A CONVERSATION WITH STEPHEN KING

STEPHEN KING:  To ourselves.

TOM PERROTTA:  To ourselves.

STEPHEN KING:  With the time travel part of it, I didn't want to jam that down anybody's throat either, because it's just a device to try to have a modern guy in a time that, to a lot of people now, 1958 seems like ancient history, the way that the '20s felt to me. When I was a kid growing up and I'd read about the Roaring Twenties, I'd think, eh, ancient history. I think a lot of people feel that way now about the '50s and '60s. But since I now qualify for a senior discount at the movies, to me this is like it was just recently. 

But there's a point where he goes back for the first long stay and he's been told – like you said, the secret agent thing – he's got to be wearing a certain kind of pants, the haircut has got to be a little bit shorter in back than he's got it. And he's got the money from the '50s, and all that. And when he goes back, he realizes that he's tried to use a modern copper sandwich dime in a payphone and it doesn't work, and he's carrying his cell phone [laughter], which wouldn't be too good; you'd wind up probably in a prison somewhere as a visitor from space.

TOM PERROTTA:  So much of a historical novelist's job is to weed out anachronisms, to figure out what would people say in 1958? What would they say in 1963? What would they say at any given point. It becomes a really funny thread throughout the book when Jake blurts out some idiom that wasn't invented.

STEPHEN KING: He gets in trouble with his girlfriend, too, because he's thinking about something else and he starts singing Honky Tonk Women by the Rolling Stones. [laughter] "I met a gin-soaked, barroom queen in Memphis.  She tried to take me upstairs for a ride. She blew my nose and then she blew my mind." And he's with his girlfriend and when he gets home she says, "Where did you hear that?" And he says, "Aw, it's something I heard on KLIF, which is one of the rock stations at the time. She says, "No radio station in America can play a song like that. They'd be banned by the FCC." Which was true.

TOM PERROTTA:  Especially in Texas.

STEPHEN KING:  Especially in Texas, that's right. 

TOM PERROTTA:  I think this would be a good time to just ask, because you clearly did a ton of research – and, yeah, you do that so that nobody can say, "Hey, you made a big mistake and I no longer believe you, or trust you as a writer." But there's also, I think, in the course of synthesizing all that research, I wondered, in your sense of the past, of John F. Kennedy's importance to American history, the centrality of the assassination, did any of those things change as a result of all this research and this immersion?

STEPHEN KING:  I saw Kennedy more as a man as a result of some of the footage that I looked at. That's one of the great benefits of the computer is that a lot of this archived footage is available. The thing that stuck out in my mind the most was, I found video of him in Tampa and Miami. This was just days before the Dallas trip. And he did all the things that the politicians do, the grip-and-grin kind of thing. And it gave me a chill to see him in that same car, with the same open top. He goes into the crowd and the Secret

Service agents are just kind of looking at each other like, "What do we do now?"

There were barriers -- almost like the ones that you see sometimes between lanes when the highway's under construction -- and there was a gap. He slips through the gap and he starts to shake hands. The agents are kind of like, "Oh, man, I don't know what to do now." And they're the same agents that were surrounding him days later in Dallas.

But the thing that I really liked was that they showed him at a political function that night. And there's a guy in Alpine shorts with the suspenders and the lederhosen and the Alpine cap, and he's playing Hail to the Chief on the accordion. [laughter] Kennedy comes in and this is kind of like a "holy shit" minute, like, "This guy, I can't believe it."  I had to put it in the book because at that second, you see Kennedy the man just going like,

"How bizarre this is, this world that I'm in." Like us doing this right now. [laughter]

So I got a picture of him as a man. The other thing was I got a chance to … Kennedy is a peripheral figure in the sense that Jake is trying to stop the assassination. The person that I really wanted to try and bring forward and kind of delineate was Lee Oswald, because he was the change agent, not Kennedy. That's the pity of it. Because Kennedy, up until that moment, had been this real change in American politics and the way that we did business up to that time. 

The difference was Eisenhower showing up at the inauguration in a silk top hat and a morning coat. Kennedy's bare-headed, and he's got this beautiful thick head of hair, and you could tell it was the changing of the guard. Things weren't going to change except for this guy with a rifle. So I was interested in trying to make him exist as a character.

TOM PERROTTA:  Yeah, and you really do. In fact, such a jolt in the book when Jake actually has interaction with Oswald and his wife Marina. You get that charge that you get in really good fiction where history just erased and you're seeing them the way that you see anybody in this novel.

Speaking of the secret agent stuff, there's a lot of interesting surveillance. And we get access to Oswald's house.

STEPHEN KING: Remember when you asked me, "Did you ever have doubts?"

[laughter] I'll tell you what. There's a guy sitting in the front row here. His name is Russell Dorr, and he was my research assistant on this book. He saved my ass so many times in the course of doing this.

But I had my own "holy shit" minute when I thought to myself, I want to put Jake in a position where he can see Oswald and hear Oswald. Then I realized that when he's in Fort Worth, he and his wife spoke nothing but Russian because Lee met her in Russia, and she had no English. And he had no interest in letting her learn English, because he wanted her under his thumb.  So not only is Jake in a different house, but they're speaking a different language. And I did have this sort of "ghh" reaction that I'd gotten into this. So I started to look into bugging equipment. My friend Russ helped me, and we found out what was possible and what wasn't. He gave me the information and then I did what they pay us the big bucks for, which is to try to make something real out of that. And I did, I had some fun with it.

TOM PERROTTA:  I think it's amazing from a writerly perspective. That's one of these unlikely things that you're able to do. You're able to get him traveling back in time. You set up a lot of rules that make your job much more difficult. You said, “Okay, he can only go back to this one day in 1958.” 

STEPHEN KING:  Two minutes before noon on September 9^th, 1958. Every trip is the first trip.

TOM PERROTTA:  Yeah, it's crazy.

STEPHEN KING:  It's Groundhog Day. [laughter] 

TOM PERROTTA:  And then there's also how are we going to hear what goes on in

Oswald's room? And you figure out a way to do this, and you never look back. I think the reader just follows you anywhere, which is, the sign of a real master at work. I mean, I understand that you have doubts and you have to conquer them in some way, but for the reader, I think you just find yourself going along for the ride. 

STEPHEN KING:  Step one is you get the information by hook or by crook. I had Russ to help me with some, and of course I have access to the computer and stuff. Then you just kind of make stuff up that'll make it work.

But one of the things that I found out that interested me – you have to remember that this was the time of transistor radios where you put the little button in your ear. For those of you who are the younger set, they were like iPods with only a single pod kind of thing. [laughter] You listened to the radio.  But one of the things that I found out was that the people who made all the really good stuff back then, all the good spy stuff, were the Japanese. They made the transistor radios and that was great. And one of the other things that happens in the course of it that my research assistant got me -- one of the great advantages of coming from 2011 to 1958 and being there for five years -- is you would know who won every athletic competition that people bet on. 

TOM PERROTTA:  It's a scam, time travel.

STEPHEN KING:  Yeah, the whole thing's a scam.

TOM PERROTTA:  Now, one thing I'll say, there are advantages in 2011, but 1958 has its advantages in the book. One of the things that really suffuses the book is a kind of nostalgia for that golden time. I know that that's built into the book because the Kennedy assassination becomes a kind of fall, and it's the end of an idyllic time in America. But also, it felt really heartfelt.  Food tasted better; the air smells better; people are nicer; the pace of life is slower. And I just wondered if this is something that you share, or if it's just a part of the book.

STEPHEN KING: You having said that, I want to read something else here. It's short, but it speaks to what you're talking about. I really didn't want to do nostalgia in this book. I didn't really want to get that soft-focus-Vaseline-on-the-lens kind of thing. I wanted to try and balance it off. 

One of the things that you have to remember is that if you did go back from 2011 to 1958, you would know that the world wasn't going to end in a thermonuclear blast. One of the sections of the book has to do with a woman who almost commits suicide during the Cuban Missile Crisis because she's convinced that the world is going to end. The advantage that we would have, other than knowing that the Pirates were going to beat the Yankees in seven in 1960, and be able to bet on it and get great friggin' odds [laughter] is you'd know that the mushroom cloud wasn't going to go up. But I tried to balance these things off. 

This is Jake headed for Dallas from Maine:

I took US 1 south. I ate in a lot of roadside restaurants featuring Mom's Home Cooking, places where the Blue Plate Special, including fruit cup to start and pie à la mode for dessert, cost 80 cents. I never saw a single fastfood franchise, unless you count Howard Johnson's with its 28 Flavors and Simple Simon logo. I saw a troop of Boy Scouts tending a bonfire of fall leaves with their Scoutmaster; I saw women wearing overcoats and galoshes taking in laundry on a gray afternoon when rain threatened; I saw long passenger trains with names like The Southern Flyer and Star of Tampa charging toward those American climes where winter is not allowed. I saw old men smoking pipes on benches in town squares. I saw a million churches, and a cemetery where a congregation at least a hundred strong stood in a circle around an open grave singing "The Old Rugged Cross." I saw men building barns. I saw people helping people. Two of them in a pickup truck stopped to help me when the Sunliner's radiator popped its top and I was broken down by the side of the road. That was in Virginia, around 4:00 in the afternoon, and one of them asked me if I needed a place to sleep. I guess I can imagine that happening in 2011, but it's a stretch. 

And one more thing. In North Carolina, I stopped to gas up at a Humble Oil station, then walked around the corner to use the toilet. There were two doors and three signs. MEN was neatly stenciled over one door, LADIES over the other. The third sign was an arrow on a stick. It pointed toward the brush-covered slope behind the station. It said COLORED. Curious, I walked down the path, being careful to sidle at a couple of points where the oily, green-shading-to-maroon leaves of poison ivy were unmistakable. I hoped the dads and moms who might have led their children down to whatever facility waited below were able to identify those troublesome bushes for what they were, because in the late '50s most children wear short pants.

There was no facility. What I found at the end of the path was a narrow stream with a board laid across it on a couple of crumbling concrete posts. A man who had to urinate could just stand on the bank, unzip, and let fly. A woman could hold onto a bush (assuming it wasn't poison ivy or poison oak) and squat. The board was what you sat on if you had to take a dump. Maybe in the pouring rain.  If I ever gave you the idea that 1958's all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path, okay? The one lined with poison ivy and the board over the stream.

And that's the other side. [applause] Thank you.

TOM PERROTTA:  That's a very powerful passage, and I remember it well. There's also, of course, a big component of the book is a love story. Jake goes back to 1958 and eventually makes his way to a small town in Texas named Jodie, gets a job teaching with forged documents that nobody checks, because it's, what, '61 at that point?

STEPHEN KING:  He gets a teaching certificate from a degree mill.

TOM PERROTTA:  And he starts this affair with this sort of gawky, charming librarian. It's interesting because it's the era where they can't really sleep together openly.

But one thing you notice is that there is a kind of sexual revolution sort of bubbling up. People who get to know them will cover for them. And there are these gay guys who have a discreet motor court.

STEPHEN KING:  Bungalows, yeah. 

TOM PERROTTA:  So I thought we just see history in that as well.

STPEHEN KING:  One of the things that happens here is they do have this sexual relationship that develops. And she doesn't have a diaphragm, and at that time birth control pills were only dispensed to married women. If you were a single lady and you went into a doctor's office and tried to get birth control pills, you wouldn't get them; they weren't allowed. The diaphragm that she did have she doesn't have anymore. So she tells Jake to get condoms, but to be sure not to get them at the local drugstore because they would be fired, they would lose their jobs. And he has to be very, very careful about not staying too late at her place and that sort of thing.

I think that a lot of younger people today who grew up with coed dorms and coed bathrooms and all the rest find it hard to believe that we existed in a world of parietal hours and where women were in serious trouble if they transgressed the rules that had anything that smelled of sexuality. That's another side of that time.

A lot of aspects to the '50s and '60s, particularly pre-Beatles … That was the other thing here is that the Beatles changed a lot, and that whole culture changed a lot. I was always sorry that Kennedy missed that, because I think that he would have been a fan. I think he would have done the Beatles.

TOM PERROTTA:  Well, Bobby got to live that journey. I just saw that documentary where he went to South Africa and it was just interesting to see how much he had been transformed in those four years, and how much counterculture he had taken in, and how much the language …

STEPHEN KING:  Was Bobby Kennedy on record about the Beatles?

TOM PERROTTA:  I don't know.

STEPHEN KING:  Does anybody know? 

TOM PERROTTA:  Somebody here knows. 

STEPHEN KING:  Please tell me Bobby Kennedy wasn't a Rat Pack guy. [laughter] That would be terrible.

TOM PERROTTA:  He loved the Monkees, I'm told. 

STEPHEN KING:  Oh, dear.

TOM PERROTTA:  As Tom said before, you've written over 50 books. Some of them are masterpieces and cultural touchstones. Everybody has either seen the movie version, read them; they're part of our lives, they're part of the culture. Is that a burden to you sometimes when you take on a book like this? Are you compared to other works that you've done. Do you think I have to beat that one?

STEPHEN KING:  It isn't really a burden, but I certainly have gotten a reputation as the horror writer and I never said, “Yes, that's what I am.”  And I never said, “No, that's what I'm not.” I felt that as long as I was writing what I wanted to write. That's a terrific gift, to be able to sit and write what it is that you want to write and not have to do a lot of directed stuff, to actually be able to support your family.  It's sort of guilt-free, because you're kind of in a playground. You're making all this stuff up that you want to and you say, “Yeah, but I'm actually paying the light bill while I do this.” So that's a great thing.

But sometimes it does pop up. We live in Florida in the winter time. We didn't really want to go, but we turned 60 and we had to; it's the law. [laughter] So we go to a place that's near Sarasota and the deal that I worked out with my wife was that she would do the big shopping things, and then if we needed anything else in the week, I was supposed to go and get it.  So I was doing that one weekday and I was going up the aisle with the housewares, and this woman came the other way. I'm going to say she was 120. [laughter] There's a certain Florida woman that's sort of like skin wrapped on an armature; you know they're going to last a long time, ultimately have two or three husbands, or whatever. [laughter]  And no governor on this lady's mouth. She's coming at me and I'm going at her and she says, "I know who you are. You write those scary stories.

Well, I don't read those horror stories. I like uplifting things like that Shawshank Redemption." [laughter] So I said, "I wrote that." And she said, "No, you didn't." [laughter] And that was it.  That was the whole discussion.

So I think it would be great if some people came to this book who were history buffs, who were interested in the Kennedy years. I don't know if that will happen or not, but I think it would be terrific. But I don't set out to write any particular thing for any particular audience. I don't think you do either, do you?

TOM PERROTTA:  No, I don't, and I would love to have your audience. [laughter]

STEPHEN KING:  Yeah, but there are plenty of people who'd love to have your audience, too. We're going to fight, we're going to roll it out. This is going to be like bigtime author wrestling. [laughter]

TOM PERROTTA:  We were just up in the Hemingway Room, so we feel like a fistfight would be good for our reputations. [laughter] Also, we're going to pose shirtless later. [laughter]

STEPHEN KING:  Come on, Hemingway would kick our ass. You know it's true.

TOM PERROTTA:  Oh, bring it on. 

STEPHEN KING:  Yeah, bring it on. 

TOM PERROTTA:  On the one hand, I think of you as a kind of working class guy and a working class writer, and you write really well about small-town, working class life. But then you do something else that I think I often associate with a different kind of writer, which is you write about writing. You are a metawriter on some level; you have many characters who are writers. And I usually think of that as being like … I'm always wary when there are writer characters, but your writer characters feel like working writers to me and not so much like rarified literary intellectuals.

The other thing that comes through, I think, is just this utter love of writing. I was recently reading The Green Mile, which I think is just an amazing book and there was this quote – let me see if I can find it in my notes here – the narrator says, "What I didn't realize was how many doors the act of writing unlocks, as if my dad's old fountain pen wasn't really a pen at all, but some strange variety of skeleton key." I think there are comments like that throughout your work, and a lot of times narrators are writing the book that we're reading.  I just wanted to hear you talk a little bit about that, because I think a lot of writers see writing as a burden, this thing that they've taken on that is oppressing them, but they've got to get it out, and it's an arena of struggle. I just wanted to hear what you had to say about that.

STEPHEN KING:  Well, the whole thing about the writer who sees the job as a burden and something that they struggle along, it makes me think. There was an album by a rock artist named Todd Rundgren. It was called The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect. And I sometimes think that writers draw this cloak of the tortured artist around them because (a) you can get free drinks [laughter] and (b) chicks love it.  They love that tortured thing going on. 

But I've always thought that it was a terrific job, and I've always felt very, very fortunate – blessed, really – to be able to do it. Because I'd do it for free if I couldn't do it for money, but I love doing it for money. [laughter] That sounds kind of nasty, doesn't it?  I love doing it for money. [laughter] 

I read early on -- and probably you did, too -- write about what you know. And I know about the writing life because I've been a writer for a lot of years. I know a little bit about the teaching life. One of the pleasures of 11/22/63 is Jake's secret identity. He becomes a high school teacher, and that was a good thing to revisit because I have a lot of good memories about teaching. There were a lot of things that were great. Did you teach yourself?

TOM PERROTTA:  I did. I taught mostly college. But I also ended up writing a lot about teachers.

STEPHEN KING:  Do you like it?

TOM PERROTTA:  I do. I like …

STEPHEN KING:  Parts of it.

TOM PERROTTA:  I like the close interaction with students. I didn't like grading papers. 

SETPHEN KING:  I didn't like grading papers. I didn't like a lot of the administration and a lot of the politics.

TOM PERROTTA:  Which is probably a lot worse now than when you taught. 

STEPHEN KING:  But I liked the kids and that was great; that was very refreshing. So I've written about those things, and I've written about a few other jobs. I just try to be careful.  I don't think that writing as an act is very interesting to very many people. I don't know, it's like I've shown people where I write, interviewers and people like that. And they're always a little bit disappointed like, "Where's the magic?" Well, there isn't any. There's a desk and a word processor and a bunch of sticky-notes stuck around and a lot of clutter, that sort of thing. But the magic is somewhere else. So I can write about the act of writing a little bit, but the real story has to be somewhere else, I think.

In the case of Misery, which was about a writer whose taken prisoner by his number one fan, the real interest is sort of in that relationship, the dynamic between the sane person who happens to be a writer and the crazed fan.

TOM PERROTTA:  And that, obviously, was some struggle you were sensing in your own mind or your own career, maybe, that fans wanted something?

STEPHEN KING:  I think that you sense that. But the other thing that I discovered:  you write books to find out how you feel about things. Don't you think that's true to a degree?

TOM PERROTTA:  Right. And if you start out knowing and you end up knowing the same thing you started with, it's going to be a bad book, I think.

STEPHEN KING:  Yeah, that's right. You've got to know more, a little bit more than when you started; you've got to have a different view of it. One of the things is like, if you spend all that time to write a book, you ought to be able to come out with something more important than a paycheck, because you have to live a life, too. 

So in the case of Misery, what Paul Sheldon finds out is that Annie Wilkes, in a way, is sort of expressing to him that what he's really good at is writing these bodice-ripper romances, and he'd better stick to what he's good at. It's kind of sad, but there it is. 

TOM PERROTTA:  We've got some questions from the audience, but first let me just then ask you – if it's not too hard to sum up, because it's such a big novel that tackled such big issues – what did 11/22/63 reveal to you that you didn't know at the beginning?

STEPHEN KING:  Well, the first thing is probably not to write another historical novel. [laughter] But I think what it taught me is that it's possible to appreciate your own time, and it's possible to get some perspective on the past by trying to relive it. Obviously, nobody can go back and change the events of the past, but I certainly felt enriched by the time that I spent rediscovering the '50s and '60s.

TOM PERROTTA:  Okay, so here we go. You say you've made a career of writing about what scares you. What scares you now?

STEPHEN KING:  Oh, man. Being in front of all these people. [laughter] I don't know how you feel.  I asked you beforehand if you were nervous, and the thing is we sit in a room, that's what we do.

TOM PERROTTA:  I'm nervous, by the way. [laughter]

STEPHEN KING:  We sit in a room to make our daily bread, so being in front of a bunch of people. But on a more mundane level, I guess, I'm afraid that when I get to the hotel, there might be a lunatic in the shower stall. [laughter] You wouldn't think so, but think of all the passkeys they have in all those hotels. 

TOM PERROTTA:  You heard it here first!

STEPHEN KING:  I'm a fearful person by nature, I think. I survive pretty well. I'm afraid that after the way the Red Sox finished last season. [laughter] But I mean, for a horror writer, the Red Sox are a natural. [laughter] I'm basically evading the question, because the subject of what frightens me is just like everything. 

TOM PERROTTA:  Well, you made it work.

STPEHEN KING:  That's good.

TOM PERROTTA:  Here's a good one: Have you thought about the possibility of building a Stephen King Library in the future in Bangor, Maine, or elsewhere?

STEPHEN KING:  Oh, I don't think that I'd want any kind of a place that was filled with my stuff. That'd make me feel sort of conceited or puffed up, kind of like the Goodyear blimp. My wife and I have a foundation, and we try to support as many libraries as we can, because I feel they're very important resources in communities. And they meant a lot to her and I when we were younger, because we didn't really have any money, either one of us, and we loved books. And that's where you go to get the books. But a library of just my stuff, I think that'd be a pretty boring library. We could put in some of your stuff as well.

TOM PERROTTA:  I'd be happy to be there. [laughter] We were just up in the Hemingway Room upstairs, and I must say there's something kind of thrilling about seeing handwritten pages from Hemingway, or correspondence that he had with Fitzgerald. In a sense, you will be part of American literary history. So I know that's not …. Obviously, somebody will do it if you don't. 

STEPHEN KING:  It's crazy to think that. One of the things that I noticed in the Hemingway Room was that the editor had suggested, at the end of … Do you remember which novel it was? Farewell to Arms, maybe. 

TOM PERROTTA:  Yeah.

STPEHEN KING:  The editor had said it's magnificent, it's terrific.  And by the way, I have at least one editor here today, and I can tell you for every writer, that when you get a letter from an editor that starts out by saying, "Thank you for this wonderful, terrific book," it just totally blew me away that the rest of the letter's going to be all the shit that you're supposed to fix. [laughter] So at the end of this particular manuscript, this letter, the editor had said things to change, Hemingway has written – you can see this upstairs for yourself – he's written "Kiss my ass." [laughter] He put it in a circle. 

There's a story about that -- we were talking about Misery -- and my wife and I and the kids were in England for a week, and on the ride over I feel asleep and I kind of had this dream about this woman who took a writer prisoner and skinned him and bound a final book in his skin. [laughter] And I thought there's a real story here, which I called The Annie Wilkes Edition, and that was the beginning of Misery.  When we got to the hotel -- which was Brown's Hotel in London -- I couldn't sleep because of the time change. My wife was knocked out, the kids were asleep. And I went downstairs and I asked if there was a place where I could write. And the guy said, "Oh, yes, sir, we would be very pleased to have you," and he took me up on the landing between the ground floor and what the Brits call the first floor. It was this beautiful desk there and he said to me, "This was Rudyard Kipling's desk." I said I could never write at this. And he's like, British,

"Oh, I insist, I insist, you must, you must write at Rudyard Kipling's desk." I'm like, okay.

So I sat down and I started to write Misery at Rudyard Kipling's desk. And they brought me buckets and oodles and buckets of tea. And I'm writing and drinking tea. Then toward the end, when I'd gotten about everything I could get and I felt like I could sleep, the hotel manager came up again and said, "Did I tell you? Kipling died at this desk." [laughter] He had a stroke and dropped dead at his desk! And that was …

TOM PERROTTA:  That was one more thing to be scared of. 

STEPHEN KING:  One more thing to be scared of, that's right. And some day there's a place waiting for me – for you, too – where people will say, "This is where he dropped." [laughter] 

TOM PERROTTA:  "And would you like to have a seat?" This question came with the supplement: What did you think of your future prospect as a writer when you published your first book?

STEPHEN KING:  Oh, I didn't have any idea. I'll tell you what.  The first book was Carrie, and the advance for Carrie was $2,500. My wife said, "Don't make any big plans for that money, Steve, we have to buy a car." And we did, we bought a Ford Pinto. [laughter] It was snot-green, it was the only one they had. It was a standard; she couldn't drive a standard.  But we were very excited. There was a telegram that came saying the book has been accepted, $2,500. And we were lying in bed one night and she said, "Is there a possibility that there'll be anything more from this?" And I said, "Well, if they sell the paperback, Doubleday has a 50/50 split and whatever they sold it for, we would get half of that money." And she said, "How much do you think that might be?" And I said, "Well, they might sell it for as much as $60,000 and if that happened, we'd get $30,000, a little running room – write another book and maybe not have to go back and teach school right away. It'd be like getting a sabbatical year at school."

So we were living in a really terrible apartment in Bangor, Maine. It was the first-floor apartment. They had the Friday night fights in the apartment above us. We had our Pinto, and that was really about all that we had.  And the phone rang one day. Tabby was up visiting her parents. It was a Sunday, and it was my editor from Doubleday and he said, "We sold the paperback rights." And I said, "Really? How much did you get?" And he said, "$250,000." We were living in a $90-a-month apartment at that time and we had a baby, and we had another baby on the way. No, I take that back, because Joe had been born then. We had two kids, no money, and a brand new Pinto that my wife couldn't drive because it was a standard. [laughter] 

He said, “$250,000,” and the strength went out of my legs. It was a wall phone in the kitchen and I sat down on the floor. I said, "Did you say $25,000?" And he said, "No, $250,000."  We talked about that for a while, and he hung up. And my wife was gone and I couldn't call her because she had left her parents' house. I wanted to tell her in person anyway, and I walked around and I thought to myself, “I have to buy her a present, I've got to buy her a present.” But it was Sunday and the only place open was the Rexall Drug. So I bought her a hairdryer. [laughter]

And at that point, when you're looking ahead, it never occurred to me that anything like what has happened to me in my career would ever happen to me. All I wanted was a little running room to be able to write the next book.

TOM PERROTTA:  How old were you at that point?

STEPHEN KING:  When Carrie was written, I was 23, and when it was sold – because it was a long process. It was accepted for publication in '73, which would have made me, I guess, 25 at that time.

TOM PERROTTA:  That's pretty amazing. I know it was a struggle and you had two kids, but it was very young to have that kind of success. I bet in a way that it contributes to the sort of confidence and boldness that you have now. You go through a long period of getting rejected, it seems like. 

STEPHEN KING:  I had a lot of rejections because I was trying to sell short stories. And I had a nail pounded into the wall, and when the rejections came in, I'd slam them on this nail. And it got to a point where the nail tore out of the wall because it had so many.

You've done that.

TOM PERROTTA:  I haven't done the nail, but I have gotten the rejections.

STEPHEN KING:  When you get the rejections.

TOM PERROTTA:  I had a manila envelope that bulged dishearteningly.

STEPHEN KING:  Oh, god, yeah.

TOM PERROTTA:  Here's both a letter and a question: First, thank you. You are the reason I'm a journalist and On Writing gives me the evidence I need to delete adverbs from stories that I now read as an editor. My question: How do you write love, passion, marriage and sex so well? [laughter]

STEPHEN KING:  Well, I'm a romantic. I am, I am a romantic. And one of the things, if you read the book 11/22/63, it's a sentimental book. It's a sentimental book, and I don't really have a problem with that as long as you don't drown in it and get all sloppy about it. 

The other thing, whether it's horror or whether it's something that has to do with love, sex, affection, murder, violence, any of those things, the trick is to try and tell the truth. I idolize Frank Norris, the guy who wrote McTeague and The Octopus. He said that some people had criticized him for writing stories about ordinary people and sort of sordid situations. And he said, "What cared I? I never truckled. I told them the truth." And if you can tell the truth, you're on good grounds. I know that people do fall in love and people do bond together. I like to write about that. I mean, hell, you wrote about that in The Leftovers. And that guy who's at the center of that book is a very sweet man who sticks with his wife, even though she's gone off and wears her white sheet, and all that. That speaks to me. There are people in the Dickens books that speak to me that way, Little Dorrit. 

TOM PERROTTA:  I will say, in your work, in On Writing you talk about your wife in really just deeply devoted terms.  You trust her as a reader, and she's a constant reference point for you. I can't think of as many writers who talk about being in a happy marriage quite as much as you do. I think it has become something that is part of your worldview.

A lot of narrators talk about that. 

STEPHEN KING:  One of the things about love and the love relationship is that I think we all understand that it's very difficult to know anybody else, including the people that you're closest to, but that might be the one relationship. If you do fall in love with somebody and if you bond, then you make a third life of the other two, which is the life where the two of you are together. 

TOM PERROTTA:  I think with that lovely sentiment … 

STEPHEN KING:  I don't know how lovely it was, but thank you. Thank you very much. Tom, thank you. [applause]

TOM PERROTTA:  Thanks, Stephen, so great. 

TOM PUTNAM:  Before coming down here, we were talking about how polite Stephen King fans are. So we now test that politeness and ask you to just remain in your seat for a minute while Mr. King goes upstairs, back to gather his belongings.