Stephen King: How His Childhood Influenced His Craft
In an interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, Stephen King discusses the impact his childhood had on his storytelling craft.
In an interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, Stephen King discusses the impact his childhood had on his storytelling craft.
Interestingly enough, when asked to speak on this period of his life, King quips, "At some point a lot of interviewers just turn into Dr. Freud and put me on the couch and say, 'What was your childhood like?'”. After referencing one of Gardner’s creatives, he goes on to explain that his childhood was pretty normal… aside from one thing: from a very early age, he always craved the feeling of being scared.
He describes a radio program titled Dimension X which he secretly listened to outside his mother’s bedroom door. She thought it was too scary for King to hear as a child but he says, “she loved it, so apparently I got it from her." This connection to his mother can be related to Freud, whose relationship with his mother was the basis for his theory of the Oedipus Complex. Whereas King’s inspiration was not as extreme, it was his mother’s love for horror that first opened his eyes to the genre.
Both King and Freud seem to use influences from their lives in their creative products. As Csikszentmihalyi states in Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention, “creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other” (63). King perfectly fits this personality description, as his stories stem from his imagination, but are also heavily influenced by his real-life experiences. His inspiration for the book Joyland draws from an image that has always stuck with him, “a boy in a wheelchair flying a kite on a beach”, as well as memories of carnivals and amusement parks from his youth in rural Maine.
In his interview with Gross, King also discusses his belief in God. He explains that he chooses to believe in God, and he makes this distinction clear. Freud also had a strong connection to his Jewish faith, which is another parallel that can be drawn between the two.
Finally, Gross asks King if his near-death experiences and brief addiction to OxyContin sparked a change in his writing. King seemed unable to answer the question directly, stating “I'm on the inside and I'm not the best person to ask if my writing changed after that accident. I don't really know the answer to that.” Though he isn’t exactly sure what effect these experiences had on his writing, he does believe that having near death experiences must cause “some evolution in the way a person works.” It would be interesting to see whether Freud’s use of cocaine had some effect on his work as well.
Overall, it is clear that the way King grew up had an influence on his work. Thanks to his mother, he developed a passion for being scared at a young age, and always kept with him a vivid imagination of the supernatural. Though his work stems from such fantasies, he at the same time stays rooted to his real-life experiences, which have shaped who he is today.
Sources:
Csikszentmihalyi, M. Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York: Harper/Collins. -Chapter 3
Great connections to our class readings!! I enjoy a good King story, so I was glad to learn a little more about his life from your blog. It's funny how disinterested he seems in discussing his childhood (at least as it relates to his storytelling). It never really occurred to me how presumptuous the question is. We tend to assume someone must have had a traumatic childhood to be able to write the types of works that King does, but he is shaped by a variety of complex influences and experiences. Although King's upbringing was a key part of the person he became, it would be simplistic to attribute his success to a strange or somehow scarring childhood experiences.
ReplyDeleteI really like that you brought up Csikszentmihalyi and the imagination versus realistic thinking of a creative. After also researching a lot about King and especially his accident, he pointed out how much his hallucinations, medications, and painful incidents influenced his creativity and subconscious, but realistically says he'd rather not have the accident again and becomes very aware and wise about his actions throughout his life. King is very realistic and humble about his creations, his writing, and doesn't attribute it to anything too crazy.
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