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Stephen King
Nov. 1st, 2015 09:49 pmStephen King has a new collection of short stories out, and we get another interview, with questions by Alexandra Alter.
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Q. In your introductions to the stories, you often describe how an idea will stay with you half-formed for years, until some catalyst makes you go back to it. Do you write your ideas down somewhere?
A. I don’t write anything down, any ideas ever, because that’s a good way to immortalize really bad ideas. The bad ideas fall out. It’s a natural Darwinian process. They go away somehow. It’s like throwing a bunch of crackers in a sieve. Some of those ideas shake out because the crumbs get too small, but the big ones stay.
I have an idea right now about a guy who kills his wife, and then his wife shows up and she’s his wife, but she’s strange. She’s pale. I can see her right now. He knows that he’s killed her, and he goes and digs up the place that he buried her, see what I’m saying? And I don’t really know what he finds, whether it’s a body there, but it’s a story idea that stayed with me for a long time.
[...]
Q. You’re in an incredibly prolific phase. What do you think is driving your creativity at this late stage in your career?
A. I’m not as a prolific as I used to be. There was a time when I published four books a year. As a college student, I had so much in my head that I had migraine headaches. Right now, I’m always happy if I have two or three ideas bouncing around that seem tasty.
[...]
Q. What made you want to write scary stories in the first place?
A. Nothing. There are certain minerals, for lack of a better word, buried in our nature, that come with the DNA, that are part of the original equipment. For me, I was about 8 or 9 years old, and my brother and I were going through some stuff that my mother had in this crawl space in an apartment in Stratford, [Conn.], and there were boxes and boxes of my father’s stuff. There were a bunch of paperbacks, and one of them had a cover that showed this green monster crawling out of an open grave. My brother didn’t want anything to do with that, and I looked at that and thought, ‘That’s mine.’ I want to know what that’s about. As a kid, I went to see every horror movie I could possibly see. Sometimes my brother went with me. My brother’s two years older, and he would put his hat over his face. I never put my hat over my face.
Q. You certainly have a talent for scaring people.
A. But I want all the people who don’t like to be scared. I want to welcome them in a gentle way, and then scare them. I want to get them in there, where they can’t get out.
-- The New York Times
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<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Q. In your introductions to the stories, you often describe how an idea will stay with you half-formed for years, until some catalyst makes you go back to it. Do you write your ideas down somewhere?
A. I don’t write anything down, any ideas ever, because that’s a good way to immortalize really bad ideas. The bad ideas fall out. It’s a natural Darwinian process. They go away somehow. It’s like throwing a bunch of crackers in a sieve. Some of those ideas shake out because the crumbs get too small, but the big ones stay.
I have an idea right now about a guy who kills his wife, and then his wife shows up and she’s his wife, but she’s strange. She’s pale. I can see her right now. He knows that he’s killed her, and he goes and digs up the place that he buried her, see what I’m saying? And I don’t really know what he finds, whether it’s a body there, but it’s a story idea that stayed with me for a long time.
[...]
Q. You’re in an incredibly prolific phase. What do you think is driving your creativity at this late stage in your career?
A. I’m not as a prolific as I used to be. There was a time when I published four books a year. As a college student, I had so much in my head that I had migraine headaches. Right now, I’m always happy if I have two or three ideas bouncing around that seem tasty.
[...]
Q. What made you want to write scary stories in the first place?
A. Nothing. There are certain minerals, for lack of a better word, buried in our nature, that come with the DNA, that are part of the original equipment. For me, I was about 8 or 9 years old, and my brother and I were going through some stuff that my mother had in this crawl space in an apartment in Stratford, [Conn.], and there were boxes and boxes of my father’s stuff. There were a bunch of paperbacks, and one of them had a cover that showed this green monster crawling out of an open grave. My brother didn’t want anything to do with that, and I looked at that and thought, ‘That’s mine.’ I want to know what that’s about. As a kid, I went to see every horror movie I could possibly see. Sometimes my brother went with me. My brother’s two years older, and he would put his hat over his face. I never put my hat over my face.
Q. You certainly have a talent for scaring people.
A. But I want all the people who don’t like to be scared. I want to welcome them in a gentle way, and then scare them. I want to get them in there, where they can’t get out.
-- The New York Times
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