Fearsome Five: Five Stories with Writing Advice from Stephen King

In November, many people are preoccupied with either cooking or consuming as many calories as possible while also wondering whether they can enjoy, tolerate, or survive encounters with their family members. For many writers, especially those looking for a boost in motivation, they think of NaNoWriMo, that month where writers try to write a novel or curse themselves for being unable to write one.  Rather than simply using this month to stuff one’s face and ignore their keyboards, we should look to Stephen King, the patron saint of scary writing, for inspiration. He wrote a book called On Writing, of course, but he also has a great many stories that feature writers (he does seem to know the psychology of writers rather well). Here are five Stephen King stories that, in their own way, offer some advice about writing.

5) Bag of Bones: What is basically a ghost story done by Stephen King is also an exploration into one of the more fearsome specters that can plague writers: writer’s block. Mike Noonan is trying to process the sudden death of his wife. Retreating to a cabin in the main woods, he finds an entire town that is haunted by a vengeful spirit. That spirit haunts Mike by giving him messages from beyond the grave through fridge magnets and other unexplained phenomenon, but he also has seemingly rediscovered the ability to write. Writer’s block can derail any would-be novelist’s agenda and writers can find Mike’s experiences of trying to produce anything relatable. Mike might be dealing with a ghost but that ghost is getting help from Mike’s own failures and doubts.

4) Lisey’s Story: Writers, especially horror writers, know that it can be hard to explain to other people why you write. The pay’s not good starting out, there’s potential for all kinds of rejections (which is compounded by social media), and as Mike Noonan demonstrated, there’s plenty of personal demons looking to thwart your efforts. Lisey Landon, wife of a famous novelist and the protagonist of this book, discovers to her horror what has been inspiring her husband. When husband Scott’s life is taken away violently, Lisey must finally begin to clean out his workspace, wherein she discovers a reality Scott tapped into called Boo'ya Moon. The problem for Lisey, as she discovers more and more about this world, is that the exit signs in this world aren’t clearly marked.  Like Bag of Bones, Lisey’s Story looks not only at dealing with the loss of a loved one but it also explores trying to learn about them from what they left behind. The ultimate lesson for writers in this work might be that what’s inspiring them might be just as wild and unpredictable as Boo'ya Moon. The question writers must ask themselves is how tightly they want to hold on to the real world when the inner world is so seductive.

3) Misery: People who haven’t read the book may remember the movie featuring Kathy Bates showing a truly horrific bedside manner (Her character Annie Wilkes also uses the words Cockadoodie and Cocksucker).  But this feature looks at the very peculiar relationship between the writer and the reader. The reader interprets the writer’s view of the world as it is filtered through the written word. Paul Sheldon wrote the Misery books to make some money and hated them. To Annie Wilkes, Misery, the protagonist in these novels, lived and thrived in her imagination. This story has been read as another fan that takes their obsession too far, something that might make writers nervous about being accosted in public or, worse, in private, but it also looks at the passion and fervent belief a writer can potentially evoke in a reader, for better or worse. Sure, it’s a novel about physical and psychological torture, but a positive spin on that book is that Annie Wilkes believed in the character of Misery so much that Annie couldn’t let Misery cockadoodie die.

2) “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” (found here): This novella from King focuses on magazine editor Henry and his descent into madness. One day, Henry discovers a story from author Reg Thorpe and soon after Henry begins to share in Thorpe’s paranoid fantasies, including tales of the Fornits, little people that live in his typewriter, and of course the omnipresent They. Horror is full of slow descents into madness, and a few fast ones, but Ballad is a King story that shows a unique struggle creatives endure, particularly the writer: the need to create in isolation and the detrimental effects isolation can have. Writing, or any creative endeavor, often gets associated with insanity, the need to create and express beautiful and terrible truths about the human condition leading to a kind of forbidden, even corrosive, knowledge, or a gateway into Boo'ya Moon. The advice to take from this? Simply to have a break once in a while, at least to let friends and family know that your work hasn’t swallowed you whole.

1) The Shining: Yeah, it’s a book about a boy who has the Shine. There’s also a haunted hotel that wants to absorb that Shine as well as the boy and his family into its cursed menagerie of malevolence. But The Shining wouldn’t be the book it is, or the Stanley Kubrick movie it is, without the father and diabolical instrument of the hotel Jack Torrance. The man who says Here’s Johnny through a hole he himself chopped into a door is a very complex man and his descent into madness begins simply as a man trying to do right by his family. Out of a job, he becomes the caretaker of the Overlook so that he can have an income for him and his family, but he was a writer that was waiting for that masterpiece. That masterpiece Torrance chased down in the dark halls of the Overlook always eluded him, so the hotel just had to wait for Torrance’s frustration at his current situation to reach critical mass before it could use him. Jack Torrance isn’t your typical axe-wielding (or mallet-wielding in the novel) villain; he’s pushed to his breaking point when all the opportunities to improve his life, including his play, have been decimated. Simply put, to pin your hopes on one writing, no matter its perceived level of genius, is insanity. My wife actually said to just write, to not worry about making Stephen King levels of money and notoriety and just writer, create because you want to create. She’s not a writer, but it’s the best writing advice I ever got.