From a New York Times Magazine interview of author Stephen King by David Marchese:
“I can’t understand,” Stephen King said, “why you want to talk to me at a time like this.” Well, for one thing, the prolific mega-best-selling author has a new book out, the novella collection “If It Bleeds.” But to be a little more poetic about it: Here was an opportunity to see how an author who so compellingly depicted a rampaging pandemic — in his apocalyptic novel “The Stand” — and who understands so profoundly what scares us, was seeing the world these days. . . .Why did I want to talk with Stephen King? Because right now, as he himself put it to me, “it’s strange out there.”. . .
You’ve depicted apocalyptic scenarios throughout your work. What’s been interesting or weird to you about how the real world has responded to an event like the pandemic? One thing that’s shocking is how fast things change. Was it only a month ago that people were in stores? To go to the market today, and to see all those people in masks and in gloves. Talk about unreality. In “The Stand,” everything happens so fast that the roads are jammed with cars. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. There’s been very little panic. What there has been — you feel it, I feel it, everybody feels it — is a low, constant fear in the American public. If you sneeze, if you cough, the first thought that goes through your mind is, “Maybe I have this disease.”. . .
I think it’s in “On Writing” where you point out that you’re part of the last generation of writers who can remember what it’s like not to have easy access to screens. Does the way we’ve become wedded to screens have ramifications for our imaginations? It’s so big that I don’t even know. It’s a bit like these two donkeys are walking along the bridge, and one of them doesn’t have anything on his back and the other one is covered with packages and bales and bundles. The first donkey says, “Jesus, that’s quite a load you got on.” And the second donkey says, “What load?” You get used to it. And I don’t know how much time of the day you spend on screens, but for me — I almost hate to say this — I think it would be the majority. I get up in the morning, and the first thing I do is look to see if there are messages or emails. I got involved and that becomes addictive. I don’t know the answer to your question. I know that it has changed the way I work. I’ll be writing and my flow gets interrupted, because I say, “I want to write about a 2000 pickup truck.” So immediately I go to Firefox, and I find myself not writing but looking at different 2000 pickup trucks instead. It’s easy to get distracted. . . .
On the subject of critical esteem, there was a lot of debate about your literary merit or place in the canon back when you were honored by the National Book Foundation. That argument seems to have gone away since then. Why do you think that is? When I started, I was seen as a genre writer, and that’s pretty much what I was. I remember going to a literary-guild party around the time of “The Shining.” Irwin Shaw was sitting in a corner, very gouty and very flushed. He had a cane and was wearing a blue suit. He looked morose. He looked at me, and this sneer came over his face, and he said, “Oh, look, it’s the lion,” meaning the literary lion. I shrank, because I love that guy’s books. I still do. I think part of what happened was I outlived a lot of my real bad critics. I still remember in The Village Voice somebody did a long, debunking piece about my writing. There was a caricature of me eating money that was flowing from my typewriter. I thought, Oh, it’s so dispiriting when you work as hard as you can and you see something like that. I kept my mouth shut. I kept my head down and kept doing the best stuff that I could. When you look around at some of the people who’ve worked in the 20th century, the idea that I would be part of that canon is ridiculous. You’re not going to put me with John Updike, let alone people like Faulkner or Steinbeck. Maybe Steinbeck a little bit. I’ve tried to write as honestly as I could about ordinary people and situations. But I think I basically outlived a lot of the bad critics. Now, I won’t be around to see the final tally. Most writers who are perennial best sellers drop dead, and their work falls off the list. They just disappear. . . .
No one who has written as much as you can have it all be great. How do you tell when a piece of your writing is working or not? I never did anything that I thought was working. When I get in the middle of something, a part of me is always saying to myself, This is certainly a piece of [expletive]. . . .
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