On Writing

In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King fuses autobiography and craft manual into a vivid chronicle of his evolution as a storyteller. Born in Portland, Maine in 1947, King grew up in modest circumstances after his father disappeared when he was two years old. His mother, Nellie Ruth, worked multiple low-paying jobs—laundry, caregiving, bakery work—to support Stephen and his older brother, David. The family moved constantly around New England, and the instability taught King early lessons about hardship, perseverance, and empathy—qualities that would later saturate his fiction.

As a frail, frequently ill child, King spent long hours in bed, losing himself in comic books and pulp magazines. His earliest creative attempts involved copying the stories he read in Tales from the Crypt and Superman comics word for word. His mother encouraged him to stop imitating and create his own tales instead. When she read one of his first stories about four adventurous animals and laughed out loud, she told him, “You’re good enough to be in a book someday.” That single moment, King recalls, “was worth more than any paycheck.”

In adolescence, he discovered his first audience: his classmates. He sold homemade horror booklets for a quarter each before a teacher confiscated them, telling him he was “better than this junk.” The rebuke didn’t stop him—it fueled him. He began submitting stories to magazines, hammering rejection slips onto a nail above his desk until the nail bent under their weight. By fourteen, he had replaced it with a railroad spike.

When he finally received a personalized note from an editor saying, “You have talent—keep trying,” it was enough to convince him that he was on the right path. After college, King married Tabitha Spruce, a fellow writer, and took a teaching job to support their growing family. They were barely scraping by—living in a trailer, counting every penny, and sometimes borrowing money to pay medical bills. King wrote at night on a small desk wedged between the washer and dryer in their laundry room.

The breakthrough came when he began Carrie. Inspired by his days as a janitor cleaning girls’ locker rooms and an article on telekinesis, King wrote a short scene about a girl getting her first period and being mocked by her classmates. Convinced the story was too strange, he threw it away—but Tabitha rescued it from the trash, telling him it had promise. When Carrie sold for $400,000 in paperback rights, the Kings went from poverty to financial freedom overnight. King never forgot that lesson: sometimes the best stories begin as discarded scraps.

The Foundation of Good Writing

King insists that writing is not a mystical gift—it’s a craft honed through discipline. His two non-negotiable rules for success are: read a lot and write a lot. Reading, he explains, is the writer’s apprenticeship. He reads between 70 and 80 books each year—everything from classics like The Great Gatsby to thrillers by John D. MacDonald and modern bestsellers. He reads while eating breakfast, waiting in lines, or sitting at baseball games, ...