On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Dave and King implement the former’s “potentially lethal school science project” (31). Dave wants to create a “Super Duper Electromagnet” (32) that will pick up huge pieces of metal like cars or train compartments. Dave creates one using a metal spike, magnet, copper, and the power from a wall socket.

Dave rigs up a lamp with the device and asks King to plug it in. When he does so, all the power in their apartment building and the building next door goes out.

King reflects on his first experience with television at home. The family does not get a set until King is 11. He lists many shows and movies that captivated him at the time, such as Robot Monster, Highway Patrol, One Step Beyond, and others. Of his first experience watching this content, he notes, “There was a whole world of vicarious adventure which came packaged in black and white” (34).

King says that in the late 1950s, Forrest J. Ackerman “changed the lives of thousands of kids—I was one—when he began editing a magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland” (35). In 1960, Ackerman spins off the “short-lived but interesting” magazine Spacemen (35). King submits a story to Spacemen and is rejected, but Ackerman keeps the story. Twenty years later, Ackerman brings the story to one of King’s book signings and requests that King sign it.

King publishes his first story in Mike Garrett’s horror fanzine. King’s original title is “I was a Teen-Age Grave-robber,” but Garrett changes it to “In a Half-World of Terror” (36).

The King family moves back to Durham, Maine in the early 1960s, so Nellie can tend to her parents “in their declining years” (36). Her sisters give her this “job,” and in return they send her cash and boxes of clothes each month, which barely cover the family’s expenses (37). Nellie stays in Maine afterwards and gets another job in the same town once her parents die. She doesn’t leave the town until she herself succumbs to cancer. She moves in with David during her final weeks alive.

Shortly after moving to Durham, King gets his first original story idea.

One day in Durham, King’s first original story idea “came sailing at [him]” (38). When Nellie complains that she doesn’t have enough Green Stamps to buy a lamp, King thinks it would be convenient to be able to counterfeit one’s own stamps, and “in that instant a story called ‘Happy Stamps’ was born” (38). In the story, an ex-convict, Roger, begins counterfeiting stamps and realizes the design is so simple that he is actually creating the genuine article. The characters can buy any item as long as they have enough Happy Stamps, and his mother wants to buy a house with six or seven million books of stamps. Though Roger’s stamps are fine, the glue is defective and will turn blue if they are run through a mechanical licker, rather than a tongue. Roger must lick all the individual stamps in order to buy the house his mother wants.

King submits “Happy Stamps” to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and receives a form rejection with a handwritten note at the bottom cautioning him never to staple manuscripts.