Trivia / Stephen King

• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: There's an unflattering quote comparing the rich, moral complexity of Harry Potter to the relative shallowness of The Twilight Saga often attributed to him: "Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend." While this does reflect King's personal opinions about both books, the quote actually came from blogger Robin Browne.
  • He also never said, "I have seen the future of horror, and it is named Clive Barker." According to Douglas Winter (a friend of King's and author of Stephen King: The Art of Darkness), King actually said, "Well, I haven’t read this guy [Barker], but from what I understand, it’s like what Jann Wenner said: ‘I have seen the future of rock and roll, and his name is Bruce Springsteen.’ Sounds like Clive Barker might be the ‘future of horror fiction.’” Berkeley Books transformed that quote into their famous blurb.^note  And, ironically, King's actual quote contains a misquote, because it was music critic Jon Landau who originated the line about Springsteen, the actual line was "I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen," and it didn't even appear in Wenner's Rolling Stone, for which Landau did some writing, but the Boston-based weekly The Real Paper.
• Fan Community Nicknames: Constant Readers.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: Many of King's novels have been published as these by specialty presses. Some have even premiered as such; both The Gunslinger and The Eyes of The Dragon took years after their limited edition to get published in trade format.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: In 1999, King was struck by a van while walking along a road. His personal brush with death was later incorporated into several of his works, including his Dark Tower series, which he hastened to complete so he wouldn't leave it unfinished.
  • Also inspired the short story of "Memory", as the story was inspired by what King was able to remember and not remember from having the accident.
• Technology Marches On: Reading "Word Processor of the Gods" is hilarious 30+ years after its publication in 1983. The WANG word processor as it's described in the story went for a starting price of $3000, and could cost up to $18k! In the days of $400 desktops, it's funny. Knowing that price got you a whopping 64K of RAM is unbelievable.
• What Could Have Been: The entire 200-page manuscript for his novel The Cannibals vanished midway through writing it. King has never found the missing manuscript, and can't bring himself to start over. He did work elements of it into Under the Dome though.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Self-admitted, in On Writing. He comes up with a basic "What If?" premise and then makes the story up as he goes along, filling in character traits on the fly and never concerning himself with "theme" or "symbolism" until he gets stuck and needs to find a way out. He stated that — aside from The Dead Zone — he dislikes his "plotted" books such as Rose Madder and Insomnia, calling them "stiff, trying-too-hard" novels.^note  The heavy plotting was his attempt to tie both into his then-ongoing Dark Tower series, which was for naught as the latter ended up being hand-waved away in-universe while the former had no relevance However, this approach sometimes backfires on him, leading to criticisms of his rushed, sloppy endings that he often agrees with.
• Wrongfully Attributed: As noted on the main page King himself shares his name with former Iowa Representative Steve King ^note  albeit the politician King spells his name "Steven" rather than "Stephen" , something which has caused him some consternation given the latter's history of making racist statements.

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