On Writing

by Stephen King

  When I read Carrie over prior to starting the second draft, I noticed there was blood at all three crucial points of the story: beginning (Carrie’s paranormal ability is apparently brought on by her first menstrual period), climax (the prank which sets Carrie off at the prom involves a bucket of pig’s blood—“pig’s blood for a pig,” Chris Hargensen tells her boyfriend), and end (Sue Snell, the girl who tries to help Carrie, discovers she is not pregnant as she had half-hoped and half-feared when she gets her own period).

  There’s plenty of blood in most horror stories, of course—it is our stock-in-trade, you might say. Still, the blood in Carrie seemed more than just splatter to me. It seemed to mean something. That meaning wasn’t consciously created, however. While writing Carrie I never once stopped to think: “Ah, all this blood symbolism will win me Brownie Points with the critics” or “Boy oh boy, this should certainly get me in a college bookstore or two!” For one thing, a writer would have to be a lot crazier than I am to think of Carrie as anyone’s intellectual treat.

  Intellectual treat or not, the significance of all that blood was hard to miss once I started reading over my beer- and tea-splattered first-draft manuscript. So I started to play with the idea, image, and emotional connotations of blood, trying to think of as many associations as I could. There were lots, most of them pretty heavy. Blood is strongly linked to the idea of sacrifice; for young women it’s associated with reaching physical maturity and the ability to bear children; in the Christian religion (plenty of others, as well), it’s symbolic of both sin and salvation. Finally, it is associated with the handing down of family traits and talents. We are said to look like this or behave like that because “it’s in our blood.” We know this isn’t very scientific, that those things are really in our genes and DNA patterns, but we use the one to summarize the other.

  It is that ability to summarize and encapsulate that makes symbolism so interesting, useful, and—when used well—arresting. You could argue that it’s really just another kind of figurative language.

  Does that make it necessary to the success of your story or novel? Indeed not, and it can actually hurt, especially if you get carried away. Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create a sense of artificial profundity. None of the bells and whistles are about story, all right? Only story is about story. (Are you tired of hearing that yet? I hope not, ‘cause I’m not even close to getting tired of saying it.)

  Symbolism (and the other adornments, too) does serve a useful purpose, though—it’s more than just chrome on the grille. It can serve as a focusing device for both you and your reader, helping to create a more unified and pleasing work. I think that, when you read your manuscript over (and when you talk it over), you’ll see if symbolism, or the potential for it, exists. If it doesn’t, leave well enough alone. If it does, however—if it’s clearly a part of the fossil you’re working to unearth—go for it. Enhance it. You’re a monkey if you don’t.

  – 10 –

  The same things are true of theme. Writing and literature classes can be annoyingly preoccupied by (and pretentious about) theme, approaching it as the most sacred of sacred cows, but (don’t be shocked) it’s really no big deal. If you write a novel, spend weeks and then months catching it word by word, you owe it both to the book and to yourself to lean back (or take a long walk) when you’ve finished and ask yourself why you bothered—why you spent all that time, why it seemed so important. In other words, what’s it all about, Alfie?

  When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest. Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language (they call it prose for a reason, y’know), but it seems to me that every book—at least every one worth reading—is about something. Your job during or just after the first draft is to decide what something or somethings yours is about. Your job in the second draft—one of them, anyway—is to make that something even more clear. This may necessitate some big changes and revisions. The benefits to you and your reader will be clearer focus and a more unified story. It hardly ever fails.

  The book that took me the longest to write was The Stand. This is also the one my longtime readers still seem to like the best (there’s something a little depressing about such a united opinion that you did your best work twenty years ago, but we won’t go into that just now, thanks). I finished the first draft about sixteen months after I started it. The Stand took an especially long time because it nearly died going into the third turn and heading for home.

  I’d wanted to write a sprawling, multi-character sort of novel—a fantasy epic, if I could manage it—and to that end I employed a shifting-perspective narrative, adding a major character in each chapter of the long first section. Thus Chapter One concerned itself with Stuart Redman, a blue-collar factory worker from Texas; Chapter Two first concerned itself with Fran Goldsmith, a pregnant college girl from Maine, and then returned to Stu; Chapter Three began with Larry Underwood, a rock-and-roll singer in New York, before going back first to Fran, then to Stu Redman again.

  My plan was to link all these characters, the good, the bad, and the ugly, in two places: Boulder and Las Vegas. I thought they’d probably end up going to war against one another. The first half of the book also told the story of a man-made virus which sweeps America and the world, wiping out ninety-nine per cent of the human race and utterly destroying our technology-based culture.

  I was writing this story near the end of the so-called Energy Crisis in the 1970s, and I had an absolutely marvellous time envisioning a world that went smash during the course of one horrified, infected summer (really not much more than a month). The view was panoramic, detailed, nationwide, and (to me, at least) breathtaking. Rarely have I seen so clearly with the eye of my imagination, from the traffic jam plugging the dead tube of New York’s Lincoln Tunnel to the sinister, Nazi-ish rebirth of Las Vegas under the watchful (and often amused) red eye of Randall Flagg. All this sounds terrible, is terrible, but to me the vision was also strangely optimistic. No more energy crisis, for one thing, no more famine, no more massacres in Uganda, no more acid rain or hole in the ozone layer. Finito as well to saber-rattling nuclear superpowers, and certainly no more overpopulation. Instead, there was a chance for humanity’s remaining shred to start over again in a God-centered world to which miracles, magic, and prophecy had returned. I liked my story. I liked my characters. And still there came a point when I couldn’t write any longer because I didn’t know what to write. Like Pilgrim in John Bunyan’s epic, I had come to a place where the straight way was lost. I wasn’t the first writer to discover this awful place, and I’m a long way from being the last; this is the land of writer’s block.

  If I’d had two or even three hundred pages of single-spaced manuscript instead of more than five hundred, I think I would have abandoned The Stand and gone on to something else—God knows I had done it before. But five hundred pages was too great an investment, both in time and in creative energy; I found it impossible to let go. Also, there was this little voice whispering to me that the book was really good, and if I didn’t finish I would regret it forever. So instead of moving on to another project, I started taking long walks (a habit which would, two decades later, get me in a lot of trouble). I took a book or magazine on these walks but rarely opened it, no matter how bored I felt looking at the same old trees and the same old chattering, ill-natured jays and squirrels. Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam. I spent those walks being bored and thinking about my gigantic boondoggle of a manuscript.

  For weeks I got exactly nowhere in my thinking—it all just seemed too hard, too fucking complex. I had run out too many plotlines, and they were in danger of becoming snarled. I circled the problem again and again, beat my fists on it, knocked my head against it . . . . and then one day when I was thinking of nothing much at all, the answer came to me. It arrived whole and complete—gift-wrapped, you could say—in a
single bright flash. I ran home and jotted it down on paper, the only time I’ve done such a thing, because I was terrified of forgetting.

  What I saw was that the America in which The Stand took place might have been depopulated by the plague, but the world of my story had become dangerously overcrowded—a veritable Calcutta. The solution to where I was stuck, I saw, could be pretty much the same as the situation that got me going—an explosion instead of a plague, but still one quick, hard slash of the Gordian knot. I would send the survivors west from Boulder to Las Vegas on a redemptive quest—they would go at once, with no supplies and no plan, like Biblical characters seeking a vision or to know the will of God. In Vegas they would meet Randall Flagg, and good guys and bad guys alike would be forced to make their stand.

  At one moment I had none of this; at the next I had all of it. If there is any one thing I love about writing more than the rest, it’s that sudden flash of insight when you see how everything connects. I have heard it called “thinking above the curve,” and it’s that; I’ve heard it called “the over-logic,” and it’s that, too. Whatever you call it, I wrote my page or two of notes in a frenzy of excitement and spent the next two or three days turning my solution over in my mind, looking for flaws and holes (also working out the actual narrative flow, which involved two supporting characters placing a bomb in a major character’s closet), but that was mostly out of a sense of this-is-too-good-to-be-true unbelief. Too good or not, I knew it was true at the moment of revelation: that bomb in Nick Andros’s closet was going to solve all my narrative problems. It did, too. The rest of the book ran itself off in nine weeks.

  Later, when my first draft of The Stand was done, I was able to get a better fix on what had stopped me so completely in mid-course; it was a lot easier to think without that voice in the middle of my head constantly yammering “I’m losing my book! Ah shit, five hundred pages and I’m losing my book! Condition red! CONDITION RED!!” I was also able to analyze what got me going again and appreciate the irony of it: I saved my book by blowing approximately half its major characters to smithereens (there actually ended up being two explosions, the one in Boulder balanced by a similar act of sabotage in Las Vegas).

  The real source of my malaise, I decided, had been that in the wake of the plague, my Boulder characters—the good guys—were starting up the same old technological deathtrip. The first hesitant CB broadcasts, beckoning people to Boulder, would soon lead to TV; infomercials and 900 numbers would be back in no time. Same deal with the power plants. It certainly didn’t take my Boulder folks long to decide that seeking the will of the God who spared them was a lot less important than getting the refrigerators and air conditioners up and running again. In Vegas, Randall Flagg and his friends were learning how to fly jets and bombers as well as getting the lights back on, but that was okay—to be expected—because they were the bad guys. What had stopped me was realizing, on some level of my mind, that the good guys and bad guys were starting to look perilously alike, and what got me going again was realizing the good guys were worshipping an electronic golden calf and needed a wake-up call. A bomb in the closet would do just fine.

  All this suggested to me that violence as a solution is woven through human nature like a damning red thread. That became the theme of The Stand, and I wrote the second draft with it fixed firmly in my mind. Again and again characters (the bad ones like Lloyd Henreid as well as the good ones like Stu Redman and Larry Underwood) mention the fact that “all that stuff [i.e., weapons of mass destruction] is just lying around, waiting to be picked up.” When the Boulderites propose—innocently, meaning only the best—to rebuild the same old neon Tower of Babel, they are wiped out by more violence. The folks who plant the bomb are doing what Randall Flagg told them to, but Mother Abagail, Flagg’s opposite number, says again and again that “all things serve God.” If this is true—and within the context of The Stand it certainly is—then the bomb is actually a stern message from the guy upstairs, a way of saying “I didn’t bring you all this way just so you could start up the same old shit.”

  Near the end of the novel (it was the end of the first, shorter version of the story), Fran asks Stuart Redman if there’s any hope at all, if people ever learn from their mistakes. Stu replies, “I don’t know,” and then pauses. In story-time, that pause lasts only as long as it takes the reader to flick his or her eye to the last line. In the writer’s study, it went on a lot longer. I searched my mind and heart for something else Stu could say, some clarifying statement. I wanted to find it because at that moment if at no other, Stu was speaking for me. In the end, however, Stu simply repeats what he has already said: I don’t know. It was the best I could do. Sometimes the book gives you answers, but not always, and I didn’t want to leave the readers who had followed me through hundreds of pages with nothing but some empty platitude I didn’t believe myself. There is no moral to The Stand, no “We’d better learn or we’ll probably destroy the whole damned planet next time”—but if the theme stands out clearly enough, those discussing it may offer their own morals and conclusions. Nothing wrong with that; such discussions are one of the great pleasures of the reading life.

  Although I’d used symbolism, imagery, and literary homage before getting to my novel about the big plague (without Dracula, for instance, I think there is no ‘Salem’s Lot), I’m quite sure that I never thought much about theme before getting roadblocked on The Stand. I suppose I thought such things were for Better Minds and Bigger Thinkers. I’m not sure I would have gotten to it as soon as I did, had I not been desperate to save my story.

  I was astounded at how really useful “thematic thinking” turned out to be. It wasn’t just a vaporous idea that English professors made you write about on midterm essay exams (“Discuss the thematic concerns of Wise Blood in three well-reasoned paragraphs—30 pts”), but another handy gadget to keep in the toolbox, this one something like a magnifying glass.

  Since my revelation on the road concerning the bomb in the closet, I have never hesitated to ask myself, either before starting the second draft of a book or while stuck for an idea in the first draft, just what it is I’m writing about, why I’m spending the time when I could be playing my guitar or riding my motorcycle, what got my nose down to the grindstone in the first place and then kept it there. The answer doesn’t always come right away, but there usually is one, and it’s usually not too hard to find, either.

  I don’t believe any novelist, even one who’s written forty-plus books, has too many thematic concerns; I have many interests, but only a few that are deep enough to power novels. These deep interests (I won’t quite call them obsessions) include how difficult it is—perhaps impossible!—to close Pandora’s technobox once it’s open (The Stand, The Tommyknockers, Firestarter); the question of why, if there is a God, such terrible things happen (The Stand, Desperation, The Green Mile); the thin line between reality and fantasy (The Dark Half, Bag of Bones, The Drawing of the Three); and most of all, the terrible attraction violence sometimes has for fundamentally good people (The Shining, The Dark Half). I’ve also written again and again about the fundamental differences between children and adults, and about the healing power of the human imagination.

  And I repeat: no big deal. These are just interests which have grown out of my life and thought, out of my experiences as a boy and a man, out of my roles as a husband, a father, a writer, and a lover. They are questions that occupy my mind when I turn out the lights for the night and I’m alone with myself, looking up into the darkness with one hand tucked beneath the pillow.

  You undoubtedly have your own thoughts, interests, and concerns, and they have arisen, as mine have, from your experiences and adventures as a human being. Some are likely similar to those I’ve mentioned above and some are likely very different, but you have them, and you should use them in your work. That’s not all those ideas are there for, perhaps, but surely it’s one of the things they are good for.

  I should close this little sermonette with a
word of warning—starting with the questions and thematic concerns is a recipe for bad fiction. Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story. The only possible exceptions to this rule that I can think of are allegories like George Orwell’s Animal Farm (and I have a sneaking suspicion that with Animal Farm the story idea may indeed have come first; if I see Orwell in the afterlife, I mean to ask him).

  But once your basic story is on paper, you need to think about what it means and enrich your following drafts with your conclusions. To do less is to rob your work (and eventually your readers) of the vision that makes each tale you write uniquely your own.

  – 11 –

  So far, so good. Now let’s talk about revising the work—how much and how many drafts? For me the answer has always been two drafts and a polish (with the advent of word-processing technology, my polishes have become closer to a third draft).

  You should realize that I’m only talking about my own personal mode of writing here; in actual practice, rewriting varies greatly from writer to writer. Kurt Vonnegut, for example, rewrote each page of his novels until he got them exactly the way he wanted them. The result was days when he might only manage a page or two of finished copy (and the wastebasket would be full of crumpled, rejected page seventy-ones and seventy-twos), but when the manuscript was finished, the book was finished, by gum. You could set it in type. Yet I think certain things hold true for most writers, and those are the ones I want to talk about now. If you’ve been writing awhile, you won’t need me to help you much with this part; you’ll have your own established routine. If you’re a beginner, though, let me urge that you take your story through at least two drafts; the one you do with the study door closed and the one you do with it open.