Eneh Akpan Writes: Stephen King: The Story Behind His Stories

Without Dracula, there is no Salem’s Lot. Stephen King himself said that he did a “restructuring and updating the basic elements of Bram Stoker’s Dracula to create Salem’s Lot.

Stephen King is possibly the foremost writer who gives away his writing secrets and intellectual recipes in his novels. He has somehow, made a lifestyle out of it and his fans love him for indulging them in this manner. I hardly start reading any of his books without a quick peek at the foreword. It’s where he tucks away how he came about the idea for the story and many times, these inspired moments are things any other writer would fail to notice.

Let’s get on with what we came here for, shall we?

Photo courtesy: talkstephenking.blogspot.com

Needful Things

“In a small town, the opening of a new store is big news.”

The book’s opening line grabs you at once. What store and why is it important to have it in the very first line of the story?

King said, “The idea for the story came all at once.” He was in a town a few miles from his hometown of Bangor, Maine when an idea struck him. Of course, it came as a “what if” question.

“What if somebody came to this town and forced all these people to do nasty things like pranks to get what they really wanted?”

King wrote a novel of over 700 pages from that innocent idea. A black comedy about a new store in the town of Castle Rock where buyers can get all their heart desires–sexual pleasure, power and items of mysterious origin. But for a price–each customer has to play a prank on a neighbor, an old enemy or a total stranger. Nobody was to know about the prank(s) or all bets were off. A simple prank with lethal repercussion.

The story of an evil clown, Pennywise who returns every twenty-seven years to unleash untold horror on a town.

About writing IT, King said he sort of wanted to write the final exam on horror and put in all the monsters that everybody was afraid of as a child. And then, he asked himself, “How are you gonna do that?”

He decided to create a massive work of fiction, a doorstop of a book, if there ever was one. He created a town where all kinds of evil happen and everybody ignores them.

He had to relocate to Bangor (they were living in the country at that time) because he wanted the story set in a town.

The gay assaulted by a gang on the bridge, and even the gang itself, the military Base that burned down, the flood and much of the disaster that makes up the telling of the story were actual events.

King went around town asking people about weird events and occurrences. He said he wasn’t out to get the facts. What he really wanted was people’s take on the subjects–the legends folks usually build around such stuff. He wanted what they believed.

When he got all he wanted, he sat down and wrote his story (about 1,093 pages in all!).

Under the Dome

“She got back into the Volvo (the sticker on the bumper, faded but still readable: OBAMA '12! YES WE STILL CAN).”

This novel marks a triumph of fiction. In UR, an eBook written exclusively for the Kindle, King hinted (you might miss it, if you don’t have a careful eye) Obama would become the American president if he contested for the post. Obama did and he won. In this novel, Under the Dome published in November 2009 (you might think it was too early to gamble), King predicted Obama’s reelection and I don’t have to tell you but it came to pass!

Shortly before noon on Saturday October 21 of an unspecified year after 2012 (evident by mention of a faded bumper sticker for Barack Obama's successful 2012 re-election campaign…

Wikipedia (synopsis of Under the Dome)

King’s inspiration for his novel was the abuse of power by the previous administration. He was peeved about “how sometimes, the sublimely wrong people can be in power at a time when you really need the right people.”

The novel, as political as it sounds, tries not to bore you with politics. It’s just a straight shot at fiction about bad guys trying to run a little town. The plot “concerns itself with how people behave when they are cut off from the society they’ve always belonged to.”

Pet Sematary

Stephen King considers this his scariest book ever!

And here’s the story behind the scary story. At a point in his life, Stephen King had to teach at the University of Maine for just a year in return for a favor. He had to find residence close to the higher institution. He got an apartment on a busy road that led to a factory.

One day he decided to go for a walk and while out walking, he noticed a sign that read, Pet Sematary. King borrowed the phrase as title of the book the event inspired. (He said he believed a kid made the sign because of the incorrect spelling of the word cemetery) Driven by curiosity especially, because of the pet cemetery he noticed in the woods, Stephen King discussed the subject with his neighbor who told him, “This road uses up animals.”

King later discovered the highpoints of the statement when his daughter’s cat became a “jam in a fur coat” after it got run over by one of the factory trucks.

His youngest son, who at the time was a boy of 18 months, also had a close call.

And then voila! The idea struck him. “What if a child is killed and then buried among all these pets in the cemetery? What if the cemetery possessed power to resurrect the dead and the person returned to avenge his/her death?”

Secret Window

The trailer for the movie adaptation of the book goes like this, “Every story is a window into another world.” That sums up this book’s synopsis.

How did King come about his story?

Secret Window is actually my favorite Stephen King novella. The story revolves around a writer exhibiting rare symptoms of dissociative disorder. Only recently, the author and his wife separated (he caught her with another guy and she opted to stay with the other guy) and then, his childhood nemesis popped up from his past, a former high school junior (who he had helped critique a short story at the time) returned to demand for his story. This writer, Rainey had submitted the story to a magazine a few years back, passing it off as his.

One day, while doing laundry in his house, Stephen King developed queer interest in a window almost obliterated by the laundry machines. The laundry room is a small, narrow alcove on the second floor of his house. And the window in question is difficult to look out of because of the situation I just explained. This particular day, King decides he might as well try to see what lies beyond the window.

The view was familiar but the angle was new. Standing there and looking at the flowerpots his wife placed in the sun on the brick paved alcove, he seemed to be viewing someone’s secret garden.

And he thought, What if the window between reality and unreality breaks and the writer plunges through down into the abyss in a maddening rush?

The story was born right there and King set himself up to create yet another beautiful story about a writer in distress.

Ideas are everywhere. Practically, reaching through the mesh in our psyche and grabbing for our lapels. We only need to open our eyes and really look to see.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan