hello audience and welcome to another video here on the channel where i the disheveled goblin we'll be speaking to the regular goblins of the audience about how stephen king specifically writes horror and how effective he has been at appealing to a mass audience while not really holding any punches back i mean we know that for sure right he's written multiple scenes about and yet he's still sold over 350 million copies worldwide dear lord but what gives him that element of success is it a little bit of human in time no it's about the way stephen
king writes and the reason i bring this up is because you will frequently see people online talking about how stephen king is a bad writer a sentiment i vehemently disagree with i even tweeted about it recently and hey stephen king himself retweeted it and as someone who stephen king retweets i just you know think i'm able to now speak on the matter because as someone who stephen king retweets it's just something that i think elevates me above the rest but don't worry as someone who stephen king retweets i don't think i'm getting much of an
ego about it because as someone who stephen king retweets it's just we're above that so why exactly have so many great films been based off stephen king's works why do so many authors quote him as a major influence well i think partially that's because stephen king has mastered the idea of beauty and simplicity and woven that theory into the way he pins horror in this video we're going to look at two stephen king passages one just as a general chunk to show how he uses rather simple words to convey a very visceral feeling of emotion
and the second we're actually going to go through line by line to show how the structure of king's writing can help convey terror as well i am trying to convince you stephen king is one of the best american writers we have in terms of accomplishing what he's setting out to do that's a very important distinction no i'm not going to try and make the case that he's some brilliant wordsmith on the level of patrick rothfuss or guy gavriel k because he's not trying to be there's this frequent criticism of king where people are like oh
he's he's blue collar writing well one that's fine to be that if it's your intent to do so and two fancy writing would detract from what king does if he tried to inject a bunch of four dollar words into a passage about a child experiencing fear from a clown it would break immersion these critics who call king simplistic are right but the ones who are claiming what he is doing is somehow inherently wrong are wrong though quick disclaimer i'm not someone who really thinks you can right wrong i'm someone who doesn't even really believe in
objective review or all a bunch of caffeinated space apes flying through space nothing actually means anything if you want to artistically go a certain angle no one can tell you you're wrong to do so so hey if you disagree with that philosophy that's okay but that's my personal approach i am more than willing as a critic to go ahead and dive into the faults of a certain attempt but i'm never going to actually bash the intent itself getting back on topic if you are an experienced stephen king reader you will already know there's quite the
diversity in his actual prose style stephen king is willing to borderline sound poetic at times and he will occasionally use some more fancy non-blue collar words as these critics condescendingly put it other times though stephen king is willing to completely turn off the poeticism and abuse the out of some adjectives is that as i saw one person put it trailer trash writing absolutely not because it serves a purpose and accomplishes something the author is setting out to do now i will give an olive branch to some of king's critics of course because not every writer
is perfect not everything's going to be flawless there are certainly elements to king's writing that are weaker occasional descriptions aren't as concise and clear as they could be you could also defend that as intentional but yeah i even as a reader i'm willing to acknowledge sometimes a descriptor king gives makes me go a little but let's look at the genre king in general is writing within the horror genre for me has an interesting angle every writer who attempts to write in it must take into account and that is how they are going to handle characters
reactions to a terrifying circumstance will they bring the internal turmoil into the writing itself and make it so that you as the reader are experiencing this elevated sense along with the character or leave the reader slightly detached and not change the pro style that much king has an interesting blend when an intense scene is going down of course king uses a slightly different pro style than in his typical just elongated you're exploring whatever setup is happening scene yet through this more simplistic quote-unquote blue collar writing style he's already using in general it's a much more
natural transition and it feels extremely smooth to you as the reader i also think this has the appeal of seeming more human we are not poetic we also fixate on weird just yesterday i was taking my cat to the vet and while he was there i just noticed i for some reason was counting the collars on display no idea why i was just bored it's what my mind decided to pick up and focus on we don't exactly control what we notice and this is another part of the human experience i think king actually brings into
his prose where he just picks out small details very specifically to just have a placement of something in the scene with the reader and to me that even especially in scenes of horror helps drag your mind into the experience of the character so what i'm saying is his messiness and his simplicity can come together to feel human i get more immersed in king's writing than any other author i read regularly this doesn't even take into account his character work which on its own does a lot of the lifting for the exact same process i'm trying
to convey here it's just that combining that with his general prose style what you have is this magnificent blend where you believe the character you relate to them you understand them and the way the story is told to you and you're dragged into the scene to me it doesn't even feel like stephen king is pulling you into the world instead he's putting the world around you combine that with his magical realism with his fantasy stories and his horror and it just always feels like this is something that could be happening in the apartment next door
the house across the road it's earth it's us it's human that's where his horror comes from to simplify this idea as much as possible let's pull from a horror cliche you are standing in front of your vanity mirror right you do the thing where you bend down you spit out toothpaste you rinse your mouth you stand back up and you see the reflection of a dead relative behind you is your thought process in that moment going to be hmm what a perplexing apparition or is your mind going to melt and just descend into i would
i would safely assume the latter let's look at a passage from misery blood squirted from the lawn boy's gas exhaust in an amazing jet the kid in the trooper uniform screamed there was a sharp clang as the mower's whirling blade struck the pistol then annie was swerving up the sideline using it to turn and her gaze fell on paul for one second and paul felt sure he knew what that momentary gaze meant first the smoky then you the kid was laying on his side again when he saw the mower bearing down on him he rolled
over on his back and dug frantically the driveway dirt with his heels trying to push himself under the cruiser where she couldn't get him he didn't even come close and he throttled the riding mower up to a scream and drove it over his head paul caught a last glimpse of horrified brown eyes salt tatters of a brown khaki uniform shirt hanging from an arm raised in a feeble effort of protection and when the eyes were gone paul turned away the lawn boy's engine suddenly lugged down and there was a series of fast strangely liquid thudding
sounds paul vomited beside the chair with his eyes closed not one of them four dollar words no overly flowery descriptions just a almost dry statement of what's happening and yet it pulls you in as the reader you know these things because you can relate to every word said because there's something you would come across in your day-to-day life if you were watching this scene you wouldn't be thinking hmm indubitably you'd be going okay okay i hear you yes he writes the human experience well in a way that appeals to a lot of people myself included
but it's more than just word choice and i agree that's why i'm going to pull from one of my favorite passages from the shining it's such a brief bit and yet it paints such a vivid picture and it's such a clear concise sequence it's honestly one of the scariest things i've ever read his breath stopped in a gasp an almost drowsy terror stole through his veins yes yes there was something in here with him some awful thing the overlook had saved for just such a chance as this maybe a huge spider that had burrowed down
under the dead leaves or a rat or maybe the corpse of some little kid that had died here on the playground had that ever happened at the far end of the concrete ring danny heard the stealthy crackling of dead leaves as something came for him on its hands and knees that is one of the most terrifying things i've ever read it's poetry of horror notice there's nothing overtly beautiful or complex you could write that the difference is you wouldn't because the genius comes in the structure he's forming this actual scene before you in this fantastic
escalation like it works so well you don't need to know the rest of the story of the shining to be afraid of what just happened in that little snippet let's break it down line by line now king will often start a little sequence like this with a direct action to establish something has happened and perk your ears up as the reader to go okay what's about to unfurl so we begin with his breath stopped in a gasp which leads you to go what's wrong an almost drowsy terror stole through his veins now some editors i
know for a fact would hammer at this line they would tell him to remove drowsy it would be simplified things like that but i like stephen king's insistence on using not entirely necessary words it's almost like this meta fog king often puts into his texts that i notice i especially saw it a lot in pet cemetery where he has a lot of just little words descriptors that whether you can exactly understand what he's conveying or not it's just enough detail that you can feel the wrongness there is no other author in the world who will
make you feel the wrongness of a scene more than king i challenge you to think of somebody else well let's go ahead and move on to the next line yes yes okay simple repetition right it's a very simple practice you'll see a lot of times in sequences of escalation where someone is reaffirming oh my god this is true it's really happening a quick yes yes i like this because i've been in situations of immense terror of disturbing things your mind kind of rejects at first and then accepts to me this communicates that feeling i've experienced
very well there was something in here with him some awful thing the overlook had saved for just such a chance as this threat established and conveyed without specificity which in horror is usually a good thing that way your mind and imagination take over and begin pulling and exaggerating and you can feel the fear set in as is just well known your mind is always going to be able to go in a vague sense in a more terrifying direction than any literal description generally can take you now i want to clarify this is not always the
proper practice for example if you want to switch over to another stephen king work like it where pennywise is standing in broad daylight and in front of the children he's terrifying he's quickly and often just painted away and you understand what exactly is there but in a scene of this where there's a rising tension something that is clearly building in this gradual manner then you generally want to keep it more okay let's hold back and then reveal or never reveal and just have the terror come from the unknowing maybe a huge spider that had burrowed
down under the dead leaves or a rat or maybe the corpse of some little kid that had died here on the playground fantastic start with the least terrifying and escalate well okay some people say rats are more terrifying other spiders i don't care start with real world horrors where people are bothered by these things and then add a line through sensory that actually ties the reader into the moment yet again the burrowing down through dead leaves we've all heard that we all know that sound we all know the smell of dying leaves we've all seen
animals probably burrowing into these things it's something that again ties you to it but then stephen king overlays a nightmare or maybe the corpse of some little kid that had died here on the playground okay okay scary i'm particularly partial to being afraid of dead children don't know why it's just been a lifelong fear and living children kids scare me they genuinely do but because we start with something believable something you can picture and then he ties you into that moment with a descriptor of an experience the sound of dead leaves being burrowed in you
are then placed in that moment then he comes in and finishes it off with the actual here's the fright without confirming it it's still just a speculation from the character so your mind is still able to wander and go beyond the suggestion had that ever happened another completely possibly cuttable line but to me reminds me that we are in the perspective of this character who's experiencing it and some editor might pull this out but i love it at the far end of the concrete ring danny heard the stealthy crackle of dead leaves as something came
for him on its hands and knees oh my god the delivery the finisher the last oh that's so spooky again it's not confirmed to us that this is a dead child running at danny on his hands and knees but the implication from the descriptor does heavily imply that confirming the worst of the nightmare scenarios propositioned before we're also reminded of that sensory connection to place us the reader there we are in this playground hearing these sounds alongside danny and i am just as afraid as this little kid is my god i want to run away
from it and go to my daddy except my daddy in this situation is jack torrance so never mind ha it's just a very effective example of making it so that's not just the character is under attack we are under attack we are the target of this threat we are in this moment powerful and this ties into everything i've been saying about stephen king's prose up until this it's effective and smart in its simplicity he uses these simple tools to build something that is just rock solid no flowery words no complicated descriptions just an exploitation of
our own sensory input and our own experiences as readers to put us in a scene where a nightmare is introduced some would criticize it as simple i would add on to that that it's also effective and that accomplishes exactly what is being set out for and it ties together with stephen king's entire vision he is a magical realism horror author it's not about putting you in a fantasy world it's about bringing his terrors into your actual life he wants to stick with you in your day-to-day yes stephen king might not be the scariest read of
your life but he's certainly one who is going to stick with you like almost no other authors i still think about many scenes from the stand every time people are talking with me about effective horror because they just stand out they stand as next level and it's like people dismiss king for many reasons and i agree with a lot of things people have problems with his endings can be flopped though other times they're extraordinary 11 22 63 in my opinion the dark tower but people will fight me on that you'll also hear a lot of
people say stephen king is extraordinarily compelling i agree with this and i think it's tied into what we've talked about here he puts the story around you and so it's never gonna pull you out of it even his most extreme moments of horror where the most fantastical elements come into play i still feel like i'm in the story he's the author who will tell you about your main protagonist's trouble pissing in the morning and that is the point combined with the terror is why this genius has sold over 350 million copies of his books worldwide
it's a style everyone can connect with without having to sacrifice the horror just for the love of god read pet cemetery i'm out peace you
