Write What You Know
King addresses the gap existing between the advice to write what you know and stories that require knowledge no one can know. He suggests that the directive “what you know” be extended to what inside rather than focusing merely on acquired knowledge. Then he uses simple imagery to describe how he writes what he knows:
“I was built with a love of the night and the unquiet coffin, that’s all.”
Show, Don’t Tell
Interestingly, King offers advice on another common directive—“show, don’t tell”—by demonstrative examples of showing throughout the work. He doesn’t explicitly preface such imagery by referencing the advice against telling; instead he reveals the power by repetition:
“The throat doctor donned an interesting gadget that went around his head on a strap. It had a mirror in the middle, and a bright fierce light that shone out of it like a third eye. He looked down my gullet for a long time, urging me to open wider until my jaws creaked, but he did not put needles into me and so I loved him. After awhile he allowed me to close my mouth and summoned my mother.”
Where Stories Come From
King also offers advice on how to get to a story when stuck for an idea. He does this by using imagery to reveal the ways in which ideas for stories are actually always present in the atmosphere around you. No matter what a writer is doing at any given time, even—or, perhaps, especially—under conditions that are potentially among the worst, an idea is just waiting to be extricated:
“There was a brawling stream full of snowmelt beyond the station, and when I came out of the men’s, I walked a little way down the slope, which was littered with cast-off tire-rims and engine parts, for a closer look at the water. There were still patches of snow on the ground. I slipped on one and started to slide down the embankment. I grabbed a piece of someone’s old engine block and stopped myself before I got fairly started, but I realized as I got up that if I’d fallen just right, I could have slid all the way down into that stream and been swept away.”
The Origin Story
Today, of course, Stephen King is a legendary figure. He is one of the most successful writers in history and his books actually get read by people essentially don’t read much of anything else unless forced to do so. For this reason, it is worth remembering that that there was a time not all that long ago when King was an absolute nobody. Every legend has its origin story and the origin story of Stephen King is recollected after the fact with imagery that hardly seems the stuff of mythic rise to power and yet there it is: the very moment that Carrie White and her creator’s successful career as a novelist was born:
“One day he and I were supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls’ shower. I looked around the locker room with the interest of a Muslim youth who for some reason finds himself deep within the women’s quarters. It was the same as the boys’ locker room, and yet completely different. There were no urinals, of course, and there were two extra metal boxes on the tile walls—unmarked, and the wrong size for paper towels.”
