Stephen King's On Writing

I was fifteen when Stephen King released On Writing. A friend of mine named Damien, who was working with me in the dish room of a steakhouse at the time, handed off his copy to me. I had never read a book on writing. I've since read several. This and Annie Dillard's Writing Life are the only ones I've ever returned to.

There's nothing nuts-and-bolts groundbreaking in here about writing as a craft, but what endures is King's demonstration that writing for writers is so enmeshed in their lives out of habit that it, second only to reading, registers for them as something all-consuming.

Something I asked myself while rereading On Writing this time is whether it would have gotten published without King's brand name. Maybe in fact it wouldn't have. But thank goodness it did. The imperfections of the book speak to the paradoxes of the writing life.

Take this howler, for instance. King writes that life is not a support system for writing but the other way around, and yet every extract he provides from his life evidences the opposite. He certainly doesn't live like writing isn't all there is.

Reading this book as a teenager, I took King's advice on writing extremely seriously.

Stephen King's Insomnia

I found the 1995 first edition Signet paperback copy of this book in my family garage on a workbench. I doubt my father read it. The only books I knew my father to have read from were the King James Bible and a worn paperback he had purchased at Goodwill about a man's experiences in Vietnam. So I don't know how the book wound up in the garage. Kismet, I guess.

Whenever I grabbed this book, I had yet to read a word of King. I would come to learn later how atypical this book is compared to King's other work. At this point in his career, he was thinking a lot about his magnum opus, still in development, The Dark Tower, a fantasy series about an otherworldly gunslinger who pursues a man trying to destroy the foundations that make the existence of the many worlds possible. Weird, huh? Not what casual readers tend to associate with the king of horror. But Insomnia is a of a piece with that lore. Call it the King Bibliographic Universe.

In Insomnia, we have an elderly man named Ralph Roberts who finds himself less and less able to sleep through the night. One dawn, he sits on his porch and looks out on his neighborhood. As the town come to life—the various people starting their days, the children coming out to play, and so on—he observes, surrounding, everyone these mystical, colored auras, and floating up from their heads is something like a balloon string—their lifeline.

Stephen King's Rose Madder

As a 10-year-old, I saw TV ads for this book, Rose Madder. This was in 1995, back when the rare writer could get their own commercial. Stephen King was one of those rare writers.

One year passed and the commercials faded. But the advertising campaign wasn't over.

I must have been in Walmart. Or else Waldenbooks. On its own cardboard book rack were Signet paperback copies of Rose Madder. I bought it then. Or else I only saw it and my mother later bought it for herself. I don't remember. All I remember is that I remember my mother wanting to read it, too. She put it on her dresser counter in her bedroom, where it sat and sat and sat, and then one day I picked it up.

The mass market Signet paperback cover is, admittedly, a lot more intriguing than the hardcover Doubleday cover. The Doubleday cover is a brown paper wrapping, crinkled and partially ripped, revealing the backside of a canvas painting and its wooden frame. The Signet paperback cover is pink and bears a man with the face of a bull. Had the book never appeared in the latter format, I probably never would have picked it up. At 10 and 11, you see, I still judged a book by its cover.

Stephen King's Desperation

I was 11 years old when I first got my hands on the hardcover copy of Stephen King's Desperation. It was October of 1996. The book was released in September, but it was already a bestseller, naturally, given the popularity of King.

Also given his popularity, the book was treated with special marketing by King's publisher Viking, presented at bookstores in a special, faux-wood-paneled cardboard display. It was displayed just like this in the best bookstore in my area (albeit a 45-minute drive), at Kentucky Oaks Mall in Paducah, at Waldenbooks, a bookstore chain that no longer exists. My Mama Jan had spotted the book near the front entrance of Waldenbooks while she was shopping for clothes in the mall.

When my mother and I went over to Mama Jan's house for Halloween, I remember her dumping candy into my pumpkin bucket, then sitting me down in her den. She handed me a copy of the book. "I saw it and thought of you," she said.

At 690 pages, it was the largest book I'd ever held. I didn't know authors wrote books this long. I cracked the novel and turned to the first page. The second word on the page was a dirty word. I slammed shut the cover, lest my grandmother (a good Christian woman), spot bad words in the book she bought me. I couldn't wait to get home and read the thing.

Stephen King's From a Buick 8

My first exposure to Stephen King's 2002 novel From a Buick 8 must have been that same year, at a Thanksgiving lunch at my Mama Jan's house. Family tradition had it that we all gathered at my grandparents' to celebrate, and that year a new cousin on my maternal side of the family who did not normally attend the gatherings came, with a hardcover copy of From a Buick 8 in tow.

Even though we were at least all in our twenties, I and the cousins were placed at the kitchen table, the kids' table, while my grandparents, mother, uncles, and aunts all sat at the long dining table. This new cousin put down her copy of From a Buick 8 on the kitchen table, beside the side dishes.

"What's that?" I said.

"Stephen King," she said.

I asked if I could hold the book. I didn't flip open any of the pages. I just turned to the back and peered at the dust jacket, where the author's photo was. There was Stephen King, positioned in the corner at a cream-colored wall, bearded, his head cocked upward, his eyes toward the ceiling. Seemed typically creepy. What one would expect from a horror author. Head up, away from camera. Adam's apple exposed.