Stephen King and his Personal Failures

In 1966, Stephen King got drunk for the first time on a two-dollar bottle of whiskey in Washington, kicking off a two-decade love-hate-mostly-hate relationship with addictive substances that nearly destroyed him and his family (King, 87). In the shadow of this addiction, King became one of the most famous authors in the country. Fueled by drugs and alcohol King wrote some of the defining stories of modern horror, many of which still capture the attention of millions through their film adaptations (including the smashing success of IT this year). Although King has been sober since the the late '80s, his whole career has been defined by the years he spent in the shadow of addiction.

In the article "Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing up" Jonah Lehrer says that "not all date is created equal...we see what we want to see and disregard the rest" (Lehrer). So too did King disregard the alcoholism that was brewing inside him. He would "build defenses like the Dutch build dikes" (94), an idea consistent with Lehrer's "delete key" that hides meaningful information that the brain does not want to see. So too did Freud write about the repression of uncomfortable truths deep in the subconscious. The key to Freud's work was repressions, "the process (defense mechanism) whereby certain potentially upsetting notions are withheld from consciousness" (Gardner, 61).

Stephen King is unique, however, because he is a writer, constantly calling on his subconscious to combine latent ideas into new stories grounded in the human experience. Thus, King wrote The Shining, the story of an alcoholic author who loses control of himself and begins hurting those whom he loves most. By his own admission, King "had written The Shining "without even realizing that I was writing about myself" (King, 95). As we learned in class, Steve Jobs spent his whole life gathering information, on typography for example, for no reason until it became relevant to his career years later. Stephen King went one further layer into the unconscious mind; he was learning things about himself without realizing it and incorporating those lessons into his writings in a way that appealed to vast audiences with no experiences of the struggles King was going through. 
A final story on King's relationship with his addiction. In 1981, he bought a massive oak desk like he dreamed of owning his whole writing career. For six years, he wrote at that desk, drunk or high, "like a captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere" (King, 100). The desk was huge, it dominated the whole study, but when he got sober King realized that it was a monument to his failure to notice the obvious facts in front of him. He converted the room to a den, invited his family to spend time there, and re-evaluated his life. King ultimately came to the conclusion that he needed to override Lehrer's "delete key" for the good things in life that had also gone unappreciated in his decades of addiction.

Citations
Stephen King On Writing, 1999
Howard Gardener, Creating Minds 1993
Jonah Lehrer, "Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up" Wired, 12.29.09