Why stephen king wrote it

In fact, when It first came out, it was part of a wave of four books King published in the span of just 14 months. Given that kind of productivity, it would be easy to assume that King seamlessly produces doorstoppers in mere months. But appearances can be deceiving: It took four years to write. It weighs four pounds. It contains an infamous sex scene. In it, the main group of and year-old kids—known as The Losers' Club—gets lost in the sewers after temporarily defeating IT.

In order to find their way out, they all have sex with the lone female member of the group as a sort of ritual. Times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to those issues. King has been sober for over three decades now, but in his youth he suffered from addiction to drugs and alcohol. His prolific writing career did not halt during this time; he simply continued writing under the influence.

According to King, The Tommyknockers —which he published after It — was the last novel he wrote before becoming sober. In the novel, the creature known as IT is not a clown; IT is a malevolent entity that takes on forms tailored to the person it's terrorizing.

Although its most common form is a clown, IT also appears as creatures like werewolves and vampires, wreaking murderous havoc on the fictional town of Derry every 27 years. I'm doing the best I can with what I've got.

Shawshank flopped when it opened in theaters in , but it was nominated for seven Academy Awards — more than any other King adaptation. As indicated by its long reign as the highest-ranked film on IMDB , it has gone on to become one of the most popular and beloved films ever made. In his award-winning collection of essays on horror, Danse Macabre , King names three emotions that belong to the realm of the horror genre: terror, horror, and revulsion.

Drawing on numerous writers before him, he posits that never fully revealing the source of the horror is the best way to effect terror upon the mind. King argues that the art of making us terrified about what lies around the corner is all about getting us to identify with the characters who are experiencing the terror. By framing his stories within an interwoven web of narrative perspectives and juxtaposed character experiences, King is able to generate a feeling of interconnectivity, as well as explore the various literary themes that stretch throughout his multidimensional universe, including but not limited to:.

King credits his absentee father for bequeathing him a love of horror via a stash of pulp novels King discovered as a boy. King explores male intimacy through these relationships, frequently challenging typical masculine forms of expression.

He can do this because his boys and men tend to be nerds and outcasts who already exist outside traditional masculine norms. The bookish nerdy kid was relatively uncommon in mainstream adult fiction before King came along; now we recognize such characters as hallmarks of genre literature. King has also been open throughout his career about his struggles with addictions ranging from alcohol to drug abuse to painkillers, and many of his main characters likewise struggle with addiction — either directly, in books like The Shining and Revival , or indirectly: The villain of Misery , Annie Wilkes, is a metaphor for cocaine itself.

This is because King almost exclusively writes and sets his stories there. The town of Derry, for example, where It lives, is based on Bangor, Maine. King uses these locations to increase the verisimilitude of his stories, painting them as all part of the same fictional universe.

In stories like It , he borrows liberally from real places and landmarks, highways and scenery, even real street corners. One popular villain, a recurring supernatural figure who may or may not be the devil, appears throughout the Stephen King universe in various guises. Frequently throughout his books, King will signal that his worlds are all connected by having characters meet characters from other books in passing.

He spells out his essentially hopeful, fundamentally romantic worldview in a interview :. There must be a huge store of good will in the human race. I believe all those sappy, romantic things: Children are good, good wins out over evil, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Yet, believe it or not, the author has no recollection of writing one of his most famous books. Keep reading to find out why. King has been writing horror novels since the s. His first book, Carrie , was published in and granted the author overnight success. No longer did King have to live in a cramped little trailer park with his wife and kids. Soon, he was churning out novels from left to right. Eventually, it got to the point where you could never enter a book shop without seeing one of his novels exhibited by the front window of best sellers.