Did Everyone Miss This Detail in Stephen King’s Book ‘On Writing’?

The leading book on the craft has fallen so far out of touch with the publishing industry that it’s become the opposite of motivational

My dissatisfaction with Stephen King’s fiction is well-documented.

I find him overly verbose, particularly in his full-length novels, and, for his stellar reputation as a storyteller, he leaves a lot of opportunities on the table.

It’s not that I don’t like King. It’s that he disappoints me and my reading time is finite. I’d just rather read someone else.

Recently, though, I was depressed and drunk and picked up his book On Writing. I’m a writer, I badly needed some motivation, everyone said that it was the best book on the subject, and I’d somehow never even opened it.

King’s recollections of his childhood: Humorous. His depictions of the struggles of being a writer: Relatable. His ability to just keep writing: Motivational.

It really made me think that I could do it too.

But then I made it to the point where King gets his big breakthrough. It’s on page 82. Anyone who knows King’s body of work knows that he’d written loads of short stories before hitting it big with Carrie. They’re also aware that King struggled to write it, didn’t think it would be successful, and actually threw it out before his wife urged him to finish it.

What people seem to have missed, or what people seem eager to ignore, is how King’s debut got published.

Who the Hell is William Thompson?

In On Writing, King doesn’t go into details about the submission process. Instead, he just says, “The manuscript of Carrie went off to Doubleday, where I had made a friend named William Thompson.”

Queue the sound of a record scratching.

If you ask me, that phrasing is disingenuous. King had an “in” at a major publisher. That’s how Carrie got published.

And it’s not like William Thompson was a nobody at Doubleday. He was an editor at the publishing house. A junior editor, sure, but still an editor. Someone with a say in which novels get published and which ones don’t.

I re-read that sentence of On Writing and I got pissed. All of that relatability that I’d had for King as a struggling writer, trying to break into the literary world — all the motivation that the book had built in me — died.

It all just died.

Killed by one sentence.

King’s big breakthrough was because he knew someone.

I read a few more pages of On Writing — the relief that the poor King family got from the initial advance and the thrill of the massive paperback sale — but I’d soured on it. I flipped it onto my end table and haven’t picked it up since.

Why would I? I don’t know those sorts of people. I’m not rubbing shoulders with the insiders. I’m a normie.

A peasant.

A few days later, I was still ticked. Ticked enough that I decided to look more into it. How did this detail get missed by everyone? Or was the issue that it would taint the brand of Stephen King, so it had to be glossed over in his origin story?

Huh.

On Writing actually did motivate me to write.

Would you look at that.

The Waters Muddy But the Message is Still the Same

Looking into the mysterious William Thompson guy less confirmed my frustration than redirected it. King’s description of him as a “friend” in On Writing is inaccurate. Many of King’s stories about his interactions with Thompson don’t jive with Thompson’s version. But what became clear was that Carrie didn’t get published simply because King “knew a guy.”

Which was a relief.

It did, however, get published in a way that is laughably closed off to modern writers, which is somehow even worse.

In an interview with the publisher Suntup Editions, Thompson states that he inherited a different King manuscript from another editor who had just left Doubleday. Apparently King had sent that departing editor a manuscript called Getting It On — which would eventually be published as Rage under a penname — because the departing editor had worked on a book called The Parallax View (probably this one, based on the publication date).

King had thought that Getting It On was similar to The Parallax View and sent the editor his book.

(Incidentally, the reviews for The Parallax View are not good, though it did get made into a movie. Meanwhile, Rage is about a high school shooting. It inspired real-life shootings so King let it fall out of print.)

While Thompson eventually turned down the Getting It On manuscript, he was impressed with King’s chops. He kept in touch with King, who eventually sent him the manuscript for Carrie.

So Stephen King’s big breakthrough stemmed from an unsolicited submission (Getting It On) to an editor at a major publishing house. In On Writing, he doesn’t even have a literary agent at this point. He just put his book in a package and sent it to an editor at one of the biggest publishing houses in New York with a cover letter that said “if you liked The Parallax View you’ll like this one.”

This is just… laughable.

You do that today and your manuscript goes into the slush pile, where it will die. And that’s if it’s even accepted. Most publishers outright refuse to receive unsolicited manuscripts. They go right in the trash.

Though there’s little difference between the trash and the slush pile.

The idea that a manuscript from the slush pile makes it to an editor is preposterous today. It’d be like winning the lottery.

If that’s how Stephen King got his big breakthrough, then it wasn’t because he knew someone on the inside. It was through sheer dumb luck, which might even be worse.

A Very Demotivational Book

There’s a lot to like about On Writing — obviously, as there’s no denying its popularity among people who enjoy storytelling. There’s some great advice about the difference between writing and rewriting, and about cutting out all the words that are not a part of the story — advice that King seems to have forgotten.

But the “feel good” part of On Writing is the idea that, with dedication, persistence, and lots and lots of hard work, you too can make it big.

In today’s traditional publishing world, that part of On Writing tastes a lot like the back of someone’s hand. It’s not motivating: It’s a slap in the face to remind us that things have changed so much that this way of breaking through is closed off as well.

I’m not saying that King didn’t deserve his breakthrough. His writing made Thompson a fan and an advocate for his work.

What I am saying is that the way that the modern publishing industry is designed, King would never get into it today.