On Writing

by Stephen King

  A year out of college, Frank gets his first acceptance letter—oh happy day. It is from a little magazine available at a few newsstands but mostly by subscription; let’s call it Kingsnake. The editor offers to buy Frank’s twelve-hundred-word vignette, “The Lady in the Trunk,” for twenty-five dollars plus a dozen cc’s—contributor’s copies. Frank is, of course, delirious; way past Cloud Nine. All the relatives get a call, even the ones he doesn’t like (especially the ones he doesn’t like, is my guess). Twenty-five bucks won’t pay the rent, won’t even buy a week’s worth of groceries for Frank and his wife, but it’s a validation of his ambition, and that—any newly published writer would agree, I think—is priceless: Someone wants something I did! Yippee! Nor is that the only benefit. It is a credit, a small snowball which Frank will now begin rolling downhill, hoping to turn it into a snow-boulder by the time it gets to the bottom.

  Six months later, Frank sells another story to a magazine called Lodgepine Review (like Kingsnake, Lodgepine is a composite). Only “sell” is probably too strong a word; proposed payment for Frank’s “Two Kinds of Men” is twenty-five contributor’s copies. Still, it’s another credit. Frank signs the acceptance form (loving that line beneath the blank for his signature almost to death—PROPRIETOR OF THE WORK, by God!) and sends it back the following day.

  Tragedy strikes a month later. It comes in the form of a form letter, the salutation of which reads Dear Lodgepine Review Contributor. Frank reads it with a sinking heart. A grant was not renewed, and Lodgepine Review has gone to that great writer’s workshop in the sky. The forthcoming summer issue will be the last. Frank’s story, unfortunately, was slated for fall. The letter closes by wishing Frank good luck in placing his story elsewhere. In the lower lefthand corner, someone has scribbled four words: AWFULLY SORRY about this.

  Frank is AWFULLY SORRY, too (after getting loaded on cheap wine and waking up with cheap wine hangovers, he and his wife are SORRIER STILL), but his disappointment doesn’t prevent him from getting his almost-published short story right back into circulation. At this point he has half a dozen of them making the rounds. He keeps a careful record of where they have been and what sort of response they got during their visit at each stop. He also keeps track of magazines where he has established some sort of personal contact, even if that contact consists of nothing but two scribbled lines and a coffee-stain.

  A month after the bad news about Lodgepine Review, Frank gets some very good news; it arrives in a letter from a man he’s never heard of. This fellow is the editor of a brand-new little magazine called Jackdaw. He is now soliciting stories for the first issue, and an old school friend of his—editor of the recently defunct Lodgepine Review, as a matter of fact—mentioned Frank’s cancelled story. If Frank hasn’t placed it, the Jackdaw editor would certainly like a look. No promises, but . . . .

  Frank doesn’t need promises; like most beginning writers, all he needs is a little encouragement and an unlimited supply of take-out pizza. He mails the story off with a letter of thanks (and a letter of thanks to the ex–Lodgepine editor, of course). Six months later “Two Kinds of Men” appears in the premiere issue of Jackdaw. The Old Boy Network, which plays as large a part in publishing as it does in many other white-collar/pink-collar businesses, has triumphed again. Frank’s pay for this story is fifteen dollars, ten contributor’s copies, and another all-important credit.

  In the next year, Frank lands a job teaching high school English. Although he finds it extremely difficult to teach literature and correct student themes in the daytime and then work on his own stuff at night, he continues to do so, writing new short stories and getting them into circulation, collecting rejection slips and occasionally “retiring” stories he’s sent to all the places he can think of. “They’ll look good in my collection when it finally comes out,” he tells his wife. Our hero has also picked up a second job, writing book and film reviews for a newspaper in a nearby city. He’s a busy, busy boy. Nevertheless, in the back of his mind, he has begun to think about writing a novel.

  When asked what is the most important thing for a young writer who’s just beginning to submit his or her fiction to remember, Frank pauses only a few seconds before replying, “Good presentation.”

  Say what?

  He nods. “Good presentation, absolutely. When you send your story out, there ought to be a very brief cover-letter on top of the script, telling the editor where you’ve published other stories and just a line or two on what this one’s about. And you should close by thanking him for the reading. That’s especially important.

  “You should submit on a good grade of white bond paper—none of that slippery erasable stuff. Your copy should be double-spaced, and on the first page you should put your address in the upper lefthand corner—it doesn’t hurt to include your telephone number, too. In the righthand corner, put an approximate word-count.” Frank pauses, laughs, and says: “Don’t cheat, either. Most magazine editors can tell how long a story is just by looking at the print and riffling the pages.”

  I’m still a bit surprised at Frank’s answer; I expected something that was a little less nuts-and-bolts.

  “Nah,” he says. “You get practical in a hurry once you’re out of school and trying to find a place for yourself in the business. The very first thing I learned was that you don’t get any kind of hearing at all unless you go in looking like a professional.” Something in his tone makes me think he believes I’ve forgotten a lot about how tough things are at the entry-level, and perhaps he’s right. It’s been almost forty years since I had a stack of rejection-slips pinned to a spike in my bedroom, after all. “You can’t make them like your story,” Frank finishes, “but you can at least make it easy for them to try to like it.”

  As I write this, Frank’s own story is still a work in progress, but his future looks bright. He has published a total of six shorts now, and won a fairly prestigious prize for one of them—we’ll call it the Minnesota Young Writers’ Award, although no part of my Frank composite actually lives in Minnesota. The cash prize was five hundred dollars, by far his biggest paycheck for a story. He has begun work on his novel, and when it’s finished—in the early spring of 2001, he estimates—a reputable young agent named Richard Chams (also a pseudonym) has agreed to handle it for him.

  Frank got serious about finding an agent at about the same time he got serious about his novel. “I didn’t want to put in all that work and then be faced with not knowing how to sell the damn thing when I was done,” he told me.

  Based on his explorations of the LMP and the lists of agents in Writer’s Market, Frank wrote an even dozen letters, each exactly the same except for the salutation. Here is the template:

  June 19, 1999

  Dear :

  I am a young writer, twenty-eight years old, in search of an agent. I got your name in a Writer’s Digest article titled “Agents of the New Wave,” and thought we might fit each other. I have published six stories since getting serious about my craft. They are:

  “The Lady in the Trunk,” Kingsnake, Winter 1996 ($25 plus copies)

  “Two Kinds of Men,” Jackdaw, Summer 1997 ($15 plus copies)

  “Christmas Smoke,” Mystery Quarterly, Fall 1997 ($35)

  “Big Thumps, Charlie Takes His Lumps,” Cemetery Dance, January–February 1998 ($50 plus copies)

  “Sixty Sneakers,” Puckerbrush Review, April–May 1998 (copies)

  “A Long Walk in These ‘Yere Woods,” Minnesota Review, Winter 1998–1999 ($70 plus copies)

  I would be happy to send any of these stories (or any of the half dozen or so I’m currently flogging around) for you to look at, if you’d like. I’m particularly proud of “A Long Walk in These ‘Yere Woods,” which won the Minnesota Young Writers’ Award. The plaque looks good on our living room wall, and the prize money—$500—looked excellent for the week or so it was actually in our bank account (I have been married for four years; my wife, Marjorie, and I teach school).

  The reason I’m see
king representation now is that I’m at work on a novel. It’s a suspense story about a man who gets arrested for a series of murders which occurred in his little town twenty years before. The first eighty pages or so are in pretty good shape, and I’d also be delighted to show you these.

  Please be in touch and tell me if you’d like to see some of my material. In the meantime, thank you for taking the time to read my letter.

  Sincerely yours,

  Frank included his telephone number as well as his address, and one of his target agents (not Richard Chams) actually called to chat. Three wrote back asking to look at the prizewinning story about the hunter lost in the woods. Half a dozen asked to see the first eighty pages of his novel. The response was big, in other words—only one agent to whom he wrote expressed no interest in Frank’s work, citing a full roster of clients. Yet outside of his slight acquaintances in the world of the “little magazines,” Frank knows absolutely nobody in the publishing business—has not a single personal contact.

  “It was amazing,” he says, “absolutely amazing. I expected to take whoever wanted to take me—if anybody did—and count myself lucky. Instead, I got to pick and choose.” He puts down his bumper crop of possible agents to several things. First, the letter he sent around was literate and well-spoken (“It took four drafts and two arguments with my wife to get that casual tone just right,” Frank says). Second, he could supply an actual list of published short stories, and a fairly substantial one. No big money, but the magazines were reputable. Third, there was the prize-winner. Frank thinks that may have been key. I don’t know if it was or not, but it certainly didn’t hurt.

  Frank was also intelligent enough to ask Richard Chams and all the other agents he queried for a list of their bona fides—not a list of clients (I don’t know if an agent who gave out the names of his clients would even be ethical), but a list of the publishers to whom the agent had sold books and the magazines to which he had sold short stories. It’s easy to con a writer who’s desperate for representation. Beginning writers need to remember that anyone with a few hundred dollars to invest can place an ad in Writer’s Digest, calling himself or herself a literary agent—it isn’t as if you have to pass a bar exam, or anything.

  You should be especially wary of agents who promise to read your work for a fee. A few such agents are reputable (the Scott Meredith Agency used to read for fees; I don’t know if they still do or not), but all too many are unscrupulous fucks. I’d suggest that if you’re that anxious to get published, you skip agent-hunting or query-letters to publishers and go directly to a vanity press. There you will at least get a semblance of your money’s worth.

  – 16 –

  We’re nearly finished. I doubt if I’ve covered everything you need to know to become a better writer, and I’m sure I haven’t answered all your questions, but I have talked about those aspects of the writing life which I can discuss with at least some confidence. I must tell you, though, that confidence during the actual writing of this book was a commodity in remarkably short supply. What I was long on was physical pain and self-doubt.

  When I proposed the idea of a book on writing to my publisher at Scribner, I felt that I knew a great deal about the subject; my head all but burst with the different things I wanted to say. And perhaps I do know a lot, but some of it turned out to be dull and most of the rest, I’ve discovered, has more to do with instinct than with anything resembling “higher thought.” I found the act of articulating those instinctive truths painfully difficult. Also, something happened halfway through the writing of On Writing—a life-changer, as they say. I’ll tell you about it presently. For now, just please know that I did the best I could.

  One more matter needs to be discussed, a matter that bears directly on that life-changer and one that I’ve touched on already, but indirectly. Now I’d like to face it head-on. It’s a question that people ask in different ways—sometimes it comes out polite and sometimes it comes out rough, but it always amounts to the same: Do you do it for the money, honey?

  The answer is no. Don’t now and never did. Yes, I’ve made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it. I have done some work as favors for friends—logrolling is the slang term for it—but at the very worst, you’d have to call that a crude kind of barter. I have written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side—I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.

  There have been times when for me the act of writing has been a little act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair. The second half of this book was written in that spirit. I gutted it out, as we used to say when we were kids. Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life. That was something I found out in the summer of 1999, when a man driving a blue van almost killed me.

  * * *

  1 Traditionally, the muses were women, but mine’s a guy; I’m afraid we’ll just have to live with that.

  2 There are some great stories about Joyce. My absolute favorite is that, as his vision failed, he took to wearing a milkman’s uniform while writing. Supposedly he believed it caught the sunlight and reflected it down on his page.

  3 Kirby McCauley, my first real agent, used to quote science fiction writer Alfred Bester (The Stars My Destination, The Demolished Man) on this subject. “The book is the boss,” Alfie used to say in tones indicating that that closed the subject.

  4 Although “dark as a cave” isn’t all that riveting; certainly we’ve heard it before. It is, truth to tell, a bit lazy, not quite a cliché but certainly in the neighborhood.

  5 A few critics accused me of being symbolically simplistic in the matter of John Coffey’s initials. And I’m like, “What is this, rocket science?” I mean, come on, guys.

  ON LIVING: A POSTSCRIPT

  – 1 –

  When we’re at our summer house in western Maine—a house very much like the one Mike Noonan comes back to in Bag of Bones—I walk four miles every day, unless it’s pouring down rain. Three miles of this walk are on dirt roads which wind through the woods; a mile of it is on Route 5, a two-lane blacktop highway which runs between Bethel and Fryeburg.

  The third week in June of 1999 was an extraordinarily happy one for my wife and me; our kids, now grown and scattered across the country, were all home. It was the first time in nearly six months that we’d all been under the same roof. As an extra bonus, our first grandchild was in the house, three months old and happily jerking at a helium balloon tied to his foot.

  On the nineteenth of June, I drove our younger son to the Portland Jetport, where he caught a flight back to New York City. I drove home, had a brief nap, and then set out on my usual walk. We were planning to go en famille to see The General’s Daughter in nearby North Conway, New Hampshire, that evening, and I thought I just had time to get my walk in before packing everybody up for the trip.

  I set out on that walk around four o’clock in the afternoon, as well as I can remember. Just before reaching the main road (in western Maine, any road with a white line running down the middle of it is a main road), I stepped into the woods and urinated. It was two months before I was able to take another leak standing up.

  When I reached the highway I turned north, walking on the gravel shoulder, against traffic. One car passed me, also headed north. About three-quarters of a mile farther along, the woman driving the car observed a light blue Dodge van heading south. The van was looping from one side of the road to the other, barely under the driver’s control. The woman in the car turned to her passenger when they were safely past the wandering van and said, “That was Stephen King walking back there. I sure hope that guy in the van doesn’t hit him.”

  Most of the sightlines along the mile of Route 5 which I walk are good, but there is one stretch, a short steep hill, where a pedestrian walking north can
see very little of what might be coming his way. I was three-quarters of the way up this hill when Bryan Smith, the owner and operator of the Dodge van, came over the crest. He wasn’t on the road; he was on the shoulder. My shoulder. I had perhaps three-quarters of a second to register this. It was just time enough to think, My God, I’m going to be hit by a schoolbus. I started to turn to my left. There is a break in my memory here. On the other side of it I’m on the ground, looking at the back of the van, which is now pulled off the road and tilted to one side. This recollection is very clear and sharp, more like a snapshot than a memory. There is dust around the van’s taillights. The license plate and the back windows are dirty. I register these things with no thought that I have been in an accident, or of anything else. It’s a snapshot, that’s all. I’m not thinking; my head has been swopped clean.

  There’s another little break in my memory here, and then I am very carefully wiping palmfuls of blood out of my eyes with my left hand. When my eyes are reasonably clear, I look around and see a man sitting on a nearby rock. He has a cane drawn across his lap. This is Bryan Smith, forty-two years of age, the man who hit me with his van. Smith has got quite the driving record; he has racked up nearly a dozen vehicle-related offenses.