“There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station.”
Stephen King
On Writing
Ever since my shoot in Maine last week I’ve had Stephen King on my mind. While I haven’t read that many of his novels, I have been reading his books since my college days. And I’ve read his book On Writing (and listened to his audio reading of that book) several times. His simple challenge to write a 1,000 a day was the push I needed when starting this blog. And while I no longer write the 1,000-2,000 word posts as I did in that first year of this blog, his simple explanation of the importance of writing everyday was an inspiration to me, and in part how I’ve been able to write over 350,000 words on this blog in the past four years.
Which brings me to his doublewide trailer. I doubt he still has a doublewide, or any kind of trailer—but he once did. And that’s important to remember. Long before his writings would earn him a Forbes estimated net worth of $400 million, his roots are more humble.
“I wrote my first two novels, Carrie and Salem’s Lot in the laundry room of a doublewide trailer, pounding away on my wife’s portable Olivetti typewriter and balancing a child’s desk on my thighs.”
Stephen King
On Writing
While every writer has an ideal writing area and situation in his or her mind, I bet no one’s short list includes a doublewide trailer and Olivetti typewriter. But it was what it was and King embraced the situation and forged onward. And back in 1973, before he published his first book, he was teaching high school English in Hampden, Maine making sixty-four hundred dollars a year, and his doublewide was in the town of Hermon.
Ever heard of Hampden or Hermon? Writers come from everywhere. And while some doublewides are pretty nice these days, somehow I don’t think the one King lived in almost 40 years ago was the kind you’ll find in Palm Springs today.
“I was driving a Buick with transmission problems we couldn’t afford to fix, Tabby was still working at Dunkin’ Donuts, and we had no telephone. We simply couldn’t afford it….The biggest deal was that, for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching. I liked the kids—even the Beavis and Butt-Head types in Living with English could be interesting—but by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I’d spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.”
Yet in that laundry room, in a rented doublewide trailer, in a small town in Maine is where King found the time to write his first published novel—the one that launched his career.
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