Does King really not have control over his stories?

[Daghain]

Something I just read in Bev Vincent's book (and that I've read in other places as well) made me want to post this topic.

Do you really believe King has no control over his characters? Or do you believe that he uses that as an excuse for things he knows his readers will not be happy about?

As an (unpublished) writer, I have to agree with him. I've written many a story where I totally knew where the characters were going, only to have them laugh in my face and take off in a different direction.

So, which is it? Truth or excuse? I'm interested in your thoughts.

[Wuducynn]

I've been a King fan for most of my life and I've never known him to be a bullshitter. He's been straight with his fans, so I have no reason not to believe him when says that. On and off all my life I've read various things where he has said - "Well I didn't want it to happen that way either but it just came and I had to go with it."

[Daghain]

See, that's how I feel. As I said, it has happend to me. I've had a story 90% written in my head, and then the characters take over, somehow. Damn them!

Generally, though, they seem to know better than I do. Go figure.

I too take King at face value when he says "Hey, I had no idea." I am aware of the phenomenon.

[Jean]

As an (unpublished) writer, I have to agree with him. I've written many a story where I totally knew where the characters were going, only to have them laugh in my face and take off in a different direction.

that's the answer, isn't it? Many authors confessed of the same, including Leo Tolstoy.

[Daghain]

Wow. Hadn't thought of him. But yes, you say true, I say thankya.

I knew I could count on you for a good answer.

You should know how much I respect your opinion, Jean.

I may not always agree, but you never disappoint me.

(Actually, most of the time I DO agree with you.)

[Jean]

[Letti]

To answer to the question: Nobody does.
Anyway it's a damn good thread.

[Daghain]

Aww, bearhugs from Jean and a good thread from Letti.

I can die happy now.

[Darkthoughts]

I get that too - sometimes I'll even have an idea for a story, a general direction - and then the specifics will come to me in a dream. I definately believe we all have some kind of subconcious or even otherworldly muse working for us

[Matt]

I will play devils advocate here and say that authors have a "general" idea of where their characters are going. The specifics will always change with the writing of course.

I hope the below isn't a spoiler, I tried to write it so it wouldn't be

For instance--I fully believe that Rowling was unclear until the end weather or not Potter would die--but she had to know that the scar would be part of the end and put it in at the very beginning.

For an author to have a "structure" for their book, I think they do have to have an idea of the overall story beginning middle and end. Obviously not anything specific because that can be taken in any direction through the writing.

[Darkthoughts]

I agree Matt, but I think what SK says is that sometimes he'll be thinking "Ok, so this storys starting at a, passing through b and ending up in c - but he'll start writing and suddenly the storys taken him beyond b and c and way off into w - y'know?

I think most authors are content to let the specifics work themselves out, but really clever storytellers, like Sai King, aren't afraid to stray off the beaten track if the story wants them to.

[Matt]

I totally agree, the details (like life itself) are always changing

[Odetta]

I think he would have control over characters in short stories, as he probably knows how it's all going to work out. But in longer works... I think the characters AND plot lies may have a mind of their own.

[Randall Flagg]

Of course King has control over his characters-he writes the stories. I think what he means is that whether he or the reader likes it or not, to remain faithful to the story and not just sell out, certain times a character or plot goes in an unpleasant direction. Here is a quote from King about the writing of Pet Semetary:

The book started off as a lark, but didn’t finish up that way. It stopped being a lark, when I realized that the kid would have to die-and that I had never had to deal with the consequences of death on a rational level.
I have always been aware of the things I didn’t want to write about. The death of a child is one-and the death of Tad Trenton at the end of Cujo was bad enough, but I didn’t have to deal with the aftermath. And I always shied away from the entire funeral process-the aftermath of death. The funeral parlors, the burial, the grief, and, particularly where you are dealing with the death of a healthy child, the guilt-the feeling that you are somehow at fault. And for me it was like looking through a window into something that could be.
I decided that, if I was going to write this book, perhaps it would be good for me-in the Calvinist sense-to go through with it, to find out everything, and to see what would happen.
But in trying to cope with these things, the book ceased being a novel to me, and became instead a gloomy exercise, like an endless marathon run. It never left my mind; it never ceased to trouble me. I was trying to teach school, and the boy was always there, the funeral home was always there, the mortician’s room was always there.
And when I finished I put the book in a drawer.

[Darkthoughts]

Thanks for that RF, I've never read that before and I'm glad he felt that way. Pet Semetary bothered me for the same reasons.

[Matt]

Seriously, that is an amazing quote

[Randall Flagg]

Here is quite a bit more, from Stephen King: The Art of Darkness by Douglas Winter:

In 1979 King was serving as writer in residence at his alma mater, the University of Maine at Orono. His rented house in Orrington bordered a major truck route-a road that seemed to consume stray dogs and cats; in the woods behind the house, up a small hill, local children had created an informal pet cemetery. One day, a neighbor informed King that a passing truck had killed his daughter’s cat, Smucky. King was faced with the disconcerting task of burying the cast in the pet cemetery and then explaining to his daughter what had happened:

My impulse was to tell her that I hadn’t seen him around; but Tabby said no, that she had to have that experience. So I told her, and she cried and cried……

The next day….we heard her out in the garage. She was in there, jumping up and down, popping these plastic packing sheets and saying, “Let God have His own cat. I want my cat. I want my cat.”

It was on the third day after the burial, he reports rather ominously, that the idea for a novel came to him. What would happen, King wondered, if a young family were to lose their daughter’s cat to a passing truck, and the father, rather than tell his daughter, were to bury the cat on a remote plot of land-something like a pet cemetery. And what would happen if the cat where to return the next day, alive but fundamentally different-fundamentally wrong. And then, if the family’s two year old son were to fall victim to another passing truck….The book would be a conscious retelling of W.W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw’ (1902), that enduring short story about parents who literally wish their son back from the dead.

When ideas come, they don’t arrive with trumpets. They are quiet-there is no drama involved. I can remember crossing the road, and thinking that the cat had been killed in the road…and [I thought], what if a kid had died in that road? And we had had this experience with Owen running toward the road, where I had just grabbed him and pulled him back. And the two things just came together-on one side of this two-lane highway was the idea of what if the cat came back, And on the other side of the highway was what if the kid came back-so that when I reached the other side, I had been galvanized by the idea, but not in any melodramatic way. I knew immediately that it was a novel.

That night King dreamed of a reanimated corpse walking up a nd down the road outside of the house; he began to think about funerals, the modern customs surrounding death and burial; “I said to myself, ‘If anybody else wanted to write about that, people would say that he’s really morbid, ‘ But I got a reputation. I’m like a girl of easy virtue-one more won’t hurt”.
But it did hurt. When King completed the first draft in May of 1979, the book he had come to call Pet Sematary (using a child’s spelling) was put away. He didn’t wish to work on it any further; the novel was tinged with anxieties about his youngest child, who it had been feared-fortunately, incorrectly-was hydrocephalic, and his difficulties in coming to grips with the implications of the death of a child.

The book started off as a lark, but didn’t finish up that way. It stopped being a lark, when I realized that the kid would have to die-and that I had never had to deal with the consequences of death on a rational level.

I have always been aware of the things I didn’t want to write about. The death of a child is one-and the death of Tad Trenton at the end of Cujo was bad enough, but I didn’t have to deal with the aftermath. And I always shied away from the entire funeral process-the aftermath of death. The funeral parlors, the burial, the grief, and, particularly where you are dealing with the death of a healthy child, the guilt-the feeling that you are somehow at fault. And for me it was like looking through a window into something that could be.
I decided that, if I was going to write this book, perhaps it would be good for me-in the Calvinist sense-to go through with it, to find out everything, and to see what would happen.
But in trying to cope with these things, the book ceased being a novel to me, and became instead a gloomy exercise, like an endless marathon run. It never left my mind; it never ceased to trouble me. I was trying to teach school, and the boy was always there, the funeral home was always there, the mortician’s room was always there.
And when I finished I put the book in a drawer.

In a television interview, King unwittingly sparked rumors that the book was too frightening to be published:

It was the first time I had ever been asked the question; “Did you ever write anything too horrible to be published?” And this book came to mind:

Tabby had finished reading it in tears, and I thought it was a nasty book-I still think that it is a nasty book. Twenty years ago, Pet Semetary would not have been a publishable novel…because of the subject matter and theme. Maybe I don’t have the guts for that end of the business of horror fiction-for the truths.

[Daghain]

Thanks, Jerome, for all that. I had a vague memory of most of it.

Still. I HAVE had my characters laugh in my face and go off in a totally different direction, and it seems King did, to extent that he did NOT want to deal with the aftermath.

[Mattrick]

In my book the characters were different than I had intended. At first they were all modelled, skeletonized from people I knew and their problems. Over time they developed a life of their own. What I had in mind for the ending ended up happening halfway through the book, opening a whole new direction for it to take,

which is now also concluded.

I can understand what King said about killing a child. One of my characters was seven and I thought for the longest time he was going to live to the end. Well, it didn't happen and the end result wasn't very pretty at all. Fortunately I wrote it in a way where him getting torn to pieces wasn't shown, you just see the body afterwards.

My main character has turned out to much stronger with a greater will for survival than I had pegged him for. I think things may turn out nice for him after years of pain and agony. But his number will come up and it will prophetic.




I've heard King wrote a book that was too scary and wasn't going to have it published until after his death. Anyone know anything about this?

[Matt]

I had one that I was sure was going to die and then didn't.

I can see how situations change in a story but the idea that they have a mind of their own has always been lost on me a little bit because in the end, I could have killed that character, the story was just better the way it went.

[Darkthoughts]

I have another quote here about King's writing, from Joe Quesada (NY Comic Con 24th Feb 2007) thats rather more in support of the theory that King is maybe tuned into something greater than himself (they are discussing writing the Gunslinger Born comics):

"...we discussed the story...and [Stephen] just sort of spoke.
And there was a three-act structure that just came out, and it was literally just floating up there to grab it. Just grab it, and here you go. I've never seen anything like that, and I'm not really a spiritual kind of person, and all that higher power kind of stuff...but there was really, I didn't know what you were tapping into, but it was just amazing to see this flow of story that was coming out of Mr King - Stephen...And at that moment I understood exactly where all your success came from, and where all these incredible stories that I have enjoyed came from."

I thought that was pretty wild

[Daghain]

That's cool.

[Adumbros]

Something I just read in Bev Vincent's book (and that I've read in other places as well) made me want to post this topic.

Do you really believe King has no control over his characters? Or do you believe that he uses that as an excuse for things he knows his readers will not be happy about?

As an (unpublished) writer, I have to agree with him. I've written many a story where I totally knew where the characters were going, only to have them laugh in my face and take off in a different direction.

So, which is it? Truth or excuse? I'm interested in your thoughts.

as another (unpublished) writer, I concur, as I have shown many times in other threads. A writer does not have control. To put it in a way that the layman can understand, I give you this:

A writer is God to his characters, right? Misery shows us this. And God, our God, created us. Does he have control over what we do? Fuck no! He gave us free will, and the same is true for writers. The only way a writer has control over his characters is if he removes free will, and if he does that, he produces a stagnant, boring, predictable tale. Such writers are not truly writers at all; they are merely talespinners (or, as I constantly argue, AUTHORS. yes, i consider it a derogatory term when it is used on me; i find it a professional term, pompous and pretentious as hell. an author writes to get paid. A writer, if he's lucky, gets paid to write. Or, to be more accurate, gets paid by what he writes). It is more enlightening, if not to the reader, then certainly to the writer, to let the tale spin itself. Ask yourself this: how many times were you absolutely certain Harry Potter was going to die? Multiply that by infinity, and that's how much more Rowling believed it, let me tell you. A true writer suffers more from the tale than anyone else, again, same as God (speaking of which, am i the only who has noticed how deep-founded of a faith King has rooted, both in himself and his works?).

To touch lightly on that second part; OK, all you writers on this thread, gimme your pipe and let me put this in it for you to smoke on:

Say you're an author. You would be quite prone to such behavior. You would know that the fans are gonna howl for your head if this happens or that happens. So instead of making merely an excuse, you, as the untalented asshole you are, would flaunt it like your latest conquest from the streetcorner. You would go public with it well before it happened, and you would take delight in informing people about it, because that's what works for those pretentious bastards known as authors. Then, you would some such cop-out excuse, trying to using the "writer's creed", when, in fact, the whole world would know that, as an author, you hold no such right.

Now, say you're a writer. Different scenario. You would be strolling happily along, thinking, you know, hey, we're gettin pretty close to the end, and what the fuck do ya know, even though i thought back in book 4 of this 13-book set that it would never happen, i thought i was gonna be killing so-and-so off back then and that they would then all start to drop one by one, somehow, he we are, Book 13, Chapter 45 of 47, and everybody's still kickin'! The fans are gonna fuckin LOVE this shit! And then, astounding you, the characters, the fans, hell, everybody, the final dungeon (or whatever the final obstacle may be), HAS to have a guardian of some sort, and you, the characters, the readers, hell, everybody, have been skipping so happily along, so delighted by the fact that there have been few if any significant casualties, that you, the characters, the fans, hell, everybody, have forgotten or overlooked that fact. Now, here they come, 'cause guess what fucker, you're too close for comfort now, and to hell with one guardian, you got three; two incubi and the motherfucker whose haunted you throughout the story, and they take out 2 of the 11 main characters; and it's not over yet, 'cause even though you got by them, that was just the drawbridge, and now, at the very door of this atavistic structure, you find yoursleves w/o time to even lick your wounds, 'cause here come the two legendary dragons that used to guard it back when it belonged to the good guys, because your faithful antagonist has twisted them by some evil sardonic magic called the nefas sanguinus spell (look up your Latin, kiddies); and now 5 more of you are down, 3 dead, 2 severely wounded but gamely pushing on, and although there's six of you left, there's really only four, and the writer, the characters, the readers, hell, everybody, they're all fuckin stunned, because this wasn't supposed to happen, how the hell could this happen?!, and all of sudden the odds look like a great big steaming pile of shit, not least because of the fact that the main character of the tale was just mortally wounded by his long-presumed-dead sister in an act of stunning betrayal; after all, didn't she die for him?, and now she carries him off into the darkness, and there are 5 of you left to try to finish what he started, and oh god, why does the night suddenly feel so long?

[Bev Vincent]

A writer has a certain amount of control, but I've had things happen in my books that I didn't expect to happen. In my most recent novel, a character ended up dying when I thought she might end up being the villain. The character didn't choose to die against my will, but all of a sudden I realized that was what needed to happen. On the other hand, if her death had written the novel into a corner, I could have backed up and reconsidered that choice. The development of characters over the course of the narrative does change the direction of the story somewhat, but I don't believe the characters take over. They just create a direction that becomes more and more inevitable. I don't believe in the notion of an absolute truth in a story -- that there is only one way it has to go -- but I do believe in the notion of lying in a story -- forcing things to go a certain way when that is against everything the characters and circumstances demand.

[Ves'Ka Gan]

I don't know, Matt, the HArry Potter example is a good one, but just last night, while working on a project of mine I realized I had unintentionally foreshadowed something on the first page. It just sort of came out & hit me in the head that it was a good bit of foreshadowing for an event that I had no idea was going to happen until I was writing it.

Now maybe that's the subconcious guiding me through--or maybe its a coincidence. Either way--I think that King is beign straightforward and that the characters in stories often pick up and start walking when the author has told them repeatedly to SIT DOWN!