On Writing

by Stephen King

  – 26 –

  From a financial point of view, two kids were probably two too many for college grads working in a laundry and the second shift at Dunkin’ Donuts. The only edge we had came courtesy of magazines like Dude, Cavalier, Adam, and Swank—what my Uncle Oren used to call “the titty books.” By 1972 they were showing quite a lot more than bare breasts and fiction was on its way out, but I was lucky enough to ride the last wave. I wrote after work; when we lived on Grove Street, which was close to the New Franklin, I would sometimes write a little on my lunch hour, too. I suppose that sounds almost impossibly Abe Lincoln, but it was no big deal—I was having fun. Those stories, grim as some of them were, served as brief escapes from the boss, Mr. Brooks, and Harry the floor-man.

  Harry had hooks instead of hands as a result of a tumble into the sheet-mangler during World War II (he was dusting the beams above the machine and fell off). A comedian at heart, he would sometimes duck into the bathroom and run water from the cold tap over one hook and water from the hot tap over the other. Then he’d sneak up behind you while you were loading laundry and lay the steel hooks on the back of your neck. Rocky and I spent a fair amount of time speculating on how Harry accomplished certain bathroom cleanup activities. “Well,” Rocky said one day while we were drinking our lunch in his car, “at least he don’t need to wash his hands.”

  There were times—especially in summer, while swallowing my afternoon salt-pill—when it occurred to me that I was simply repeating my mother’s life. Usually this thought struck me as funny. But if I happened to be tired, or if there were extra bills to pay and no money to pay them with, it seemed awful. I’d think This isn’t the way our lives are supposed to be going. Then I’d think Half the world has the same idea.

  The stories I sold to the men’s magazines between August of 1970, when I got my two-hundred-dollar check for “Graveyard Shift,” and the winter of 1973–1974 were just enough to create a rough sliding margin between us and the welfare office (my mother, a Republican all her life, had communicated her deep horror of “going on the county” to me; Tabby had some of that same horror).

  My clearest memory of those days is of our coming back to the Grove Street apartment one Sunday afternoon after spending the weekend at my mother’s house in Durham—this would have been right around the time the symptoms of the cancer which killed her started to show themselves. I have a picture from that day—Mom, looking both tired and amused, is sitting in a chair in her dooryard, holding Joe in her lap while Naomi stands sturdily beside her. Naomi wasn’t so sturdy by Sunday afternoon, however; she had come down with an ear infection, and was burning with fever.

  Trudging from the car to our apartment building on that summer afternoon was a low point. I was carrying Naomi and a tote-bag full of baby survival equipment (bottles, lotions, diapers, sleep suits, undershirts, socks) while Tabby carried Joe, who had spit up on her. She was dragging a sack of dirty diapers behind her. We both knew Naomi needed THE PINK STUFF, which was what we called liquid amoxicillin. THE PINK STUFF was expensive, and we were broke. I mean stony.

  I managed to get the downstairs door open without dropping my daughter and was easing her inside (she was so feverish she glowed against my chest like a banked coal) when I saw there was an envelope sticking out of our mailbox—a rare Saturday delivery. Young marrieds don’t get much mail; everyone but the gas and electric companies seems to forget they are alive. I snagged it, praying it wouldn’t turn out to be another bill. It wasn’t. My friends at the Dugent Publishing Corporation, purveyors of Cavalier and many other fine adult publications, had sent me a check for “Sometimes They Come Back,” a long story I hadn’t believed would sell anywhere. The check was for five hundred dollars, easily the largest sum I’d ever received. Suddenly we were able to afford not only a doctor’s visit and a bottle of THE PINK STUFF, but also a nice Sunday-night meal. And I imagine that once the kids were asleep, Tabby and I got friendly.

  I think we had a lot of happiness in those days, but we were scared a lot, too. We weren’t much more than kids ourselves (as the saying goes), and being friendly helped keep the mean reds away. We took care of ourselves and the kids and each other as best we could. Tabby wore her pink uniform out to Dunkin’ Donuts and called the cops when the drunks who came in for coffee got obstreperous. I washed motel sheets and kept writing one-reel horror movies.

  – 27 –

  By the time I started Carrie, I had landed a job teaching English in the nearby town of Hampden. I would be paid sixty-four hundred dollars a year, which seemed an unthinkable sum after earning a dollar-sixty an hour at the laundry. If I’d done the math, being careful to add in all the time spent in after-school conferences and correcting papers at home, I might have seen it was a very thinkable sum indeed, and that our situation was worse than ever. By the late winter of 1973 we were living in a doublewide trailer in Hermon, a little town west of Bangor. (Much later, when asked to do the Playboy Interview, I called Hermon “The asshole of the world.” Hermonites were infuriated by that, and I hereby apologize. Hermon is really no more than the armpit of the world.) I was driving a Buick with transmission problems we couldn’t afford to fix, Tabby was still working at Dunkin’ Donuts, and we had no telephone. We simply couldn’t afford the monthly charge. Tabby tried her hand at confession stories during that period (“Too Pretty to Be a Virgin”—stuff like that), and got personal responses of the this-isn’t-quite-right-for-us-but-try-again type immediately. She would have broken through if given an extra hour or two in every day, but she was stuck with the usual twenty-four. Besides, any amusement value the confession-mag formula (it’s called the Three R’s—Rebellion, Ruin, and Redemption) might have had for her at the start wore off in a hurry.

  I wasn’t having much success with my own writing, either. Horror, science fiction, and crime stories in the men’s magazines were being replaced by increasingly graphic tales of sex. That was part of the trouble, but not all of it. The bigger deal was that, for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching. I liked my coworkers and loved the kids—even the Beavis and Butt-Head types in Living with English could be interesting—but by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I’d spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain. If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then. I could see myself thirty years on, wearing the same shabby tweed coats with patches on the elbows, potbelly rolling over my Gap khakis from too much beer. I’d have a cigarette cough from too many packs of Pall Malls, thicker glasses, more dandruff, and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk. If asked what I did in my spare time, I’d tell people I was writing a book—what else does any self-respecting creative-writing teacher do with his or her spare time? And of course I’d lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn’t too late, there were novelists who didn’t get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty. Probably plenty of them.

  My wife made a crucial difference during those two years I spent teaching at Hampden (and washing sheets at New Franklin Laundry during the summer vacation). If she had suggested that the time I spent writing stories on the front porch of our rented house on Pond Street or in the laundry room of our rented trailer on Klatt Road in Hermon was wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would have gone out of me. Tabby never voiced a single doubt, however. Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.

  – 28 –

  While he was going to college my brother Dave worked summers as a janitor at Brunswick High, his old alma mater. For part of one summer I worked there, too. I can’t remember which year, only that it was before I met Tabby but after I s
tarted to smoke. That would have made me nineteen or twenty, I suppose. I got paired with a guy named Harry, who wore green fatigues, a big keychain, and walked with a limp. (He did have hands instead of hooks, however.) One lunch hour Harry told me what it had been like to face a Japanese banzai charge on the island of Tarawa, all the Japanese officers waving swords made out of Maxwell House coffee cans, all the screaming enlisted men behind them stoned out of their gourds and smelling of burned poppies. Quite a raconteur was my pal Harry.

  One day he and I were supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls’ shower. I looked around the locker room with the interest of a Muslim youth who for some reason finds himself deep within the women’s quarters. It was the same as the boys’ locker room, and yet completely different. There were no urinals, of course, and there were two extra metal boxes on the tile walls—unmarked, and the wrong size for paper towels. I asked what was in them. “Pussy-plugs,” Harry said. “For them certain days of the month.”

  I also noticed that the showers, unlike those in the boys’ locker room, had chrome U-rings with pink plastic curtains attached. You could actually shower in privacy. I mentioned this to Harry, and he shrugged. “I guess young girls are a bit more shy about being undressed.”

  This memory came back to me one day while I was working at the laundry, and I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains, or privacy. And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn’t know what it is, and the other girls—grossed out, horrified, amused—start pelting her with sanitary napkins. Or with tampons, which Harry had called pussy-plugs. The girl begins to scream. All that blood! She thinks she’s dying, that the other girls are making fun of her even while she’s bleeding to death . . . . she reacts . . . . fights back . . . . but how?

  I’d read an article in Life magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena—telekinesis being the ability to move objects just by thinking about them. There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first—

  Pow! Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I had an idea. I didn’t leave my post at Washex #2, didn’t go running around the laundry waving my arms and shouting “Eureka!,” however. I’d had many other ideas as good and some that were better. Still, I thought I might have the basis for a good Cavalier yarn, with the possibility of Playboy lurking in the back of my mind. Playboy paid up to two thousand dollars for short fiction. Two thousand bucks would buy a new transmission for the Buick with plenty left over for groceries. The story remained on the back burner for awhile, simmering away in that place that’s not quite the conscious but not quite the subconscious, either. I had started my teaching career before I sat down one night to give it a shot. I did three single-spaced pages of a first draft, then crumpled them up in disgust and threw them away.

  I had four problems with what I’d written. First and least important was the fact that the story didn’t move me emotionally. Second and slightly more important was the fact that I didn’t much like the lead character. Carrie White seemed thick and passive, a ready-made victim. The other girls were chucking tampons and sanitary napkins at her, chanting “Plug it up! Plug it up!” and I just didn’t care. Third and more important still was not feeling at home with either the surroundings or my all-girl cast of supporting characters. I had landed on Planet Female, and one sortie into the girls’ locker room at Brunswick High School years before wasn’t much help in navigating there. For me writing has always been best when it’s intimate, as sexy as skin on skin. With Carrie I felt as if I were wearing a rubber wet-suit I couldn’t pull off. Fourth and most important of all was the realization that the story wouldn’t pay off unless it was pretty long, probably even longer than “Sometimes They Come Back,” which had been at the absolute outer limit of what the men’s magazine market could accept in terms of word-count. You had to save plenty of room for those pictures of cheerleaders who had somehow forgotten to put on their underpants—they were what guys really bought the magazines for. I couldn’t see wasting two weeks, maybe even a month, creating a novella I didn’t like and wouldn’t be able to sell. So I threw it away.

  The next night, when I came home from school, Tabby had the pages. She’d spied them while emptying my wastebasket, had shaken the cigarette ashes off the crumpled balls of paper, smoothed them out, and sat down to read them. She wanted me to go on with it, she said. She wanted to know the rest of the story. I told her I didn’t know jack-shit about high school girls. She said she’d help me with that part. She had her chin tilted down and was smiling in that severely cute way of hers. “You’ve got something here,” she said. “I really think you do.”

  – 29 –

  I never got to like Carrie White and I never trusted Sue Snell’s motives in sending her boyfriend to the prom with her, but I did have something there. Like a whole career. Tabby somehow knew it, and by the time I had piled up fifty single-spaced pages, I knew it, too. For one thing, I didn’t think any of the characters who went to Carrie White’s prom would ever forget it. Those few who lived through it, that was.

  I had written three other novels before Carrie—Rage, The Long Walk, and The Running Man were later published. Rage is the most troubling of them. The Long Walk may be the best of them. But none of them taught me the things I learned from Carrie White. The most important is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s. Running a close second was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

  Tabby helped me, beginning with the information that the sanitary-napkin dispensers in high schools were usually not coin-op—faculty and administration didn’t like the idea of girls’ walking around with blood all over their skirts just because they happened to come to school short a quarter, my wife said. And I also helped myself, digging back to my memories of high school (my job teaching English didn’t help; I was twenty-six by then, and on the wrong side of the desk), remembering what I knew about the two loneliest, most reviled girls in my class—how they looked, how they acted, how they were treated. Very rarely in my career have I explored more distasteful territory.

  I’ll call one of these girls Sondra. She and her mother lived in a trailer home not too far from me, with their dog, Cheddar Cheese. Sondra had a burbly, uneven voice, as if she were always speaking through a throatful of tightly packed phlegm. She wasn’t fat, but her flesh had a loose, pale look, like the undersides of some mushrooms. Her hair clung to her pimply cheeks in tight Little Orphan Annie curls. She had no friends (except for Cheddar Cheese, I guess). One day her mother hired me to move some furniture. Dominating the trailer’s living room was a nearly life-sized crucified Jesus, eyes turned up, mouth turned down, blood dribbling from beneath the crown of thorns on his head. He was naked except for a rag twisted around his hips and loins. Above this bit of breechclout were the hollowed belly and the jutting ribs of a concentration-camp inmate. It occurred to me that Sondra had grown up beneath the agonal gaze of this dying god, and doing so had undoubtedly played a part in making her what she was when I knew her: a timid and homely outcast who went scuttling through the halls of Lisbon High like a frightened mouse.

  “That’s Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior,” Sondra’s mother said, following my gaze. “Have you been saved, Steve?”

  I hastened to tell her I was saved as saved could be, although I didn’t think you could ever be good enough to have that version of Jesus intervene on your behalf. The pain had driven him out of his mind. You could see it on his fac
e. If that guy came back, he probably wouldn’t be in a saving mood.

  The other girl I’ll call Dodie Franklin, only the other girls called her Dodo or Doodoo. Her parents were interested in only one thing, and that was entering contests. They were good at them, too; they had won all sorts of odd stuff, including a year’s supply of Three Diamonds Brand Fancy Tuna and Jack Benny’s Maxwell automobile. The Maxwell sat off to the left of their house in that part of Durham known as Southwest Bend, gradually sinking into the landscape. Every year or two, one of the local papers—the Portland Press-Herald, the Lewiston Sun, the Lisbon Weekly Enterprise—would do a piece on all the weird shit Dodie’s folks had won in raffles and sweepstakes and giant prize drawings. Usually there would be a photo of the Maxwell, or Jack Benny with his violin, or both.

  Whatever the Franklins might have won, a supply of clothes for growing teenagers wasn’t part of the haul. Dodie and her brother Bill wore the same stuff every day for the first year and a half of high school: black pants and a short-sleeved checked sport shirt for him, a long black skirt, gray knee-socks, and a sleeveless white blouse for her. Some of my readers may not believe I am being literal when I say every day, but those who grew up in country towns during the fifties and sixties will know that I am. In the Durham of my childhood, life wore little or any makeup. I went to school with kids who wore the same neck dirt for months, kids whose skin festered with sores and rashes, kids with the eerie dried-apple-doll faces that result from untreated burns, kids who were sent to school with stones in their dinnerbuckets and nothing but air in their Thermoses. It wasn’t Arcadia; for the most part it was Dogpatch with no sense of humor.

  Dodie and Bill Franklin got on all right at Durham Elementary, but high school meant a much bigger town, and for children like Dodie and Bill, Lisbon Falls meant ridicule and ruin. We watched in amusement and horror as Bill’s sport shirt faded and began to unravel from the short sleeves up. He replaced a missing button with a paperclip. Tape, carefully colored black with a crayon to match his pants, appeared over a rip behind one knee. Dodie’s sleeveless white blouse began to grow yellow with wear, age, and accumulated sweat-stains. As it grew thinner, the straps of her bra showed through more and more clearly. The other girls made fun of her, at first behind her back and then to her face. Teasing became taunting. The boys weren’t a part of it; we had Bill to take care of (yes, I helped—not a whole lot, but I was there). Dodie had it worse, I think. The girls didn’t just laugh at Dodie; they hated her, too. Dodie was everything they were afraid of.