bachman novels and in the end, they only sold a fraction of the works that were labeled with King’s name. There were four Bachman novels—which were later transformed into The Bachman Books, including “Rage” (1977), “The Long Walk” (1979), “Roadwork” (1981), and “The Runing Man” (1982). The publication of this collection has been discontinued due to the sensitive material that is found in Rage, which King has also decided to discontinue after the novel was associated with several real incidents of school shootings.

There were rumors that circulated for years discrediting Bachman and claiming that he had been copying King’s style. With Bachman, King was able to be the recluse that he had sometimes craved—declining interview invitations, passing on public appearances, and so on. It gave him the chance to publish earlier works prior to Carrie and, as Bachman, he could forego any sort of stereotype that King felt he had fallen into. Ultimately, King came forward with his Bachman identity and published an introduction for The Bachman Books in 1985, titled “Why I Was Bachman,” and in 1996, with the release of a new Bachman book, The Regulators, King included another introduction, “The Importance of Being Bachman.”

In King’s Own Words

Luckily for writers everywhere, Stephen King has had much to say about writing. He has talked a lot about his own process when writing and advice that he has for anyone that wants to get better or just try their hand at writing—he’s even gone as far to describe a little about what his pseudonym Richard Bachman would say about his writing process.

In 2000, Stephen King published On Writing. It’s a mix of memoir, style manual, and writing advice from the literary genius. This was King’s first novel after a major car accident the year prior. He told Katie Couric in an NBC interview “[he] was totally incapable of writing. At first it was if [he’d] never done this in [his] life…It was like starting over again from square one.” With the completion of On Writing, King felt like he had gained some of abilities back and was slowly returning to his former self—albeit with a couple of new perspectives.

On Writing also covers King’s struggles with drugs and alcohol and his journey to get sober in the 1980s after his wife, Tabitha, staged an intervention. The memoir-esque work divulges King’s belief that anyone who wants to write should be able to and has the ability to do so, and the only way to get better at is to practice. And when you inevitably run into a roadblock in whatever you’re working on, it’s never a good idea to quit. Persistence is key in writing, even when it’s emotionally challenging.

On Writing covers a lot of ground. Before the book even begins, King includes a second foreword, of three total, in which he recommends every writer to read William Strunk Jr and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style and specifically mentions a Rule 17 from the chapter titled “Principles of Composition, which says, “Omit needless words.” King’s book can be divided into five sections: “C. V.” which is autobiographical in nature but King describes it as a curriculum vitae—hence the title—of his early process to become a published writer, “What Writing Is,” “Toolbox” in which King explains parts of the English language, vocabulary, grammar, and style, “On Writing” which is where a majority of King gives his advice on writing, and the final section “On Living: A Postscript” where King discusses his unfortunate 1999 accident and the aftermath of healing from the trauma.

Stephen King’s Writing Advice

In an interview with The Atlantic in July of 2013, King said “An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.” And while King sees the importance of an opening line to the reader, he sees it as a way in for the writer, too. King believes that a writer is responsible for inviting themselves into a story just as much as they are for inviting the reader.

And it’s not necessarily in the first draft that King develops everything good about a story. He acknowledges that revision will need to happen in order for everything else to fall into place. But that first line will eventually be one of the most important things that will be included in your story. King sees revision and editing as an essential process for any story—benefitting both the reader’s experience but also the writer’s growth.

There are many articles that touch on the main points which On Writing covers and definitely too many to read so it’s probably best to just read it yourself, but if you’re curious like I was, here is a list of just some of the main points, which can be found in this article:

·       “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

·       “Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe.”

·       “The adverb is not your friend.”

·       “The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.”

·       “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.”

·       “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

·       “TV—while working out or anything else—really is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs.”

·       “Whether it’s a vignette of single page or an epic trilogy like The Lord of the Rings, the works is always accomplished one word at a time.”

·       “There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with.”

·       “One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what that writer is doing may seem.”

Discussion Questions

Feel free to answer the questions below in a comment or on your own in a journal. Remember, there are no right or wrong answers and these are meant to be fun, so don’t take yourself to seriously. And most of all, just have fun!

·       If you’ve read any of Stephen King’s novels before, do you see his influence in your work? If you haven’t read any of his works, is there a particular one that you feel is interesting?

·       After reading through some of King’s advice, which piece stands out the most to you? Is there a piece of advice that you already follow or know about?

·       Many of Stephen King’s works juxtapose the fight between good and evil. Are there other writers that come to mind who also do this? Does your own work do this?

·       Have you ever considered writing under a pen name or pseudonym like King did with Richard Bachman?