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- 📝 Stephen King’s Writing Routine
📝 Stephen King’s Writing Routine
"20 hours a day, I live in the same reality that everybody else lives in. But for four hours a day, things change."
Famous Writing Routines
February 23, 2024
Welcome to Famous Writing Routines, where we explore the daily habits, writing process, and work routines of some of the most renowned authors throughout history.
Stephen King is an American author regarded as the "King of Horror," best known for his supernatural fiction, suspense, crime, science-fiction, and fantasy novels.
I have a routine because I think that writing is self-hypnosis and you fall into kind of a trance if you do the same passes over and over.
For a majority of Stephen King’s early career, he was writing his novels buzzed. After developing a drinking problem in the early 1970s, King’s addiction quickly escalated to include drugs and would remain a serious issue for over the next decade.
In his 2000 memoir, On Writing, King admitted he barely remembers writing his 1981 psychological horror novel, Cujo, and recounts the time his friends and family staged an intervention; confronting him with all the signs of his addiction problem: beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of cocaine, Xanax, Valium, NyQuil, Robitussin, and mouthwash.
Following the intervention, King quit all drugs and alcohol in the late 1980s and has remained sober ever since. These days, the only addiction King has is to writing. No real surprise there, considering the author’s prolific output over his writing career, which includes 62 novels, five non-fiction books and 200 short stories.
“I love it. And it’s one of the few things where I do it less now and get as much out of it,” King said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “Usually with dope and booze, you do it more and get less out of it as time goes by. It’s still really good, but it’s addictive, obsessive-compulsive behavior.”
“So I’ll write every day for maybe six months and get a draft of something – and then I make myself stop completely for 10 days or 12 days in order to let everything settle. But during that time off, I drive my wife crazy.”
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Read the rest of Stephen King’s writing routine here.
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