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.
It
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
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