Stephen King interview (1998)

stephen king is the most prolific and best-selling novelist in the world he has written over 30 books in less than 25 years has sold over 300 not 3 300 million of them in 33 languages worldwide he has his own personal book of the month club and ranks number 31 on the forbes list of most lavishly paid entertainers almost all of his novels and novellas have been successfully adapted for television or film including carrie the shining and misery after years of churning out horror stories as the grim reaper of mass market media he has written what he says is a grown-up novel it is called bag of bones and i am pleased to have the author stephen king join me now there tis before we talk about this and and you and lots of other things uh two things i want to ask you about one is as a guy who built a field up there in a baseball park up there in your hometown what do you think of the home run contest and who do you hope does what well i agree with what uh russell baker said in the observer it's not competition it's an exhibition it really doesn't have a lot to do with baseball i'm a red sox fan and we don't have a home run leader this year we have mo vaughn who's hit 37. uh mark mcguire pretty good pitcher up there yeah we got two or three pretty good pitchers we've also got a second baseman named donnie sadler who's only hit three home runs but i think with a little luck we're going to the postseason and mark maguire's team isn't i think i heard a guy talking on the tv and saying that basically americans love home runs because americans are in love with power the concept of power home runs are power but that's not what baseball is about if you ask me to sum up baseball i'd say either strike them out throw them out double play or a suicide squeeze with the runner third nicole granted that kind of strategy it makes the game very appealing to the purest but i bet you if somebody said to you in the offseason we can get mark maguire and it might win the pennant you'd be the first one to say how much is it going to cost well i'm not sure that that's the truth though i think we're probably going to lose our slugger move on but i don't think home run hitters win pennants but clearly they don't the new york yankees have no one that's in the competition and they are having the best season in the history of baseball you have some people this year who've shown amazing power albert bell has come on strong he's hit 47 home runs you've got ken griffey in the american league who's hit 53. then you've got sosa you've got mcguire and of all those players only sami soas is playing for a contender and that's a contention for a while a wild card spot at that but i don't think that the reason the cardinals are not a contender is because they have mark maguire no i think that the reason that uh a whole and world series and and both in the era of mantle and in the era of ruth and it was because they have a power lineup the cards have soft pitching and that's the problem in the major leagues right now and that's one of the reasons that mcguire and sosa have done what they've done go down the list and look who served them up and ask how many of those names you know in terms of the pictures in terms of not many that's right is this the best you've done i think it is i think it might be the best that i've done in fact i'm being modest because it's my tendency to be modest i knew it was good when i was writing it and uh i worked hard on it it's a little bit different it's got a romantic feel to it that some of the other ones don't have and it's got buckets of plot and i just love it there i said it i got it i feel better there you do you felt you weren't i owe you 50 for therapy on the basis you do you do you always you've been doing therapy for how many years oh well i don't bother with therapy i get it all out on the page you go to the psychiatrist you pay him fifty dollars an hour and it's not even a full hour this way people pay me millions it is the racket of rapids yeah a great career as a writer where you can pour out all of your anxieties all of your fears all of your fantasy right right here it's it is a literary version of tom sawyer whitewashing the fence all right what makes this in your judgment now that you have put it out there and said this is the best work i've done well i wanted to write something that really was romantic and i wanted to write something that was a grown-up romance and i chose a writer i've written about writers before i wanted to say one more time this is what creativity is like this is what writers do when they're able to transcend the bounds of reality and get over on the other side into the world where the fantasy exists and this is what the process is like and this is what makes it exciting and this is the way you're able to mold reality but on love ghost stories and i love make believe and here i felt like i was able to wed what was real what was actual with some of the the spooks and the supernatural elements that have made made me happy for a long time and apparently it made some of the readers happy as well it certainly has apparently uh so you create this character is this character is this character your ideal novelist who is he 40 what 41 mike noonan is 40 years old and when the book starts he has said goodbye to his wife yeah he's been a a widower for four years his wife died of a of a brain aneurysm and he's able to finish the book that he's working on and then he's afflicted with a writer's block that grows worse and worse and worse until it's a a panic attack reaction where if he even turns on his word processor and calls up the the program he has projectile vomiting and shortness of breath and palpitations and i imagine there are critics all over america saying it should happen to you king it should happen to you you've never faced it yes i have yes i have i've had writer's block it's the kind of thing that i think you work through as time passes but i think that you know when people say how does creativity work my response is it works just fine as long as you don't examine what you're doing too closely i think that there are certain processes sex is one where the more you think about it the worse your performance becomes sometimes it's just best to rear back and let her rip so i've had it but the last time that i had it in a really serious way was when i was teaching writing courses and thinking about the process of writing instead of doing it so mike noonan is this writer who's got writer's block and in an effort to try and either come to terms with the writer's block or to get over his grief for his wife that he believes is causing it he goes to a town where they have had a summer home and he discovers a woman that he starts to fall in love with who has problems of her own and he also discovers her problems have to do with her father-in-law her problems have to do with her father-in-law who wants custody of her child and that ties into the other plot which is the fact that uh mike noonan's house is apparently haunted by ghosts from the past it's the house that he went to with his with his wife and uh you know i just i i've always remembered with affection 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 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 well you helped people let me see this now you got your camera there right okay this is this is the price on this book dollars 28 eight dollars it is 38 28 bucks is a lot of money to expect somebody to spend on a book it isn't okay it isn't more than you'd spend to go to a movie you and your wife and pay the babysitter at the same time but the first thing that a reader has a right to expect from a novel is to enjoy it to be taken away to another place now i always think of the people we should honor the most among our writers are those that have do the best job of telling the best story that takes us to another place well i think you have to tell a story and why don't we honor those people at the no belt i think a lot of times we do you know when you give a john steinbeck a nobel prize when you give a william faulkner a nobel prize you're creating remarkable characters creating remarkable characters creating remarkable stories if you take a book like the grapes of wrath for instance by steinbeck you have a wonderful story of the jokes 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 uh tv commercial about starkist tuna that used to go uh we want uh tunas that taste good not tunas with good taste i remember that uh tunas that taste good not tunas with good taste when i write a book 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 and make sure i got that on the page yeah yeah would you rather at the end of the game have people say he sold the most books he entertained the most people or he was simply the best novelist ever to come down the pike oh god wouldn't it be great if they'd say that i'd love it if they'd say that but but well okay not everybody can be mark maguire not everybody can be sami sosa i think that i think that there are a lot of writers out there who would love to be able to say at the end of the 20th century which is really close now my work ranks with the work of let's say uh some of those people we talked about steinbeck faulkner sherwood anderson f scott fitzgerald but i think the most important thing is that you take the talent that god gave you and do the best with it that you can that you not sell it short that you not uh slack off that you not take it easy that you just go as hard as you can all the time and that's what i'm trying to do i'm not trying to even go down i wasn't even tending to go down this line but since i don't operate from a predetermined list of questions and i i'll take it where it goes is there anything about um when you think of that when you think of because you have made all the money that anybody could ever hope to make i mean you really absolutely have the autonomous you know and you've been able to do things with your money you build libraries and you build ballparks and you do other things and use ways that we don't even know in which you say i've been a i've worked my butt off i've done something i'm proud of america had some fun with it too i got season tickets for the red sox and for the cleveland indians so yeah yeah the indians too why the indians well i got mad at the red sox a few years ago but that's a different story go ahead we don't want to detour over there don't go there what did they do i can't resist not going there now what did you do with the red sox we had a great manager joe morgan and he used to run a plow on the mass pike so they called him tollway joe and they basically fired him to bring in a younger man so i got mad and said i'm good because they fired joe you got p.o yeah i got p.o they brought in butch hobson instead and i said i'm to my son owen they're building a new stadium called jacobs field in cleveland ohio they're going to call it the jake i'm going to get season tickets right down front i can be right at the head of the line he said dad do it but you'll be a red sox fan until you die or you'll hate yourself till you die so you bought the tickets and you were still a red sox fan yeah that's right yeah i mean how painful was it a few years ago when you watched what happened with the mets you'll nobody will ever know how painful that was who wasn't a red sox fan i can remember where i was clearly on three historic occasions when president kennedy was shot when i heard that princess diana wales was dead and when the ball went through buckner in 1986. it says it right there how much it means i couldn't get it i was in western maine where bag of bones which incidentally is at bookstores everywhere now uh i was able to get this book man if you walk into a bookstore you got 28 dollars you can get this hey listen if you go to one of those stores where they have a sticker on it i bet you could get it for 24. but i was in western maine and the radio reception was terrible so i was still in my car and i was ready to go in and start the celebration it was terrible that was terrible you were ready to go in so you didn't hear it oh i heard it i heard it i was gonna hear the final out and then go in and kiss my wife and say the red sox finally did it were world champions all right a couple things about 28 how much of this of the 28 that's a retail price of a book how much of that goes to the writer i don't know i've got to deal with uh scribner's on that where we split the profits pretty much down the middle i can't remember whether they get the extra coupler percent or i do but uh profits down the middle pretty much so if every dollar comes in to the publisher we give 50 to steve and we take 50 for ourselves wouldn't that be nice that would be the world of worlds but there are expenses for like the publicity the the printing i shared all the expenses too we've got a pretty much of a a co-deal with it finally i backed off from the big advances because of what you were talking about before i don't really an advance historically was an amount of money that the publisher paid to tide the writer over between the acceptance of his book and the publication of the book when the book started to earn royalties and uh that was good if you had a baby you could get the food and you could pay the rent or whatever but advances nowadays and i've taken my share of huge whopping advances and i even earned a few of them out but you get to a point where you say the advance is no longer about paying the rent because i own the house it's no longer about making the car payment because we've got three different cars and they're all paid for what the advance is about in at the end of the day when it reaches the sums that a clancy or a grisham or a king or a danielle steele gets is about me saying to the publisher i need to have all this money because i don't believe the book can earn that much so i drew back i took an advance but it was a small one easily earned back and said let's put the rest down the middle and then that way we're partners in the success of the book and if the book isn't successful you know i'm a partner yeah but you're saying you split the expenses too so this is so you create a corporation to publish this book sort of i'm going to say well no i won't i i've resisted the urge to incorporate and sometimes if you look on the copyright page of a novel you'll see uh copyright by the so and so corporation but i'm not a corporation what i am basically is a cottage industry boy i'd say that yeah why do you think yours have translated to film so well and grisham's have too well clances have too daniel still i'm less familiar with now danielle steele's books have done a lot of different tv they've been a lot of tv mini-series and they've been varying in terms of success i think that producers and filmmakers look for visual imagery they look for simple stories simple bright stories with high conflict but i think that they're also seduced by visual imagery and my books are visual because i grew up on tv i grew up on the movies and i also grew up on images poetry there's the tias alien man ezra powell people love to write about you look at this i mean this is this is the new yorker this is something else something else here bag of bones this is by christopher lehmann from the new york times it goes do you essentially find they get it about you most of these people in a sense that that they somehow get it or what is a giant misconception about you i don't think that there are any giant misconceptions unless it's a misconception to refer to me as a horror novelist i've never denied that i am that but i've never confirmed it either what i am is a novelist i'm a storyteller it's even simpler than that i'm attracted to themes that have to do with uh the bizarre sometimes with the grotesque sometimes the suspenseful but uh people who think of me as a horror novelist haven't read bag of bones uh which is a gothic love story which is a gothic love story or uh the shawshank redemption a lot of people don't seem to realize that that was actually that that movie was made from my story i write what it occurs to me to write the rest is you know they also think that the reason that the reason the movie didn't do better is because of the title yeah i know and and i think there's probably some truth to that so if there's a problem with the reviews on this book and some of the other ones it's the critics seem to obsess about what the book is rather than what the book does and what the book does is to tell a story i think it's a i think it's a good one and why do you tell these stories which is the one question probably you've been asked the most well a lot of the stories vary uh some of them are extremely intense and supernatural like pet cemetery and some of them are not supernatural at all um like stand by me or the misery i think is a straight novel it has strong elements of suspense but you know i think that most literature at the bottom is a suspense story look at the bible uh is god going to win in the devil it's the ultimate suspense story so that if i if i call myself the often stories of good versus evil yeah good versus evil uh conflict story's good versus you who will triumph pardon me who will triumph good or evil that's the ultimate story the ultimate story maybe it's the only story uh oh no there's one other one will the guy get the girl those two yeah and you put them both in the same book i put them both in the same book yeah a couple of questions here this is for naomi right still right what is that well the second book that uh i ever published was a book called salem's lot and it was published in 1975 uh hard as it is to believe my daughter naomi at that time was four and uh now my daughter naomi is 28 and so i still love her just as much and she's a grown-up lady now but uh and it seems like a lot of years i've been in this business for a lot of years um in the end what is i'm preparing to say a whole bunch of cliches like boy time goes by fast doesn't it in i just looked at this what did this is this it's an artist's conception of a summer home called sarah laughs where mike goes back to trying so that's the artist's concept i haven't read the book this is the way he sees it that's the way he sees it and that's the way you saw it no it's bigger it's bigger it's a big you know your place is bigger than this well in in in the book mike's place is bigger than that yeah because i don't think you could have created mike i mean yeah yeah and i don't think you can have a gothic uh suspense story without uh a bigger house manually can't be like a cottage it's got to be bigger you wrote your character as a writer is that mean by definition it has to be part you or can you make some sort of bland statement like every character's part you yeah i was going to get ready to make a bland statement like every character is part me but mike is more me than other characters because he is a writer and i think that the book is told in the first person and that creates a kind of intimacy it also creates the misconception because it is the first person that the writer must be the writer that the writer character must be the actual living writer but in fact i've never had writer's block and my wife is very much alive well you can't contradict yourself in the same interview all right you caught me you caught me i did it i did it all right yeah i it's been a long time since i and i've never had this sort of writer's block that mike has this is cataclysmic right yes it's five years this is world war iii exactly right well this is tormented soul-wrenching absolutely agony high armanius bosch exactly right mark singer begins a piece in the new yorker magazine about you saying quote i'm not asking you to believe in the boys in the basement but you do have to believe that i believe in them right right the boys in the basement are the subconscious guys that do a lot of the work we started to discuss where books come from and he asked me a version of where the idea came from bag of bones and the fact is i don't remember i can tell wonderful stories any writer if if somebody says to me where do you get your ideas i or any other writer will immediately respond by saying well there was this one idea that i got when as though the specifics somehow answered the question but people seem to think that ideas come from an idea store sometimes people say where do you get your ideas i'll say utica there's a little used idea store some of them work for post some work from lovecraft i'm sure there's a little use left in those ideas but actually i was telling mark singer when i did this piece that i think of them as objects that are full and entire like skeletons i don't think of it as creative so much as archaeological my job is to dig them out and get as much as i can whole so that you'll know what it is when i finally get it out of the ground and he said you know that sounds good but i really don't believe it and i said well obviously you have a different take on what the writing act is about because it's real individual i said just believe that i believe that that's the way it works it's like the elves and the shoemaker they come in the night and they dump a little more on my head and i get up the next morning and i write for a while and the story marches along and hey i've been successful so you have to give me my opinion no you do yeah exactly because you know the proof is in the pudding the also but the ideas do come in the middle of the night and they come bouncing around i mean you get up in the morning and you and and somehow an idea a character has advanced between the time you went to bed and time you got up i think that that happens once in a while and i also think that uh that what happens when you sleep is your screen is refreshed it's like by the end of the day you ever noticed if you leave your computer on after a while to save energy or something the screen darkens but if you move the cursor around it immediately brightens up again it kind of refreshes itself i think that when you sleep the very dreaming process i'm just guessing now hey this is all just speculation but i do think that sleeping refreshes the process but yeah i've had a few ideas in my sleep in the end does stephen king want what's the last great ambition well i think that i want to i'd love to have another 10 productive years as a writer and i'd love to have another 20 productive years as a husband and a father i'd like to write some good stories and uh then i'd like to stop before it turns into uh a kind of self-parodying exercise mike says in in bag of bones a couple of times at the end of the day one thing that writing always does is it passes the time and that's true but if that was all it did i don't want to quit writing but i think that if i got to that point i'd like to have the uh self-discipline to put the stuff in a drawer i think i'd love it if people continue to read the books and enjoy the books and i love it if i continue to enjoy writing the books because it is it is a blast you don't know i mean sometimes it takes off and it's just the best thing in the world it's like dreaming with your eyes wide open and i feel very fortunate to be able to do that but i'm just glad to be alive i think i got most of what i want thanks for coming stephen king bag of bones at your local bookstore absolutely buy two buy two of them give one to your best friend absolutely in some cases give one to everybody it's a pleasure back in a moment stay with us

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

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Id: kRL3d0K-adw

Length: 27min 23sec (1643 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2016