You begin by observing, you
have to look, you have to see. I had a very pleasant ordinary childhood,
but of course I would say that, anyway... No I did, my brother and I were raised by a single
parent, our mom, who was-, we were latchkey kids before they were latchkey kids, and we grew up out
in the country and we had the usual friends -and my brother and I were both readers and at
some point along the way, I decided that I wanted to be a writer, so I started to type
up stories on an old typewriter that I had and and I started to send them to magazines and I
pounded a a nail into the wall and I'd get the rejection slips back and I would put them on that
nail and around the time that I turned 17 or 18 the nail fell out of the wall because
there were so many rejection slips on it so I got a bigger nail and if there's any
any secret that I know to success it's if you don't succeed get a bigger nail,
so that's what I did and it worked out and eventually I started to sell a bunch of short
stories to magazines that don't exist anymore because you can get all that stuff on the internet
now, but there were these magazines called Dude and Gent and Cavalier and Adam and Knight and
they were the sort of magazines if you turn them sideways a gatefold fell out of them, but they
paid actual money, and I was working first in a laundry and then I got a job teaching school
for the princely sum of $6400 a year and I had a wonderful idea for a book when I was teaching
school and it was February vacation I had one week and I wrote this novel in one week because one
week was what I had and I decided that I would call it The Running Man and I sent it off to
a Science Fiction publisher who did paperback originals and actually got back a note that said
there is no market for Dystopian fantasies and I thought about that a couple of years ago when The
Hunger Games and all these other books came up and I thought [ __ ] there's no
market for Dystopian fantasies. I was ahead of my time with that. So it was eventually published under the name
Richard Bachmann along with some other books, so it all worked out eventually and
I did sell my first novel, uh Carrie and, uh the advance was $2500 which came in very
handy because we had a very old car my wife and I and we were able to trade it for a Ford
Pinto and later found out that they explode, but it was a new car so what the heck! When you're writing fiction-
what's your first name? Hi Maddie, she said, "when you're writing fiction how do you
create character?" and "How do you avoid creating same old character?"
I think that, I think that the way that I would answer that is first of all
you start with the idea that for most of us, we think that we're we're good guys, we think
we're the good guys, we think we're on the side of angels, and so my idea is everybody has some
part of their character that's admirable... I'm sure that at one time or another Theodore
Bundy helped an old lady across the street. I have a tendency to start totally unjudgmental, I, and that's that
that's part of the benefit of working story, rather than plot our lives develop naturally
and our characters develop naturally over a period of time and they are influenced by a
lot of different characteristics and the way that we look at other people is influence too
over a period of time as we get to know them. Sometimes women that you didn't think were you
know particularly good looking you get to know them, the more you see them, the more you say,
after a while you say, oh that woman is pretty and then a year or two and later you
say, that woman is really beautiful, but I didn't see that at first. Do you
say some guy well he's just a guy, and he's sort of just somebody else that happened to
be at this party or in this dorm or whatever and you get to talk to those people a little bit, the
personality starts to come forward and you start to see the the shadows and the depth of things.
I've got a character in Mr. Mercedes whose name is Holly Gibney and I expected her to be a walk-on
okay she's this 47 year old woman who still lives with her aging mother and she's got psychological
problems and she never speaks above a mumble, in fact she's introduced in the book as Holly
"the mumbler" the first time that my main character meets her is at a Holiday Inn restaurant
where he thinks, she orders a sneeze burger, because she speaks so low she's actually ordering
a cheeseburger, so I thought she was a walk-on, I thought she was a flat character, little by
little, she's become more and more important to me and more fun to write about and I
started to see that, she has an interior life and you begin by observing.
We, I mean you have to look, you have to see, I mean you can't just walk and let it all go
by it's somebody some of this has got to stay you've got to see how people are uh you've got
to look for the person, who when they eat they have a tendency to look down at their plate and
they're tearing their napkins, have you ever seen a napkin ripper? okay, or somebody who's in a
cafeteria and they've kind of like got the straw in pieces? Holly is a lipstick biter, you want
to see them grow, and they do their own thing, if you let them, if you let them do their own
thing and one of the things that drives me crazy about second and third rate fiction is when a
writer will wind the character up and make them go through certain paces and I think why don't
you just go back and cut out paper dolls? I, I've always remembered with affection, the
the first line of Rebecca where, she says, "Last night I dreamt I went to Mandalay," and uh
it's a story about the past all gothic stories are stories about the past and how we hide
secrets, the same way that, I think that most stories about ghosts are really stories
about bad conscience, they're things that come back to haunt us, there are certain politicians in
Washington who could speak very well to that, who have ghosts of their own! So I think that, I think
that ghost stories really serve as moral tales and so that's sort of what I've tried to tell and
the moral tale becomes me, what's the moral? I think the moral is you can't hide evil forever
sooner or later it always comes back to haunt you. This is as contemporary as today's headlines, isn't it? Well I'd like to think that it
is, but those are all things that the, that the book is, I hope what the book does
is entertain. I tried to tell a good story,
I mean if there's one thing you don't worry about
is whether you can entertain, I mean clearly, it's the first thing I worry about when it's me.
Do you really? Yeah, I do, you say to yourself, I don't care if, it's I mean, I'd like for
it to be good, I'd like for it to be good, but mainly I want to make sure it entertains,
but the first thing that a reader has a right to expect from the novel is to enjoy it! To be taken
away to another place, now if you take a book like "The Grapes of Wrath," for instance, by Steinbeck,
you have a wonderful story of the Joads' and just incidentally as you get into that story, maybe you
start to discover some things about social issues or maybe you start to see things from a point of
view you wouldn't have seen them from otherwise, so I always think of that TV commercial about
StarKist tuna, that used to go we want, uh, tunas that taste good, not tunas' with good taste.
StarKist wants tuna that taste good When I write a book or a book like, Bag of Bones
the first thing I say is, let's tell a good story and if my assumption is that, if I like it if
it takes me away, if I can spend three hours and work on it a day and I don't know where that
time went maybe the reader will like it too, but then at some point you're supposed to
stand back and look at the whole thing and say I spent a year of my life thumping
away on this book in this little room, why did I do that? What's it
about? What interested me so much. You write books to find out how you feel
about things, don't you think that's true to a degree. Well you have 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 yeah that's right you got to know more a little bit more than, when you started
you got to have a different view of it. In the case of Misery, what Paul Sheldon
finds out is that 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 better stick to what
he's good at, it's kind of sad but there it is. There was no rationale you go where the story
leads you and in this case it had, I didn't, had no idea it was going to have a dark conclusion,
you know you were mentioning before we got going, Salem's Lot and ,uh, when I started that story
I thought to myself, uh, well this will be the opposite of Dracula where the good guys win and
this in this book the good guys are going to lose and everybody's going to become a vampire
at the end of the book and that didn't happen because you go where the book leads you and
this one just led me into a very dark place. I didn't even want to go there, I want
people to find it out for themselves. When I wrote the shining, I said, there's
a wonderful idea about this family in this haunted hotel and what they really want is the
boy with psychic powers and at the end of the book the hotel will kind of absorb him and then
we'll see the next year, we'll see the whole family as ghosts but it didn't turn out
that way, I , I feel like you have to follow the characters and you have to follow the story
where it leads and the last thing that I want to do is to spoil a book with plot, so you know,
I think, I think the plot, that plot is the last resort of bad writers it's a rule. I'm a lot
more interested in character and situation and you'll follow it where it goes and you know, I got
a lot of letters after Cujo because the little boy died at the end, Ted, his name was Ted and
he died of heat prostration in the car. I got a lot of letters saying
how can you kill that little kid, so anyway I had no idea that Ted
was going to die and I had no idea that Danny and his mother were going to
live, but I was really glad when they did. What advice do you have for young writers to
become better writers? or maybe even novelists? Well you have to write a lot, you
have to write almost constantly, every day and you have to read as much as you
can, if there's one fall or one thing that, I find disturbing about people who profess a desire
to be writers of fiction is that you'll hear them say "well, gee I really don't have time to read,"
...well that's crap! Everybody has time to read, if you carry a book with you, then
sooner or later you probably will read it and you might be doing that instead of watching
Seinfeld on TV but that might not be such a bad thing, I sound like I'm scolding you, I'm
really not what I'm saying is that, I think that practice makes perfect and if you're going
to be a writer, you have to write a lot and you have to write a lot of fiction,
if you want to be a fiction writer.
