46 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingOn Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Childhood Trauma
While growing up, King develops as a writer and a person through his early traumatic experiences. When he is very young, King deals with medical issues that are so severe that for most of the first grade, he was “either in bed or housebound” (27). It’s during this time at home that he writes stories in order to fill up the hours. King also endures severe pain as a young child. He repeatedly visits the ear doctor to get his ears drained, and “the puncturing of [his] ear drum was pain beyond the world” (24). Dealing with this sort of repeated pain as a young child shapes his character and forms his imagination as a writer.
In addition to his physical issues, King reckons with other outside forces that test and shape his character. Nellie moves the family around frequently, and King must adapt to his changing circumstances. The family also struggles to pay their bills, which forces King to develop character and work ethic, and also directly influences his story “Happy Stamps.” Once King does begin to write with regularity, he deals with criticism. His teachers ask him why he insists on writing “junk” (50). King learns to cope with all of these hardships and continue writing. Through these experiences, King learns perseverance and dedication to what is important to him.
The Influence of Media on a Writer’s Imagination
King’s imagination as a writer is formed by the world around him. A huge influence for him is media: books, television, and movies. Because he spends so much time at home in first grade, he begins reading comic books and watching TV. Consuming this type of content shapes his imagination as a writer, and he starts to write his own stories. At first, he copies the comics and add some of his own content, but later starts to write more original material.
When he gets older, he starts going to the movies every weekend, where he is primarily interested in, “horror movies, science fiction movies, movies about teenage gangs on the prowl, movies about losers on motorcycles” (45). He particularly loves Poepictures and writes novelizations of them, which he distributes at his high school. By consuming all of this content while he grows up, King forms his imagination as a writer, and these themes continue to influence him into his adulthood. King also says that writers can be too influenced by visual media, and that television, especially, can be a detractor to getting good work done.
Substance Abuse
As an adult, King’s substance abuse shapes both his writing world and personal world. For many years, he denies that he has a problem with drugs and alcohol. This makes him withdraw from the people around him and increasingly sink into secrecy, noting, “Alcoholics build defenses like Dutch dikes” (94). Due to his secrecy, he cannot openly express his emotions and weaknesses. Though he does not acknowledge his issues openly, they nonetheless emerge through his writing, notably in The Shining, Misery, and Tommyknockers. For example, in Misery, “a writer is held prisoner and tortured by a psychotic nurse” (96). The protagonist’s experience is similar to King’s own through his prison of substance abuse. In this way, substances hold King back from living honestly.
However, when he finally does become sober, he realizes that alcohol and drugs were not making his writing any better. Instead, he realizes, “Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around” (101). He reconnects to his central identity as a writer and does not allow substances to get in the way of it.
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