Earlier I mentioned that author Stephen King has refused to turn his latest work, Joyland, into an e-book, in the hopes that readers will be encouraged to buy hardcopies in actual bookstores. I’m for it, if only there were a bookstore nearby. Since then, King has been making the rounds promoting Joyland and recently did an interview for Parade. He tells Ken Tucker that “I wrote 1,500 words this morning” and “Five pages a day, that’s usually what I get through. It’s obsessive-compulsive more than anything. I’m scared to death that if I leave it alone, the color will go out of it; it’ll start to look fake.” He calls himself “a situational writer. You give me a situation, like a writer gets in a car crash, breaks his leg, is kidnapped by his number-one fan, and is kept in a cabin and forced to write a book—everything else springs from there. You really don’t have to work once you’ve had the idea. All you have to do is kind of take dictation from something inside….”
He makes it sound so easy.
For more on King’s writing habits, check out On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.