How Did Stephen King Change My Life?

“He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.” (Stephen King)

About three years ago I finished reading Stephen King’s magnum opus “The Dark Tower” book series, and it affected directly my way of living.

I had written this after I finished the last novel, and I felt an urgent need to discuss as also talk about the whole story, but there was no one that’d read it; hence, here I am.

I didn’t read the Dark Tower series, I lived it; for two years I engaged on a journey that made me another person. The story goes around Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger of Gilead that is on a quest to the Dark Tower, to prevent it from falling and restore all the good and beautiful things in the universe (it isn’t a spoiler). That being said, one question comes to the mind of who reads this: “What lies in the Dark Tower?”, to the answer of that question the readers must join Roland and his group (Ka-tet for the intimate)on their journey through Mid-World for almost four thousand pages. The seventh and last book is one of the largest, more than 800 pages, and yet I’d read it in 3 days; that I passed those letters on the pages as fast as my eyes could move, willing to know what Roland would find in the tower.

A moment before the climax, King pulls the breaks of the story; he uses a “Coda”, a symbol used on music sheets to send the musician back on some moment of the music, then he starts to speak as an author to its readers. That’s when he gave me the most valuable lesson of my life, I could hear his voice speaking to me as I read, he starts saying that he is satisfied with his story and that he could rest now, but that some of us, those who provide the ears without which no tale could survive for a single day are not so willing. He says that we are the goal-oriented ones that do not believe that the joy is on the journey and not on its destination. I felt bad, and I munched my way over the pages just as he said (only on the final book), I was eager to reach the end, after all, that is what I paid for.

“There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal “Once upon a time.” Endings are heartless. Ending is just another word for goodbye.” (Stephen King)

Before continuing the story, he makes some kind of alert, saying that we may stop there, that we could keep those beautiful images as the last ones, and if we continue, we’ll certainly be disappointed and probably heartbroken. Surprisingly as it seems, I closed the book, I felt that I owed him this, started to think where I was, and realized that it took me two years to read the entire story, but all I could think about was its ending; I started to think every single thing that I did over my life was seeking for its end, but not anymore. I promised myself not to read its ending until I read the final book properly, and I did, I joined Roland’s final part of his quest one more time in order to read its ending.

On Writing

I have been writing since about five years ago, but only about a month that I started here on Medium, and if there’s one thing that I learned from King, it’s that writing for money will make your writing emotionless. Writing makes me happy, and every time I get to the end of some article, a nostalgic feeling comes over me because being here in the middle of the process of creation, that’s what writing is, pure creation. I believe that he made me an enemy of endings, yet, I am thankful for everything that led me to “The Dark Tower”, it literally changed my way of living and seeing things.

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