 | Could it be the Hand of Fate pointing its icy finger at an unsuspecting victim? No -- It's just author Stephen King calling on a member of the audience during the master's tea on April 21 in Berkeley College. |
Clad in jeans and a tie-dyed tee-shirt emblazoned with a peace symbol, the shaggy-headed Stephen King did not cut the figure of one of America's best-selling authors when he visited the campus on April 21.
Nor did the master of the macabre and bizarre use any hocus pocus when describing the artistic process or his worldly success to the crowds he had attracted to a Berkeley College master's tea and later that evening to a reading at the Law School.
King recounted how he was in his early 20s, already the father of two children, and was scraping together a living as a high school English teacher in Hampden, Maine, when he sold his first book, "Carrie." The publisher, Doubleday, gave him an advance of $2,500, he recalled, adding that his wife, Tabitha, asked him if he expected to get any more money from the deal. He remembered thinking that there might be some money for the sale of the paperback rights, but expected the sum to be modest, especially since
Doubleday would take half of whatever he might get for the sale.
He was, therefore, shocked by the actual figure of $400,000, he said.
King vividly remembers being on the phone in his trailer home incredulously trying to grasp the numbers. He told the audience that the conversation went like this:
"You mean $4,000?" he asked.
"No, that was $400,000," his Doubleday editor replied.
"$40,000?"
"No, $400,000."
His wife's response was similar, King recalled.
"It was like someone opening a prison door," King said of the money that enabled him to quit his daytime job. All he wanted, he added, was time to write and money to acquire books. An avid reader and bibliophile from an early age, King admitted to an unquenchable lust for books -- which, he quipped, might be one reason his marriage has lasted for 30 years.
Having spent just about his entire life in Maine, King decided to use his freedom and fortune to try out another locale, he said, noting he put a blindfold across his face, randomly selected Boulder, Colorado, from a map of the United States, and moved his family there.
King's thriller, "The Shining," is based on his experience in Colorado, he said. On a trip around Boulder, he recalled, he and his wife came upon the sign "Road Closed After First Snowfall" and followed the road to a grand hotel. "Something clicked," he said, when he read the sign. Arriving at The Stanley Hotel, which was about to close for the winter season, he noticed three nuns leaving, he said, an image that piqued his imagination further.
At dinner that night, he said, although the hotel's vast restaurant was almost empty, a live band continued to play music as if for a hall filled with diners. He remembers his wife leaned over the table and said, "This is spooky," and his imagination was ignited. He described the moment of manic excitement: "Your mind is running in neutral, but your brain is on fire." The need to seize this moment to create, he said, is like "lancing a boil to let out the pus."
Learning that the hotel management was looking for a live-in caretaker during the winter hiatus, King applied for the job. Glancing out from the hotel, he said, he saw the sign that clinched the deal: "Roads Are Not Plowed After First Heavy Snowfall."
While King was getting a tour of the hotel, he recalled, he passed a fire extinguisher with its long hose coiled next to it and thought: "That could be a snake."
"The Shining" eventually became one of the dozen or so King books that have been made into major motion pictures. The others include "Carrie," "Misery," "Dreamcatcher," "The Green Mile," "Stand by Me" and "The Shawshank Redemption."
Noting that there are two kinds of writers, "those who write for themselves and those who write for readers," King put himself squarely in the latter category -- even though, he confessed, he writes for a readership of one: his wife.
When asked -- as he frequently is -- where he gets his ideas, King snapped back that the question is a ridiculous one.
All of his inspiration comes from observances of everyday life -- be it nuns leaving a hotel or people gathering outside an office building for a smoke, said the author.
Describing the actual experience of writing as "flying" and "getting high," King acknowledged that he shares a certain psychopathology with many writers. Writing down his paranoid fantasies, he claimed, is therapeutic for whatever might be clinically wrong. "I have OCD issues," he said. "Instead of paying $75 an hour talking to a psychiatrist, I get paid."
King was equally candid about alcohol and drug use. "Substances are real risks for anyone in a creative job," he said. "I have written drunk and stoned. Straight is better."
On the tools of the craft, King said that how he writes physically makes a difference to what he writes. While he joked that he married his wife for her Smith-Corona typewriter, he said one of the best moments of his life occurred after he was married, when he got an IBM "Selectric" typewriter with correct tape. "That changed the way I write," he said. Then four years ago, long after he had become accustomed to word processing on the computer, King said, he was forced to write long-hand after the accident that nearly claimed his life. The experience, he noted, made him aware that "the tool does matter."
"Word processing is like ice skating, instead of the total immersion of a swimmer," he remarked.
During his appearance at the Law School, King read from the forthcoming "Wolves of the Calla," the last of his seven-volume "Dark Tower" series. Afterward, he took questions from the audience, many of whom had claimed their seats an hour before the reading.
To a young man who asked his advice about how to become a writer, King responded with three words: "Read ... a lot."
-- By Dorie Baker
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