Stephen king hack writer

I believe you may have severely misinterpreted Mr. As a writer, as a Human being one has no right be so finite and overly structured with their process. Knowing the characters and what makes them is one thing, but having a detailed schematic of the story from beginning to end is basically suicide by pen.

One needs to let the story take shape from the soul not force it, that is the essence of storytelling of creation. Its garnered from years of reading and writing. Let the little men in the basement do all the work, let instinct take course. Is this why so many of his endings suck?! All that build up, great characters, settings and the ending craps out.

I take it from your comments that you may be one of the few naturally intuitive, structurally-oriented writers. But many, if not most, writers are not. If you pants drafts in that search, you almost always have to rewrite them. How one gets there is an individual choice. The more I read here, the more I just want to sit down and write and NOT worry about all these things.

Like I said I think it was the post about the first plot point … maybe in that comment, everything in my first book lines up exactly with what everyone says. Timing, structure, all of it… I have all the key elements. But — is that just a fluke? I wrote things that foreshadowed later stuff. I remembered I had written it and then the idea came or the characters just did things that related back to whatever it was I had written. One issue with this. Jeffery Deaver actually writes some of the most detailed outlines in the biz.

Every interview with him discusses his page outlines that he spends 8 months working on. And before I read your series on story elements I wrote like him.

My story was incomplete and boring. Once I analyzed then rewrote it using the story elements from your blog it came to life. Freewriting is fine, but at some point it has to be organized. I agree with you of course but… I work on inspiration. I get an idea like an explosion in my head and have to write it down. He can do this because his boys and men tend to be nerds and outcasts who already exist outside traditional masculine norms.

The bookish nerdy kid was relatively uncommon in mainstream adult fiction before King came along; now we recognize such characters as hallmarks of genre literature. King has also been open throughout his career about his struggles with addictions ranging from alcohol to drug abuse to painkillers, and many of his main characters likewise struggle with addiction — either directly, in books like The Shining and Revival , or indirectly: The villain of Misery , Annie Wilkes, is a metaphor for cocaine itself.

This is because King almost exclusively writes and sets his stories there. The town of Derry, for example, where It lives, is based on Bangor, Maine. King uses these locations to increase the verisimilitude of his stories, painting them as all part of the same fictional universe. In stories like It , he borrows liberally from real places and landmarks, highways and scenery, even real street corners. One popular villain, a recurring supernatural figure who may or may not be the devil, appears throughout the Stephen King universe in various guises.

Frequently throughout his books, King will signal that his worlds are all connected by having characters meet characters from other books in passing. He spells out his essentially hopeful, fundamentally romantic worldview in a interview :.

There must be a huge store of good will in the human race. I believe all those sappy, romantic things: Children are good, good wins out over evil, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Even in his bleakest works, he retains his ability to empathize deeply with his characters, and to see even his monsters as fundamentally human. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.

Please consider making a contribution to Vox today to help us keep our work free for all. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Stephen King has spent half a century scaring us, but his legacy is so much more than horror. Share this story Share this on Facebook Share this on Twitter Share All sharing options Share All sharing options for: Stephen King has spent half a century scaring us, but his legacy is so much more than horror.

Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. King might have remained a struggling English teacher, but for two women: Tabitha King and Carrie White High school is hell. Mercedes , Finders Keepers , and End of Watch —are more at home as murder mysteries.

Tony magazines and newspapers often take a certain delight in damning King with faint praise, scorning his work as boarding lounge fiction and deriding it as escapism paddling about at the shallow end of the literary pool. By ignoring or rejecting writers such as Stephen King, critics reinforce these arbitrary notions of taste, of distinction , as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it, of highbrow versus lowbrow art.

Reflected there in his dark mirror, we see shades of ourselves. Used with permission of NYU Press. Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. Via NYU Press. By Douglas E. Stephen King. A matched, signed, and uncut set of The Dark.