Lilja's Library

by Hans-Ake Lilja

  Lilja: Do you work more now than you did before?

  Stephen King: It comes and it goes. It comes and goes in streaks. I had a time last year in January and February when we were down here in Florida and I couldn’t really seem to get anything going. It just…nothing really seemed to work. It all fell apart in my hands like tissue paper, and this year it’s like I can’t do anything wrong, I really feel like I’m in a groove. I should not say that, now it will change.

  Lilja: I hope it won’t.

  Stephen King: I hope it won’t either.

  Lilja: Do you work on several projects at the same time, or…?

  Stephen King: Not anymore. I’m too old for that and, you know, it used to be that I would work on something fresh in the morning and then I would rewrite at night, but I also used to get loaded at night. I used to drink a lot and that’s kinda like…it’s a medicine for…I don’t know…insecurity or something, because I’d work and be a little bit loaded and I’d say, “Damn this is good,” and it wasn’t always, so…

  Lilja: It’s better when you’re not drunk then?

  Stephen King: Yeah!

  Lilja: Yeah, I’m glad to hear that.

  Stephen King: Now, instead of working morning and night I have a tendency to work mostly in the morning. Once every two or three weeks I’ll push everything aside and I write one of these Entertainment Weekly columns and…I don’t know…that’s a little bit harder than it used to be. You just want them to be good and at the same time you want them to feel casual and kinda off the cuff. It’s not easy to achieve that all the time but the column’s been kind of fun. It’s certainly given me a chance to do something different and that’s OK.

  Lilja: Is it hard to work under a deadline?

  Stephen King: It’s strange. I don’t know if you actually say it’s hard but sometimes it’s kinda fun. They asked me one time if I would do a column on a movie about the Red Sox. I’m trying to think…Drew Barrymore was in that and…

  Lilja: I think you were in it as well?

  Stephen King: Yeah, I was in it. Yeah, that’s right. I did have a little cameo in that. It was called Fever Pitch. I’m in the movie and I can’t remember what it was. But that is because I didn’t have any lines. I didn’t really get a close-up.

  Lilja: Was that pitch just for the movie or did you do it for…was it real?

  Stephen King: They just did the movie and they asked me if I would do this thing where they could film me throwing out the first pitch at this game, and that was already scheduled with the Red Sox, so I said, “Sure, why not. Knock yourselves out.” So, that was kinda fun. But then the people from Entertainment Weekly called me and said, “Will you write a piece about this? They’ll screen the movie for you today but we would need the piece tonight because we’re going to press and we wanna do it in this issue.” So I saw the movie and I wrote the piece that night in about an hour and a half, which was all the time I had. And that was kinda fun. That was like being back in college again and having a deadline for a paper or something, and sometimes when somebody puts you under that kind of stress you do good work. So you respond to the challenge. I mean, I like to think of myself not as this big rich best-selling writer but just as a craftsman, somebody who does this day by day.

  Lilja: I hear also that there will be a third book about Jack Sawyer?

  Stephen King: I hope so. I’ve gotta try to clear some space for that, but that was always the plan.

  Lilja: You always planned to do three books?

  Stephen King: Well, I don’t think we always planned to do three books. We planned to do one. And then at some point I think that I suggested to Peter that we do another book, a follow-up. You know, in some ways it was a great book, I really enjoyed that book, I enjoyed the process. I enjoyed the process the second time even more than the first because it seemed to me to actually be a richer book in some ways and just…the funny thing about…it’s the same for writers as it is for readers when you go back and revisit characters that you’ve written about before, they become real in your imagination and it’s like meeting old friends.

  So, we really sort of enjoyed that book, but it was an unlucky book because it was scheduled to be published on September 13, 2001, and two days before that they hit the World Trade Center, and you know Peter and I had been scheduled to do this big publicity swing, we were going to do the talk shows, do signings and this and that and the other thing, and everything just got cancelled. The book…it was almost like a book that didn’t happen. Because of all the tragedy that went around and, you know, I called Peter on the phone and I said, “I don’t think anybody’s gonna wanna read about a supernatural cannibal after what just happened.” And the book sold pretty well, but it didn’t sell at the time, nothing did really.

  Lilja: Was it harder to write the second book than the first book?

  Stephen King: No.

  Lilja: Easier?

  Stephen King: No, it was about the same. It was just a real pleasure. And working with somebody else lightens the load. If it’s someone that you see eye-to-eye with. I mean, Peter is a great guy and I’ve always really gotten along with him. It’s like he’s my big brother in a way, so it was kinda like, I think, my idea that we do the follow-up with Black House and with the third one, the way Black House turned out, we never had any question that there is to be another book. It’s just a question of trying to find the time.

  Lilja: Have you planned out the plot of the third book?

  Stephen King: Ah…[laughs]…it’s there, I mean, sometimes you just know. It’s there, just waiting for us, you know? Because Jack is hurt, goes over to the Territories and the way things are left is that he’ll be OK if he’s over there on the other side, but if he comes back to our world he will sicken and die in short order, so of course you have to put him in some sort of situation where he has to come back and then the clock is ticking.

  ****

  Stephen King, Part 3

  Posted: January 18, 2007

  PART 3—Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, books in

  cell phones and limited editions.

  “Don’t you guys realize that cell phones are the Devil?”

  “I want people to read the books and be knocked out, and I’d like that to continue even after I stop.”

  Lilja: You are also collaborating with John Mellencamp on a musical.

  Stephen King: Right.

  Lilja: Is that very different than writing a book?

  Stephen King: We’ve got a guy, and I’m not going to mention his name, but we got a guy who looks like he’s going to direct it. I’m not telling you who it is because he hasn’t signed up for it yet, but he’s going to come down here. He’s talked to John and he’s going to talk to me. We’re going to have lunch and talk about some things at the end of this month and then I would like to go back to work on that again. Well, I take that back. I worked on it so much, it’s been through so many drafts that I don’t really wanna go back to work on it again, but maybe if I can do what this man feels comfortable with then we can get the thing up onstage out of town. Maybe in some place like Houston or southern California, and if people actually come to it and like it then we can bring it to Broadway, which was always the goal.

  Lilja: Do you think it might be released in some kind of book form or on DVD or something for people not living in the U.S.?

  Stephen King: I don’t know, I don’t think so. But my idea…what I always said to John when we were just sort of slogging along and there was like nobody that got it and I said, “You know, if worse things comes to worst, John, what we do is we release a package that contains the CD with all the music and the script for the play, and people will buy that.”

  Lilja: That would be nice.

  Stephen King: Yeah, it would, and something like that may come along eventually and there’ll be CDs with the music. The music is terrific.

  Lilja: Yeah, John is a really good musician.

  Stephen King: Yeah, it’s very sweet and at the same ti
me some of the pieces rock really hard and it’s something that’s really not been done on Broadway in my experience. You know, there are plays that are kind of like the Andrew Lloyd Webber deal where everybody sings all the parts and there are musicals that here in the states we call Juke Box musicals and the closest thing to what we’ve got is Jersey Boys, which used to be autobiography. It’s the biography of the Four Seasons, which is a story with a lot of music in it, but that’s like, almost like a bioplay, you know, and this is fiction and drama. It’s interesting. It’s kind of a one of a kind thing right now.

  Lilja: You have tried to publish in a lot of formats like this musical, screenplays, eBooks, serial books and so on…Is there something left? Is there some media that you haven’t tried?

  Stephen King: Well, there’s always the Internet. I was just delighted to read that Michael Connelly had done a kind of mini-movie of the first two chapters of his novel, Echo Park. And he put it on YouTube and a lot of people watched it and it built interest in the book and I thought, “That’s an interesting idea.” So, I can’t really say, there are a lot of different possibilities. I have been approached with the idea of downloads for cell phones and I’m like, “Don’t you guys realize that cell phones are the Devil?” [laughs]

  Lilja: [laughs]

  Stephen King: You kind of download it and get a copy on your phone…I don’t know about that one, but, you know, I’m open to any kind of a format and I’m always interested in things because it keeps you fresh. Some of the fans get a little bit disgruntled, but that’s good too, you know? I like to upset them. It’s my job.

  Lilja: I think it’s great that you’re trying a lot of different things. I wish you would continue with The Plant on your site, though.

  Stephen King: Oh, but the thing is, about The Plant, I ran out of stories. It was a great idea and people downloaded it. I think that a lot of the press was kind of discouraging about the way that that worked financially because it made them nervous, but actually it was a license to coin money. There were no production costs or anything. Well, you know, you run a website. And there’s a certain amount of…you know, expense involved in keeping things like that up and running, but it’s nothing compared to this support system, the infrastructure that it takes to publish books.

  Lilja: Speaking of publishing, it seems less and less of your books have been released in limited editions now. Is that something you have done deliberately?

  Stephen King: They are releasing Secretary of Dreams now, and Frank Darabont is really high on the idea of doing a limited edition of The Mist. I don’t like them, I don’t like them. I think they are books for rich people and they’re elitist and the whole idea of limiteds…there’s something wrong with it, you know? The idea that people want a book that they can kind of drool over or masturbate on, I don’t know what it is they want with these things, but it’s like they get this book and it’s this beautiful thing and they go like, “Don’t touch it, don’t…oh God, it’s worth a thousand dollars, he signed it,” and all this, and my idea of a book that I like is when someone comes up to me at an autographing and you got this old beat-to-shit copy of The Stand and they say, “I’m sorry it looks this way,” and I go like, “I’m not.” It means a lot of people have read it and enjoyed it.

  Lilja: But often they look very good, the limiteds.

  Stephen King: Well, they do but…on the other hand my mother used to say, “Handsome is as handsome does.”

  Lilja: That’s true…

  Stephen King: A thing is better looking when it’s useful and…you know, something you just put up on the shelf to just look at it. Isn’t that weird?

  I mean…the worst one in a way and I don’t…this guy is gonna read this and be so bummed. This guy Jared Walters did ’Salem’s Lot in a limited. He basically fucking wore me down because he would come back every six months or so and say, “Please, please, please, please,” and I’m very vulnerable to that if people, I mean, if he’d come to me and said that he wanted to do a “Dollar Baby” I would say “Yes” immediately, but this guy wants to do this big huge book with this, I don’t know, incredible binding done in some endangered species or something, and finally the books come out and people like Frank Darabont and other collectors just loved that book and he wants to do The Shining next and so far I’ve just told him, “No.” Because it’d be another book like ’Salem’s Lot. It’ll weigh twenty pounds, and people will put it on their shelf and look at it and they won’t actually read it.

  Lilja: But I have read that book and it was interesting to get a chance to read the parts that weren’t in the first edition.

  Stephen King: Yeah, I know that, but on the other hand if someone had suggested to me, “Why don’t you put that up on the Net, the stuff that wasn’t in the first edition?” I would have done that. And then people could have gotten it for free.

  It would be the same words. It just wouldn’t be in that fancy thing. It’s like…I don’t know how to say this. It’s like if you see some woman and you’re really hot for her, you know? I mean, you got to say to yourself, is it the woman I’m hot for or is it just because she’s wearing a certain expensive dress? I don’t know…

  Lilja: What do you think people will think when they hear the name Stephen King, say, fifty or one hundred years from now?

  Stephen King: I think that they’ll have some vague memory of my work and some of the older ones will have read it and it’s maybe that some of the books will last, it may be that The Shining, ’Salem’s Lot…ahh…I’m hoping Lisey’s Story. That some of these books may still be read, but you know what? I think that you never know, you never know what’s gonna happen. You have no clue. Nobody would have believed, people would have laughed in 1910 if somebody would have said Theodore Dreiser was going to be a writer that people remember and read. But I think that my faith might be sort of like Somerset Maugham’s. He was a novelist who was read wildly in his time, everybody read Somerset Maugham and he’s still the record holder in terms of films made from his books. Forty-eight movies from different books and remakes and that sort of things. I’m close to that…

  Lilja: Yeah, you must be very close to that…

  Stephen King: I am, I’m close to that. But nowadays if you ask people who Somerset Maugham is they’ll kinda go like, “Well, I guess he was a writer…,” “The name is very familiar…,” so I think that that might be my fate.

  Lilja: Is that the fate you would like?

  Stephen King: No, I think any writer would like to be remembered and somebody who’s read, you know, somebody whose work stands the test of time, so to speak. But, on the other hand, as a person, I’ll be dead and if there’s no afterlife then I won’t give a shit, I’m gone. And if there is an afterlife I got an idea that what goes on here is a very minor concern.

  But, you know, I’m built a certain way and the way I’m built is to try and give people pleasure. That’s what I do. I want people to read the books and be knocked out, and I’d like that to continue even after I stop.

  Lilja: I’m sure it will.

  Stephen King: No, I’m not sure.

  Lilja: Definitely. Well, it was very nice to talk to you.

  Stephen King: Same here, very pleasant.

  Stephen King, Part 1

  Posted: February 20, 2008

  Welcome to the first part of a three-part interview I did over the phone with Stephen King last week. Once again, he was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to talk to me, and for that I’m very grateful.

  This time we talked for about thirty minutes and covered things like the new book he is working on, the upcoming collection Just Past Sunset and a script he has written for The Gingerbread Girl.

  We also talked about Duma Key, The Dark Tower comic, his collaboration with John Mellencamp, The Mist and The Talisman 3.

  This part will be followed by two more, and I really hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did doing them. It was pure pleasure talking to Stephen King.

  Enjoy
! / Lilja

  PART 1—Duma Key and a really long new book

  “I have no idea how creativity happens or why it happens or what it does to the person who creates it, except it makes you feel good while it’s going on.”

  “I’m assuming it’s gonna be a long book, a really long book.”

  Lilja: Hi Steve! How are you? Fine?

  Stephen King: Yes, I am. I’m very well indeed.

  Lilja: I just finished your last book, Duma Key, and first I wanna say that I really liked it.

  Stephen King: Well, good, I’m glad.

  Lilja: Was that one different to write compared to your other books since it was set in Florida?

  Stephen King: You know, it was a hard book to write because I had a little idea at first of these two little dead girls that I kept seeing on this road at dusk. And that image actually never made it into the book but that was where I started and the rest of it just all sort of came out…for the day-to-day writing it was never a plot, it was never an outline, so by the time I had finished it I had…you know these little sticky notes that people put up on their desks and things?

  Lilja: Yeah.

  Stephen King: I had those all over my computer. I could barely see the screen. I had them all over my desk. I had them on the walls…so I would try not to forget anything, and when I got done I just had to laugh and I thought, “Boy, I wrote that book by the seat of my pants.” [laughs]

  Lilja: [laughs] So it was harder to write than your usual book?

  Stephen King: Ah….yeah, I think it was. You know, I write two different kinds of books. I write books that have a lot of plot, which are difficult, and then there are the ones that are just situations, like Cell, where you say to yourself, “What would happen if everyone went crazy at the same time?,” and you just kinda play that out. Those are a lot easier …