STEPHEN KING

 Die Geschichte seines unwahrscheinlichen Durchbruchs als Autor.

Erzählt von ihm selbst!

AUSZUG AUS

"ON WRITING. A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT"
(DT: "DAS LEBEN UND DAS SCHREIBEN")

“I think we had a lot of happiness in those days, but we were scared a lot, too. We weren’t much more than kids ourselves (as the saying goes), and being friendly helped keep the mean reds away.
We took care of ourselves and the kids and each other as best we could. Tabby wore her pink uniform out to Dunkin’ Donuts and called the cops when the drunks who came in for coffee got obstreperous. I washed motel sheets and kept writing one-reel horror movies.

By the time I started Carrie, I had landed a job teaching English in the nearby town of Hampden. I would be paid sixty-four hundred dollars a year, which seemed an unthinkable sum after earning a dollar-sixty an hour at the laundry. If I’d done the math, being careful to add in all the time spent in after-school conferences and correcting papers at home, 

I might have seen it was a very thinkable sum indeed, and that our situation was worse than ever. By the late winter of 1973 we were living in a doublewide trailer in Hermon, a little town west of Bangor. (Much later, when asked to do the Playboy Interview, I called Hermon “The asshole of the world.” Hermonites were infuriated by that, and I hereby apologize. Hermon is really no more than the armpit of the world.)
I was driving a Buick with transmission problems we couldn’t afford to fix, Tabby was still working at Dunkin’ Donuts, and we had no telephone. We simply couldn’t afford the monthly charge. Tabby tried her hand at confession stories during that period (“Too Pretty to Be a Virgin”—stuff like that), and got personal responses of the this-isn’t-quite-right-for-us-buttry-again type immediately. She would have broken through if given an extra hour or two in every day, but she was stuck with the usual twenty-four.
Besides, any amusement value the confession-mag formula (it’s called the Three R’s—Rebellion, Ruin, and Redemption) might have had for her at the start wore off in a hurry. I wasn’t having much success with my own writing, either. Horror, science fiction, and crime stories in the men’s magazines were being replaced by increasingly graphic tales of sex. That was part of the trouble, but not all of it. The bigger deal was that, for the first time in my life, writing was hard.

The problem was the teaching. I liked my coworkers and loved the kids—even the Beavis and Butt-Head types in Living with English could be interesting—but by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I’d spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.
If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then. I could see myself thirty years on, wearing the same shabby tweed coats with patches on the elbows, potbelly rolling over my Gap khakis from too much beer. I’d have a cigarette cough from too many packs of Pall Malls, thicker glasses, more dandruff, and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk.

If asked what I did in my spare time, I’d tell people I was writing a book—what else does any selfrespecting creative-writing teacher do with his or her spare time?

And of course I’d lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn’t too late, there were novelists who didn’t get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty. Probably plenty of them. My wife made a crucial difference during those two years I spent teaching at Hampden (and washing sheets at New Franklin Laundry during the summer vacation). If she had suggested that the time I spent writing stories on the front porch of our rented house on Pond Street or in the laundry room of our rented trailer on Klatt Road in Hermon was wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would have gone out of me.

Tabitha King (Tabby)

Tabby never voiced a single doubt, however. Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.

(…)

While he was going to college my brother Dave worked summers as a janitor at Brunswick High, his old alma mater. For part of one summer I worked there, too. I can’t remember which year, only that it was before I met Tabby but after I started to smoke.

S. King und Drew Barrymore

That would have made me nineteen or twenty, I suppose. I got paired with a guy med Harry, who wore green fatigues, a big keychain, and walked with a limp. (He did have hands instead of hooks, however.) One lunch hour Harry told me what it had been like to face a Japanese banzai charge on the island of Tarawa, all the Japanese officers waving swords made out of Maxwell House coffee cans, all the screaming enlisted men behind them stoned out of their gourds and smelling of burned poppies. Quite a raconteur was my pal Harry.

One day he and I were supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls’ shower. I looked around the locker room with the interest of a Muslim youth who for some reason finds himself deep within the women’s quarters. It was the same as the boys’ locker room, and yet completely different. There were no urinals, of course, and there were two extra metal boxes on the tile walls—unmarked, and the wrong size for paper towels.

I asked what was in them. “Pussyplugs,” Harry said. “For them certain days of the month.” I also noticed that the showers, unlike those in the boys’ locker room, had chrome U-rings with pink plastic curtains attached.

You could actually shower in privacy. I mentioned this to Harry, and he shrugge
“I guess young girls are a bit more shy about being undressed.”

This memory came back to me one day while I was working at the laundry, and I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains, or privacy. And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn’t know what it is, and the other girls—grossed out, horrified, amused—start pelting her with sanitary napkins. Or with tampons, which Harry had called pussy-plugs. The girl begins to scream. All that blood! She thinks she’s dying, that the other girls are making fun of her even while she’s bleeding to death . . . she reacts . . . fights back . . . but how?

I’d read an article in Life magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena—telekinesis being the ability to move objects just by thinking about them. There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first— Pow!

Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I had an idea. I didn’t leave my post at Washex #2, didn’t go running around the laundry waving my arms and shouting “Eureka!,” however. I’d had many other ideas as good and some that were better.

Still, I thought I might have the basis for a good Cavalier yarn, with the possibility of Playboy lurking in the back of my mind. Playboy paid up to two thousand dollars for short fiction. Two thousand bucks would buy a new transmission for the Buick with plenty left over for groceries.
The story remained on the back burner for awhile, simmering away in that place that’s not quite the conscious but not quite the subconscious, either.

I had started my teaching career before I sat down one night to give it a shot. I did three single-spaced pages of a first draft, then crumpled them up in disgust and threw them away. I had four problems with what I’d written. First and least important was the fact that the story didn’t move me emotionally.

Second and slightly more important was the fact that I didn’t much like the lead character. Carrie White seemed thick and passive, a ready-made victim. The other girls were chucking tampons and sanitary napkins at her, chanting “Plug it up! Plug it up!” and I just didn’t care. Third and more important still was not feeling at home with either the surroundings or my all-girl cast of supporting characters. I had landed on Planet Female, and one sortie into the girls’ locker room at Brunswick High School years before wasn’t much help in navigating there. For me writing has always been best when it’s intimate, as sexy as skin on skin. With Carrie I felt as if I were wearing a rubber wet-suit I couldn’t pull off.

Fourth and most important of all was the realization that the story wouldn’t pay off unless it was pretty long, probably even longer than “Sometimes They Come Back,” which had been at the absolute outer limit of what the men’s magazine market could accept in terms of word-count. You had to save plenty of room for those pictures of cheerleaders who had somehow forgotten to put on their underpants—they were what guys really bought the magazines for.

I couldn’t see wasting two weeks, maybe even a month, creating a novella I didn’t like and wouldn’t be able to sell. So I threw it away.

The next night, when I came home from school, Tabby had the pages. She’d pied them while emptying my wastebasket, had shaken the cigarette ashes off the crumpled balls of paper, smoothed them out, and sat down to read them. She wanted me to go on with it, she said. She wanted to know the rest of the story. I told her I didn’t know jackshit about high school girls. She said she’d help me with that part. She had her chin tilted down and was smiling in that severely cute way of hers. “You’ve got something here,” she said. “I really think you do.”

[…]

The manuscript of Carrie went off to Doubleday, where I had made a friend named William Thompson. I pretty much forgot about it and moved on with my life, which at that time consisted of teaching school, raising kids, loving my wife, getting drunk on Friday afternoons, and writing stories.
My free period that semester was five, right after lunch. I usually spent it in the teachers’ room, grading papers and wishing I could stretch out on the couch and take a nap—in the early afternoon I have all the energy of a boa constrictor that’s just swallowed a goat. The intercom came on and Colleen Sites in the office asked if I was there. I said I was, and she asked me to come to the office. I had a phone call.

My wife.

The walk from the teachers’ room in the lower wing to the main office seemed long even with classes in session and thehalls mostly empty. I hurried, not quite running, my heart beating hard. Tabby would have had to dress the kids in their boots and jackets to use the neighbors’ phone, and I could think of only two reasons she might have done so. Either Joe or Naomi had fallen off the stoop and broken a leg, or I had sold Carrie. My wife, sounding out of breath but deliriously happy, read me a telegram. Bill Thompson (who would later go on to discover a Mississippi scribbler named John Grisham) had sent it after trying to call and discovering the Kings no longer had a phone.

CONGRATULATIONS, it read.
CARRIE OFFICIALLY A DOUBLEDAY BOOK. IS $2500 ADVANCE OKAY? THE FUTURE LIES AHEAD. LOVE, BILL.

Twenty-five hundred dollars was a very small advance, even for the early seventies, but I didn’t know that and had no literary agent to know it for me. Before it occurred to me that I might actually need an agent, I had generated well over three million dollars’ worth of income, a good deal of it for the publisher. (The standard Doubleday contract in those days was better than indentured servitude, but not much.) And my little high school horror novel marched toward publication with excruciating slowness. Although it was accepted in late March or early April of 1973, publication wasn’t slated until the spring of 1974.
This wasn’t unusual.

In those days Doubleday was an enormous fiction-mill churning out mysteries, romances, science fiction yarns, and Double D westerns at a rate of fifty or more a month, all of this in addition to a robust frontlist including books by heavy hitters like Leon Uris and Allen Drury.

I was only one small fish in a very busy river. Tabby asked if I could quit teaching. I told her no, not based on a twenty-five-hundred-dollar advance and only nebulous possibilities beyond that. If I’d been on my own maybe (hell, probably).
But with a wife and two kids?
Not happening.

I remember the two of us lying in bed that night, eating toast and talking until the small hours of the morning. Tabby asked me how much we’d make if Doubleday was able to sell paperback reprint rights to Carrie, and I said I didn’t know. I’d read that Mario Puzo had just scored a huge advance for paperback rights to The Godfather—four hundred thousand dollars according to the newspaper—but I didn’t believe Carrie would fetch anything near that, assuming it sold to paperback at all.

Tabby asked—rather timidly for my normally outspoken wife—if I thought the book would find a paperback publisher.

I told her I thought the chances were pretty good, maybe seven or eight in ten. She asked how much it might bring. I said my best guess would be somewhere between ten and sixty thousand dollars. “Sixty thousand dollars?” She sounded almost shocked. “Is that much even possible?” I said it was—not likely, perhaps, but possible. I also reminded her that my contract specified a fifty-fifty paperback split, which meant that if Ballantine or Dell did pay sixty grand, we’d only get thirty. Tabby didn’t dignify this with a reply—she didn’t have to. Thirty thousand dollars was what I could expect to make in four years of teaching, even with annual salary increases thrown in. It was a lot of money. Probably just pie in the sky, but it was a night for dreaming.

[…]

One Sunday not long after that call, I got another one from Bill Thompson at Doubleday. I was alone in the apartment; Tabby had packed the kids off to her mother’s for a visit, and I was working on the new book, which I thought of as Vampires in Our Town.
“Are you sitting down?” Bill asked.
“No,” I said.
Our phone hung on the kitchen wall, and I was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.
“Do I need to?”
“You might,” he said. “The paperback rights to Carrie went to Signet Books for four hundred thousand dollars.”

King und seine Kinder

When I was a little kid, Daddy Guy had once said to my mother: “Why don’t you shut that kid up, Ruth? When Stephen opens his mouth, all his guts fall out.” It was true then, has been true all my life, but on that Mother’s Day in May of 1973 I was completely speechless.

I stood there in the doorway, casting the same shadow as always, but I couldn’t talk. Bill asked if I was still there, kind of laughing as he said it. He knew I was. I hadn’t heard him right. Couldn’t have. The idea allowed me to find my voice again, at least.
“Did you say it went for forty thousand dollars?”
“Four hundred thousand dollars,” he said. “Under the rules of the road”—meaning the contract I’d signed—“two hundred K of it’s yours. Congratulations, Steve.”

I was still standing in the doorway, looking across the living room toward our bedroom and the crib where Joe slept. Our place on Sanford Street rented for ninety dollars a month and this man I’d only met once face-to-face was telling me I’d just won the lottery. The strength ran out of my legs.
I didn’t fall, exactly, but I kind of whooshed down to a sitting position there in the doorway.
“Are you sure?” I asked Bill. He said he was.

I asked him to say the number again, very slowly and very clearly, so I could be sure I hadn’t misunderstood. He said the number was a four followed by five zeros. “After that a decimal point and two more zeros,” he added. We talked for another half an hour, but I don’t remember a single word of what we said. When the conversation was over, I tried to call Tabby at her mother’s.

Her youngest sister, Marcella, said Tab had already left.
I walked back and forth through the apartment in my stocking feet, exploding with good news and without an ear to hear it. I was shaking all over.
At last I pulled on my shoes and walked downtown. The only store that was open on Bangor’s Main Street was LaVerdiere’s Drug. I suddenly felt that I had to buy Tabby a Mother’s Day present, something wild and extravagant. I tried, but here’s one of life’s true facts: there’s nothing really wild and extravagant for sale at LaVerdiere’s. I did the best I could. I got her a hair-dryer.

Familie King

When I got back home she was in the kitchen, unpacking the baby bags and singing along with the radio. I gave her the hair-dryer.

She looked at it as if she’d never seen one before. “What’s this for?” she asked. I took her by the shoulders. I told her about the paperback sale. She didn’t appear to understand. I told her again. Tabby looked over my shoulder at our shitty little four-room apartment, just as I had, and began to cry