Inside the Storytelling Approach of Stephen King

Today's essay is a collaborative piece between me and my friend Molly Donovan. We're thinking about creating a series called The Methods of Masters, where we'd research and collect the best insights from legendary storytellers about their creative process and philosophies. Our aim would be to further demystify the creative process and continue pushing you to make work that matters. This is the first, test piece.

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In erudite literary circles and journals, much breath has been spent and ink spilled debating this one question: Is Stephen King a "good" writer?

Some of fiction’s fiercest critics have pulled their noses from the few books they deem "worthy" long enough lambast King’s 64 novels and 200-plus short stories.

(Forgive me, but I've been spending time podcasting this week, wherein you need to "signpost," that is, preview and also reflect back on key points, so a listener doesn't miss them. So I need to cut in quickly to say: SIXTY FOUR NOVELS AND TWO HUNDRED SHORT STORIES ARE YOU FOR REAL???)

(Pause. Pause. Pause.)

(Xylophone transition music.)

Anyway...

When King won the National Book Foundation award in 2003, critic Harold Bloom chastised the foundation’s decision-makers in The New York Times, saying, “That they could believe that there is any literary value [in King’s works] or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy.”

Bloom and others work themselves into a frenzy as they debate whether King's writing qualifies as “literature.” Is he a “genre” writer, or isn’t he?

In response, King might argue—and millions of dedicated readers and fans might agree—it doesn’t really matter. Whether or not Stephen King’s works belong in the annals of “great literature” is irrelevant.

What matters is this: the guy knows story.

Over the course of more than five decades (that's 50 years for those keeping score at home #signposting), King has identified what it takes to tell a good story and become an effective storyteller. (Remember: these are not the same things. A good story might entertain and hold attention, but an effective storyteller arrives at the point. It delivers on the promise. It sparks action -- whether that's a change in perception or understanding, or something else.)

It's clear that King understands that difference between "good stories" and effective storytelling. His ability to tell a good story stems from a keen understanding of details that transcend genre, while his ability to be an effective storyteller is derived from a combination of process and attitude -- and the nebulous magic at the intersection of those two things.

The lessons learned from King’s rather particular powers are applicable to anyone—fiction writer, podcast host, content marketer—who understands the value in spinning stories that sit with the audience, long after the final sentence.

Without further ado (and man, if I don't love me some ado), let's learn about the method of the master, Stephen King.

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King’s bedtime habit

“My method for starting anything is I tell myself the story before I go to bed at night, before I go to sleep,” he said. He repeats this nightly process for nearly a year.

“A little piece of grit, and it makes a pearl after a while,” he says. “You just have to give it time. And if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen, but a lot of times it does.”

And look, maybe you aren't trying to craft your next novel or even your next five-minute bit for a paradigm-shifting keynote, but you're likely still consumed by ideas and inspirations and goals and desires in your creative work. It can be hard to know where to begin. King's belief was that writing requires us to walk away from our ideas, then see which comes running after us.

“I think a writer’s notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas,” he said. “My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around.”

You can't shake it. It nags at you. King's best stories started that way. Over the span of weeks or even months, the idea just came running after him whenever he'd set it aside.

Eventually, the idea would even outpace King, and at that point, the next piece of his method would take over.

Where the story leads, you will follow

It seems reasonable that plot would be the most essential storytelling element for a purveyor of horror, and King’s plots have the power to grip and chill in equal measure. For King, though, plot is not paramount; rather, characters and situations drive the story.

(This is arguably the most relatable part of King's entire process to our work, where we don't always have the most groundbreaking action sequences in the stories we tell -- to say nothing of horrifying monsters. Unless you write anonymously. Because then your boss might fit that description.)

“You have to follow the characters, and you have to follow where the story leads," said King. “The last thing I want to do is spoil a book with plot. I think plot is the last resort of bad writers as a rule. I’m a lot more interested in character and situation.”

As he wrote in his 2010 memoir, On Writing, “The most interesting situations can usually be expressed as a What-if question: What if vampires invaded a small New England village (Salem’s Lot)? What if a young mother and her son became trapped in their stalled car by a rabid dog (Cujo)?”

King’s most famous stories don't necessarily feature the grandest narrative arcs so much as compelling characters placed in a situation fraught with stakes and questions and tension. Using this approach, King writes stories which are about much more than a series of frightening and fantastical events. At their core, his stories address deeper human themes.

Carrie is about loneliness, abuse, and the dangers of ostracizing others. Cujo is about loyalty and the intricate relationship between violence and madness. The Shining is about mental health, substance abuse, and the complicated relationships among family members. In King’s writing, he focuses on placing richly developed characters in uniquely frightening situations, then allows the plot to unfold organically. Where the characters and situations seem to lead, the writer follows. And so do we, glued to our seats and screens, dying to see what happens next.

And speaking of dying...

Murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street

“Realistic” might not be the first word that comes to mind when contemplating King’s canon, and yet an element of truth provides a through-line that ultimately underpins the terror he creates. As author Ruth Franklin wrote, King has perfected the following scenario: “An ordinary person, through chance or weakness or plain bad luck, opens the wrong door and lets evil waltz in.” It’s that artful blend of the ordinary and extraordinary that produces shivers.

King's stories don't involve celebrities or the President, just like ours usually don't (or shouldn't) be Yet Another Story About Apple, Elon Musk, and Famous Influencer #61. Instead, King's stories (and ours) center on ordinary people. The difference is, for King, he puts them in a situation where they must grapple with something extraordinary. What if our stories did too? Difficult or profound moments really do happen to the most "ordinary" of people. It's just that, in our interviews with experts and stories of others, we rarely dive deep into those moments, preferring instead to remain at 30,000 feet, fielding generalized advice or tweetable, fortune cookie-like soundbites.

Work is meaningful. Routines contain emotions. Find those things, and explore these parts of the story which too few in our position seem to try doing.

Even if we don't accentuate the tension or emotion of it all (though we should), we can at least describe the actual sequence of events more vividly. That alone makes for a more nuanced and enjoyable story.

​In King's words, “Bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do—to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.”

Subjects aren't flat. They're dynamic. Because people are too. That's what makes King's writing real, despite the fantastic beasts his subjects find. Revealing the contradictions or dynamism of someone who could end up flat is why King's characters seem to leap off the page. Because they are written to be three-dimensional. To be real.

“The job boils down to two things,” he wrote in On Writing. “Paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth about what you see.”

Two on the hook

First impressions matter, and perhaps nowhere more than in telling a story. How many books have been abandoned, how many movies switched off, how many podcasts skipped because an opening failed to impart the emotional resonance needed to entice a reader, viewer, or listener to stay?

“There’s one thing I’m sure about,” said King in an interview. “An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.”

How often do we botch ours with something expected or mundane? How often do we even try to revisit and edit that part of our work?

For King, the best opening lines are infused with the story’s voice—the combination of style and feeling that creates the story’s emotional foundation. Those lines hook two people: the reader and the storyteller.

“You can’t forget that the opening line is important to the writer too. To the person who’s actually boots-on-the-ground. Because it’s not just the reader’s way in, it’s the writer’s way in also, and you’ve got to find a doorway that fits us both.”

Being entertaining is a sign of respect

“They should all be entertainments, you know,” King once said of novels. “If a novel is not an entertainment, I don’t think it’s a successful book.”

That idea—that a novel should be entertaining—seems like it shouldn’t be a controversial one. And yet those same critics who relegate King’s novels to a “lesser” category might argue that a novel need NOT be entertaining to be considered successful. These pundits might instead value the feel and flow of the prose and the literary merit of the subject matter over the story’s ability to entertain.

As a master storyteller, though, King understands that the commodity in which he trades is time—and for his readers to lend him theirs, he needs to compete with an ever-growing volume of attention-grabbing media.

For those who, like King, are pursuing excellent storytelling in their given medium, entertainment is table stakes. More than that, infusing entertainment into a story is a gesture of respect to the story’s audience. By focusing on entertainment, the storyteller is tacitly acknowledging the exchange of time and attention for something of value to the audience.

It starts with dead fish and monkey houses

King is generous in his responses to those who seek his counsel and liberal in his advice, and he willingly shares the details of almost everything. (Of the question “where do you get your ideas,” King once said, “I don’t know, man! And if I did, would I tell you?”)

The recipe to King’s storytelling success lies at the intersection of his process and his attitude—both of which have been honed and refined over more than 50 years of working at this craft. As I've written before, storytelling is both a skill and a posture. It is both a mastery of the act of writing and the way you carry yourself, see the world, and adjust your habits accordingly.

As King said, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” I don't think we can help but change our posture when we're reading a lot of things that inspire us. Underrated as it's become in this world overflowing with tips and tricks, osmosis remains the best way to improve your creativity.​

Before he ever published a story, King was a voracious reader. His appetite for the written word helped him learn good writing through osmosis—and it helped him define and refine his own particular style. It's a lot easier to cook an original dish if you've sampled lots of flavors in your life.

Endowed with the confidence and passion needed to tell stories professionally, King devised a process that forced him to treat storytelling like the job it is. Like so many pros, he writes daily, even when inspiration feels difficult to grasp. As he says, “All I know is that I turn on the machine, and there’s always that first 10 minutes that’s like smelling a dead fish or walking into a monkey house."

He continues, “And then something will click a little bit, and that leads to something else, and then it’s like ch-ch-ch-ch…and then the world, the normal, mundane, kind of stupid world…all that’s gone.”

To King, falling into that rhythm can be addictive—but he cautions against living for the adrenaline rush that comes when the sentences fall into place. In his words, “Don’t wait for the muse…Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ‘til noon. Or seven ‘til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up.”

Ultimately, that predictability seems to be the part of storytelling that King loves best. Unlike that popular notion that most writers love "having written" more than they love actually writing, King is all about the process. “For me the fun of writing novels isn’t in the finished product, which I don’t care about,” he has said. "They’re things that are done, but I love the process.”

King’s love for the process is indicative of the other element that makes him a master storyteller: his attitude. He operates from a combination of joy at what he gets to do and reverence for the slog of it all. This serves a dual purpose in shaping his attitude: he focuses on the process which leads to his best work, while simultaneously shielding him from criticism. Because if all you care about is the process, you tend not to obsess over the critics.

“I think that if you spend too much time worrying about what the audience is gonna like…they’re not gonna like anything that you do."

The best way to knock down a wall is to find the bricks that budge

“I just look for ideas that I really enjoy—something I really want to live with for a while," Kind said. "And I get into it most of the time, and then I just have a ball.”

That, perhaps, is the central tenet of King’s writing: he weaves stories not for the money they earn, not for the fame they attract, and not for the chance to be considered a “serious” writer of literary fiction. He writes because he loves stories, and he loves telling them. And it's so tempting for us to say, "But the writing I do needs to yield a return."

Of course! How do you think professional writers earn a living? I always marveled at a marketer's ability to say their content was somehow higher stakes than that of a full-time creator who literally needs to manufacture 100% of the results themselves -- from awareness to affinity to action. They don't need followers or leads. They need money. They need to get paid. And their legacies feel fully caught up in their ability to remain professional writers.

It doesn't get higher stakes than that.

And yet we have the audacity as marketers or other professionals to downplay what King says as just an artist talking about meaningless stuff, as if he doesn't need results and we do.

Ridiculous.

When we find joy in the process, not just end results, we tend to see better end results. We applaud professionals who "run through walls," but it's far easier to push through obstacles if you find the parts that seem to slide forward naturally.

“I did it for the pure joy of the thing,” King said. “And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”

King shrugs off the noise and merely writes. Maybe that's the point.

Maybe that is the most impressive element of King’s storytelling—and perhaps it explains why he doesn’t tell stories for the awards or accolades, and why he can ultimately shrug off the barbs of the Blooms and other high-brow critics. He keeps it simple. He does one simple motion, then sees what happens after.

He walks away from ideas, then sees which comes running after.

He puts an ordinary person into a horrifying scenario, then sees where the story may lead.

He sits down to write a bunch of bad stuff, then sees what starts to emerge that's usable.

He starts by pursuing the most joyful parts, then sees how much of that feeling can seep into the rest of the work.

Regardless of whether you find joy in the same types of stories or same parts of the process that fascinateStephen King, odds are you find joy in something about your process. It’s there, in that place, that you should begin.

If you adore clever intros, start there.

If you love creative callbacks, craft the book-end first: the opening idea and the callback to close out the piece. Then fill in the middle.

Maybe you're a lover of analogies, like a dog that just found a stray sock when his owner wasn't looking. Start tossing that sh*t in the air and have the best damn day!

It's so easy for our imagination to run towards the end, towards results and the responses of an audience. "What if they...?" We anchor to outcomes, but we forget that the process towards those outcomes is really all that we can control. We control the crafting of the work, not anyone's response to it.

Embracing that is freeing. Even if the rest feels a little bit -- oh, I don't know -- scary.