“What Does Stephen King Mean for You And Your Career?”

A couple weeks ago, I headed to Harrisburg for the stellar Harrisburg Book Festival, run in part by the also stellar Midtown Scholar bookstore, and at that event I had the privilege of being on a super-fucking-cool panel with CJ Leede, Catriona Ward, and Richard Chizmar about, specifically, the legacy of Stephen King. It was awesome for a number of reasons —

First, it’s always nice to be on a panel that very little to do with you. Just because, ahh, I can talk about something other than trying to pitch my book. I want you to read my book! But so often we’re called to talk about ourselves so much it feels like we’re crawling up our own asses too much. (And once you crawl up your own ass, you inevitably have to crawl back out.) So the chance to be like, “This is all about Stephen King,” is a fantastic one.

Second, again, great fellow panelists. I know all of them online, never met any of them in person, and it was great to hang with them on stage.

Third, the crowd there was legit wonderful. Lots of folks, huge audience, great questions, enthusiasm for King but also, mysteriously, us.

So, great event.

But in that event, Mister Chizmar — who also doubled as the moderator of the panel — asked a question about, y’know, what Stephen King has meant to us as writers and to our careers and, I do really love that question. And I love the answers everyone gave. Further, I thought I might… answer the question here a bit, given that King has now been publishing books for holy shit fifty fucking years, and certainly my books have been compared to his at a number of points along the way.

I think certainly there’s a lot of things you can say about King and his effect on individual writers and the genre as a whole. He didn’t invent THE HORROR GENRE but he is definitely the one who, I think, made the genre, so to speak. His name and work is synonymous with the genre — not to be unfair to every other horror writer, each of whom are imprinting upon the genre in ways of equal importance. I just mean, he showed up, became huge, and (I suspect unintentionally) moved the horror genre out of pulp sensibilities to something approaching Classic Americana. And I love how his work made that transition in real time, in his life and in ours. He went from being kind of dismissed and then turned more into a pop culture icon and then his work went on to be appreciated as… literature, and beyond that, as part of the canon of America. An icon. An institution.

And I’ve loved his work. I’ve fallen off of it in recent years not due to the quality and not due to my interest in it, but because I read a lot of books that are sent to me, particularly to blurb. And I also have access to a pretty far ranging gamut of books and so I’ve missed out on more recent Kingian reads. (I’ve been repairing this gap slowly over the last few years. Latest I picked up and enjoyed was Fairy Tale. Which I loved a lot, and I could give you some deeper thoughts on eventually, if anybody actually wants those?) But I love so much of his work and it’s inarguable that I get to do what I do now because of what he did and continues to do. Full-stop.

But for me? Here’s one of what is for me the most important things I, well, let’s call it gained from his presence as a writer:

When we’re starting out, and even as a writer enters what you might think of as the middle of their career, you get a lot of people pressuring you to have a brand of some sort. To pick a lane and stick to that lane. You’re this, you’re that, stick to it, don’t fuck it up. There’s comfort in the brand, a steady base of readers for Your Content, a fast-food-level of consistency in The Product. Now, for writers who want to write to a more singular thing, there’s no harm, no foul in that — write what you want to write. Write what you love to write. If it’s this type of story, that particular genre, if it’s ABC or XYZ, have at it. No shame, no issue. But! But—

Publishers, I think, sometimes want writers to do that even when it’s not who that writer is. So many of us grew up reading a very diverse set of books, across the genres, across the spectrum, into non-fic, into literary, and it just makes sense to a lot of us to mash all that stuff up and care less about the codified walls of genre. (And genre is just some made-up shit anyway.)

And I think it’s hard, especially for new writers, to resist that kind of thinking. It’s hard to say to a publisher, HEY FUCK THAT, MAN, A BRAND IS WHAT YOU PUT ON A SHEEP TO SIGNIFY WHO OWNS IT, MAN. I WON’T BE CONTAINED BY YOUR FENCE. DON’T BRAND ME, BRO. I think a publisher or whoever says we need a brand, so we start to think, okay, what’s my brand, who am I, what do I write now, what will I write forever?

But, what I do think worked for me as an example was pointing to someone like Stephen King.

Stephen King, oft-associated with horror, doesn’t really have horror as his brand. Stephen King has Stephen Fucking King as his brand. Sure, he writes horror. All kinds of horror. And then he writes some fantasy. And then some sci-fi. And non-fiction. And crime. And, and, and. But every last word feels like Stephen King wrote it. The man is his own brand.

I find that freeing. I find it empowering. And this has more or less guided my career right from the get-go. It’s set the path as being not something pre-defined or worse, pre-destined, but rather, the path I choose to hack for myself out of the brush and briar. And every time I do that, I think about how Stephen King doesn’t write this that or the other thing — Stephen King writes Stephen King. The only brand that matters is you. Which is to say, no brand matters at all — you, the author, matter. Voice matters. Who you are, matters. The things you believe, the things you’ve seen, the things that you’re afraid of? That’s what goes into the books.

I want people to read my books and say, this is a Chuck Wendig book. Even if they never saw my name on the cover. I want it to feel like me. Warts and all. I want it to be my voice, my vibe, all the stuff that goes into and comes out of my weird brain. I love that. That to me is where the joy of doing this thing really comes into play — just being me, on the page and off of it. And not worrying about trying to put on a show, or be something or someone different, not being some persona, some variant of myself. True North is always just me. For better or for worse. It governs the career. I set the path.

And away I go.

So, thanks to King for that. For the books, yes, for sure. For the horror, absolutely. But for that other stranger piece of the puzzle, too.