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King writes 1,200 words a day, six or seven days a week<\/p>\n
PHILIP MONTGOMERY\/THE NEW YORK TIMES\/REDUX\/EYEVINE<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what I\u2019m afraid of,\u201d says King, who has written more than 65 novels plus novellas and hundreds of short stories. \u201cI\u2019m afraid of that happening to me and every time that I can\u2019t remember a word or something, I think, \u2018This is the start.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
King, 77, is wearing a black T-shirt from the 1995 Laconia Motorcycle Rally. His face is long and thin and his thick grey hair has a badger-like stripe of black down the middle. <\/p>\n
He\u2019s sitting in a large, tidy attic-like room, floored and panelled with orange-brown wood. You can buy a candle, believe it or not, called Stephen King\u2019s Study (it\u2019s unofficial merch and \u00a316): it smells of oak and smoke and leather, and I expect it\u2019s not far off, except that he no longer smokes but chews on a toothpick as we talk.<\/p>\n
He recently finished a third novel in his Talisman series<\/a> and is now on a temporary work halt, but when he is writing he writes in the mornings, seven days a week, interrupted only by the cleaning ladies who come on Mondays and Fridays.<\/p>\n \u201cYou want to keep it flowing,\u201d he says. \u201cYou want to keep it fresh.\u201d<\/p>\n His stories continue to go everywhere. The one about the world ending with one man (The Life of Chuck<\/a>) has just been made into a film starring Tom Hiddleston. Two more adaptations will arrive in the next three months: The Long Walk, by the film-maker Francis Lawrence, the director of The Hunger Games, and The Running Man, an Edgar Wright<\/a> film starring Glen Powell.<\/p>\n \u2022 What horror movies scare the directors Ari Aster, Edgar Wright and John Landis?<\/a><\/p>\n The Long Walk he wrote in college in 1969, to impress a girl. \u201cLike, you know, if you read this book, maybe you\u2019ll \u2026 just fall in love with me,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n It imagines a dystopian America where 100 teenage boys volunteer for an annual race in which they walk continuously day and night, supervised by rolling trucks filled with soldiers. Anyone who falls below four miles an hour, after three warnings, is shot dead, until there is one left. <\/p>\n If someone slipped this to me in college, I\u2019m not sure if I would fall in love so much as phone the police. Which is not to say it isn\u2019t potent stuff. After I read it I started to dream about it.<\/p>\n King nods, pleased. \u201cI want readers to feel just tense and totally carried away by the story,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n He delivered it to his paramour in sections, \u201cwritten on the back of whatever I had for paper, you know, like the syllabi from classes and stuff, because I didn\u2019t have much money.\u201d<\/p>\n King\u2019s father \u201cpiled up all sorts of bills and then did a runout when I was two,\u201d he wrote in his 2000 book On Writing, that is part memoir, part manual<\/a>. He had a \u201cherky-jerky\u201d childhood, brought up with one older brother by a single mum. He went to school with kids \u201cwho wore the same neck dirt for months\u201d. They sound like the characters in The Long Walk.<\/p>\n \u201cThe same sort of kids that are pulled into the war machine,\u201d he says. As he wrote it, in college on a scholarship, young men were being drafted to Vietnam. His only condition for the film adaptation was that we see the teenagers being shot.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look at these superhero movies, you\u2019ll see \u2026 some supervillain who\u2019s destroying whole city blocks but you never see any blood,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd man, that\u2019s wrong. It\u2019s almost, like, pornographic \u2026 I said, if you\u2019re not going to show it, don\u2019t bother. And so they made a pretty brutal movie.\u201d<\/p>\n The idea for The Running Man came to him a few years later. By this time he was married to Tabitha and they were living in a trailer. Tabitha worked in a doughnut shop, King as a teacher. \u201cI was thinking, \u2018What would it be like if there was a game show where people got killed?\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cYou would have to presuppose a society that was kind of like Nineteen Eighty-Four, where you had blood and circuses.\u201d During the February half-term break \u201cthere was a lot of snow, a lot of sleet, it was hard to go anywhere\u201d. He wrote the entire thing that week and sent it to a science fiction publisher.<\/p>\n \u2022 Stephen King: 50 years of blood, guts and bestsellers<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI got my manuscript back with a little note that said, \u2018We do not do books about dystopian societies.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n So he put it in a drawer. Then Carrie (1974) and Salem\u2019s Lot<\/a> (1975), his first two published novels, did well. \u201cThe paperback publisher said, \u2018What else do you have that we could do, maybe under a pseudonym?\u2019\u201d he says. They didn\u2019t want to flood the market with Kings. So The Long Walk and The Running Man were published, in 1979 and 1982 respectively, under the name Richard Bachman<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Running Man feels very contemporary, although it was written decades before the Hunger Games trilogy and the Korean drama Squid Game, which echo the idea of an impoverished populace being drafted into the arena.<\/p>\n Glen Powell in the film adaptation of The Running Man<\/p>\n PARAMOUNT PICTURES<\/p>\n \u201cI must say I had a fun time thinking up [the] game shows,\u201d King says. Competitors in The Running Man get a 12-hour head start before they are pursued by a team of hunters, like wanted criminals, and shot. But there is also Treadmill to Bucks, featuring people with heart problems running at a steadily faster pace while trying to answer questions.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was kind of amusing,\u201d King says. \u201cIn a sick way. I mean, nobody said that I was a well puppy.\u201d<\/p>\n I imagine your psychiatrist would have a few things to say about it, I say. \u201cI\u2019d never go to a psychiatrist. That would be \u2026 to pay somebody for the stuff that I can do.\u201d<\/p>\n The other King book regarded as ahead of its time is The Dead Zone (1979), with its Bible salesman turned huckster politician Greg Stillson, who is the butt of jokes, holding bizarre but eye-catching rallies. The story\u2019s hero, a clairvoyant, sees that he will be president one day. King, in turn, is credited with predicting Trump, although he is not sure that any book could have done this.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I wrote this in a book in 1965 \u2026 if it got published at all, it would be published as an allegory, like Animal Farm,\u201d he says. \u201cNobody would have believed where we are today, with Gestapo agents in the street \u2014 they call themselves ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], but they\u2019re basically guys that are armed, they are wearing masks, they have huge amounts of money to spend and they are everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 25 years on, Stephen King\u2019s memoir is still the best guide for writers<\/a><\/p>\n I ask if he ever pauses on social media, where he is a prolific Trump critic, to consider how many of his readers are Trump supporters. \u201cI\u2019m aware of it. There\u2019s never been, you know, an organised boycott,\u201d he says. \u201cI feel I have an obligation to say what I think and be clear about it. It\u2019s a question, like the song says, \u2018Which side are you on?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n A lot of liberal Americans now talk about future historians taking their side, presumably because they feel so disenfranchised by the present.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a story about the home run that was heard around the world,\u201d King says. \u201cThere are \u2026 tens of thousands of people who will say, \u2018I saw [the baseball player Bobby Thomson] hit that home run,\u2019 and there were only, like, 5,000 people in the stands that day. So I think the opposite is true [with Trump]. Twenty or 30 years down the line, when I\u2019ll be dead and you\u2019ll be old, I think a lot of people are going to say, \u2018Well, I never voted for Trump.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n What about the other great story of our times, the rise of artificial intelligence?<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t really care about AI,\u201d he replies. \u201cMy sons [Owen King and Joe Hill] are both writers \u2026 and they\u2019re all hot to trot about AI and how awful it is for writers.\u201d (His other child, Naomi, looks rather better placed, as a Unitarian minister and yoga teacher.) \u201cI just think that it\u2019s a foregone conclusion that people are going to write better prose than some kind of automated intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n King with his wife, Tabitha, and son Owen in 2008<\/p>\n OLIVIER DOULIERY\/ALAMY<\/p>\n So AI will never match a novelist, equipped with their own life experiences? \u201cI didn\u2019t say that. I think that once there is a kind of self-replicating intelligence, once it learns how to teach itself, in other words, it isn\u2019t going to be a question of human input any more. It\u2019s going to be able to do that itself. And then \u2026 have you ever read The Time Machine by HG Wells<\/a>?\u201d<\/p>\n In it, a Victorian scientist travels to the year 802,701, where he meets the Eloi, a childlike race frolicking in the ruins of human civilisation, while a subterranean species called the Morlocks work machinery and feed on the Eloi.<\/p>\n![\"Black](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/1e8c0801-564d-4e9f-b56e-cd1d11460bd9.jpg\")
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