Stephen King

It's the birthday of fiction writer Stephen King (books by this author), born on this day in Portland, Maine (1947). He started in early on the business of writing, when he was six or seven years old, writing stories based on movies he had seen and then selling them to friends. One day, when he was 12 years old, he was exploring the attic above his aunt and uncle's garage, and he found a box full of paperback books, including a book of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft. He spent the next two days reading the book cover to cover, and he said that was "where that interior dowsing rod suddenly turned over, where the compass needle swung emphatically toward some mental true north." From that time on, horror fiction was his calling.

Stephen King has said he writes 2,000 words — about 10 pages — every single day. “On some days, those 10 pages come easily; I'm up and out and doing errands by eleven-thirty in the morning, perky as a rat in liverwurst. More frequently, as I grow older, I find myself eating lunch at my desk and finishing the day's work around one-thirty in the afternoon. Sometimes, when the words come hard, I'm still fiddling around at teatime. Either way is fine with me, but only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words.”

It isn't just his productivity that has made King one of the top-earning authors in the world. He has been years ahead of other writers on technology — in 2000, he started publishing some of his work online only, at a time when e-books were virtually unknown. He routinely turns down big advances, but instead of royalties, he splits the profits from his books 50-50 with the publishers. And while most publishers purchase book rights for 70 years after the author's death, King allows them just 15 years after publication, which guarantees that the publishers work hard to sell his books, since he can find someone else if the deal isn't working.

King's novels include Salem's Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), Cujo (1981), Pet Sematary (1993), It (1986), The Green Mile (2000), and the Dark Tower series (1982-2012). His latest novel out this month is The Institute (2019).

King said, "If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented."

And he said: "I just write about what scares me. When I was a kid, my mother used to say, 'Think of the worst thing that you can, and if you say it out loud then it won't come true.' And that's probably been the basis of my career."