YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephen King

lines on the record: 60
first: 2021-10-10
most recent: 2021-10-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Towards the end of each summer Uncle Clay and Aunt Ella, who were not, I think, real elders at all, would bring cartons of canned vegetables and preserves. The house we lived in belonged to Aunt Ethel and Uncle Orin, and once she was there mom was caught. She got another actual job after the old folks died, but she lived in that house until the cancer got her. When she left the little town for the last time, David, my brother David and his wife Linda cared for her during the final weeks of her illness. I have an idea she was probably more than ready to go.”
2021-10-10 · Founders · #210 Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grandma was about 80 at the time, obese and hypertensive and mostly blind. Daddy Guy was 82, scrawny, morose, and prone to the occasional Donald Duck outburst, which only my mother could understand. My mother's sisters had got my mom this job, perhaps thinking they could kill two birds with one stone. The aged parents would be taken care of in a homey environment by a loving daughter, and the nagging problem of Ruth would be solved. She would no longer be adrift, trying to take care of two boys while she floated almost aimlessly from Indiana to Wisconsin to Connecticut. She hated her new job, I think, in their effort to take care of her, her sisters turned our self sufficient, funny, slightly nutty mother into a sharecropper living a largely cashless existence. The money the sisters sent her each month covered the groceries but little else. They sent boxes of clothes for”
2021-10-10 · Founders · #210 Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is another example where he has to get the ability to communicate with no fat whatsoever. What I'm about to read to you takes place over three paragraphs. He tells an entire story. You understand exactly what's going on in his life at this point. The one thing I need to tell you before I read it to you is that his mom's name is Ruth. Don't worry about the other names. Our little family trioka had moved back to Maine so our mom could take care of her parents in their declining years.”
2021-10-10 · Founders · #210 Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hybrids to my mother, and she was charmed. I remember her slightly amazed smile as if she was unable to believe a kid of hers could be so smart. Practically a damn prodigy for God's sake. I had never seen that look on her face before, not on my account anyway, and I absolutely loved it. She asked me if I had made up the story if I made the story of myself, and I was forced to admit that I had copied most of it. She seemed disappointed. Write one of your own. I bet you could do better and listen to the reaction that he has here, something that he's six years old he keeps with his entire life even to this day. I remember an immense feeling of possibility at the idea as if I had been ushered into a vast building filled with closed doors and had been given leave to open any I liked. There were more doors than one person could ever open in a lifetime, I thought, and I still think that.”
2021-10-10 · Founders · #210 Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they move around a lot. His mom never has really a stable job. They really don't have a lot of money. He's also sick. At this point, he's about six years old. He's got a lot of inner ear infections and throat problems. And so he's going to actually be held back one year. But the point of this short story he's about to tell us, the main point here is that imitation precedes creation. So he says I was pulled out of school entirely. I had missed too much of the first grade. My mother in the school agreed I could start fresh in the fall the next year. If my health was good, so when he spent his time, he said I spent time in bed mainly in the house. I read my way through approximately six tons of comic books. At some point, I began to write my own stories. Imitation preceded creation. I would copy Combat KC Comics word for word, sometimes adding my own descriptions where they seemed appropriate. Eventually I showed one of these copycasts.”
2021-10-10 · Founders · #210 Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely sure of this may have farmed my brother and me out to one of her sisters for a while because she was economically or emotionally unable to cope with us for a time. Perhaps she was only chasing our father, who piled up all sorts of bills and then did a run out when I was two and my brother David was four. If so, she never succeeded in finding him.”
2021-10-10 · Founders · #210 Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These biographies. And he says the most important thing is to push through to not become depressed. I try to remember that we're all amateurs at this, and every time I sit down, it's like the first time. I battle doubts all the time about whether or not this thing is working or that thing is working and whether or not the idea is any good. And so that idea where he's talking about every time I sit down, it's like the very first time I've ever wrote anything. I have to constantly battle doubts. I have to make sure I'm going forward. I'm not being depressed. I'm glad I read that paragraph after I just finished that gigantic 500-page biography by Steven Spielberg because what was so mind-blowing to me is the fact that even now after all, you know, he's one of the most successful filmmakers of all the time, Stephen King is one of the most successful writers of all time, they said the same thing. He's like, I have to battle doubts. Stephen Spielberg literally throws up so full of anxiety and worry.”
2021-10-10 · Founders · #210 Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Herodotus, I think we can manage the gap between 1997 and 2000. And here we go actual telepathy in action. You'll notice I have nothing on my sleeves, and that my lips never move. Neither most likely to yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room, except we are together. We're close. We're having a meeting of the minds. That is an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, and the one I had a hard time putting down, which is Stephen King on writing a memoir of the craft.”
2021-10-10 · Founders · #210 Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just never know when you'll want an escape hatch, a mile long line at a Tollbooth Plaza, the fifteen minutes you have to spend in the hall of some boring college building waiting for your advisor, airport boarding lounges, laundry mats on a rainy afternoon, and the absolute worst, which is the doctor's office when the guy's running late and you have to wait a half hour in order to have something sensitive mauled. At such times I find a book vital. If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or another, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library. So I read where I can, but I have a favorite place, and you probably do too. So let's assume that you're in your favorite receiving place just as I am in the place where I do my best transmitting. We'll have to perform our mentalist routine not just over distance, but over time as well. Yet that presents no real problem. If we can still read Dickens, Shakespeare,”
2021-10-10 · Founders · #210 Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is writing? Telepathy, of course. My name is Stephen King. I'm writing the first draft of this part on my desk on a snowy morning in December of nineteen ninety seven. There are things on my mind. Some are worries, some are good things, but right now all that stuff is up top. I'm in another place. This book is scheduled to be published in the late summer or early fall of two thousand. If that's how things work out, then you are somewhere downstream on the timeline for me. But you're quite likely in your own far seeing place. The one where you go to receive telepathic messages. Not that you have to be there. Books are a uniquely portable magic. I usually listen to one in the car and carry another wherever I go.”
2021-10-10 · Founders · #210 Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source