I think a lot about Richard Bachman. A dairy farmer turned author who seemingly materialized out of thin air, released five novels and then vanished as suddenly as he appeared. Maybe you’ve heard of him and maybe you haven’t but, you almost certainly know him by another name: Stephen King.
Across my many years of English classes, I’ve heard several different flavors of “so and so is the mother/father of American literature.” Often it’s Dickens, Dickinson or a co-parenting arrangement between them. I don’t know if any of those statements are true, but I do know that if you’ve consumed any media from the past 50 years or so, you have a weird uncle and his name is Steve. As sure as birds fly and grass grows, Stephen King writes. The man is seemingly some kind of M.O.D.O.W (Mental Organism Designed Only for Writing). He’s written so prolifically and for so long that it’s easy to come across his work without even realizing it.
Understandably most people probably know him as a horror writer. Fewer people know him as the mind behind the stories that gave us movies like The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me and Dolores Claiborne. We have Evil Dead 2, and by extension the career trajectories of both Sam Rami and Bruce Campbell, because King liked the first movie enough to talk Dino De Laurentiis into funding a sequel. Had it not been for Stephen King, Peter Parker might have gotten into that theater. As of recording this, Stranger Things is all over the place, and that series is dripping with the influence of King’s works especially Firestarter and It. Once you know how to spot King’s fingerprints, it’s shocking where you’ll find them, and before long, you’ll start to see them everywhere.
Because we all live in a world that Stephen King created.
But before he was Stephen King the brand, who I’m going to call Stephen King™, he was Stephen King: a young writer selling short stories to men’s magazines while trying (and failing) to publish a novel. He would teach high school by day and spend his nights over a typewriter nestled in the laundry room of the trailer his family lived in — smoking cigarettes and drinking beers he knew they couldn’t afford.
The legend goes that one day Tabitha, an established author in her own right, King’s wife and the real MVP of this story, rescued a few pages of an abandoned manuscript out of the trash. She gave them a read and encouraged a dispirited Stephen to keep working on the idea. So, he did. That manuscript about a tormented young girl with psychic powers became Carrie; King’s debut novel.
The book was initially a modest success but then a copy made it into the hands of Phantom of the Paradise director Brian De Palma. Stephen King wasn’t Stephen King™ yet so De Palma bought the rights on the cheap, put together a film on a shoestring budget and struck solid gold establishing himself and King as household names — also eventually securing the market for college dorm room Scarface posters until the heat death of the universe.
King would follow Carrie with Salem’s Lot, a novel about a vampire coming to a small town in rural America. Sages sing that the idea for the novel materialized when Stephen wondered aloud about what would happen if Dracula were to arrive in modern America. The bell rung and Tabitha came off the top rope suggesting that he’d probably get run over and die. With that in mind Steve pivoted to a vampire story framed by the rot at the heart of small town life in America. Well before Barlow’s arrival, the residents of The Lot are already vampires — they just aren’t drinking blood yet.
I was going to slot in a joke about how the Salem’s Lot’s finale with the glowing dudes fighting vampires and one particular character death inspired parts of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure but it seems like that's actually just true. Araki is a big fan of Stephen King. Enough so that he dedicated an entire chapter to King’s work in his own book about the horror genre. I wasn’t kidding when I said we really do just live in Stephen King’s world.
Go then Joestar, there are other worlds than these.
Somehow still not done, King stepped up the plate again with the publication of The Shining, rounding out one of the cleanest triples in modern fiction. In just a few years, King had gone from throwing out an early draft of Carrie to publishing three tentpole works of horror, each of which could individually be the height of a writer’s career; Stephen King had become Stephen King™.
In 1977 – the same year that Stephen King published The Shining – Stephen King would publish under the name Richard Bachman for the first time. His reasons for doing so were two-fold. Stephen King is a man who, to this very day, makes other authors feel insecure about their own output. However, publishers were nervous that Stephen King the guy may be the worst enemy of Stephen King the brand. Scarcity is king (ba dum tsh) when it comes to sales and marketing something as “The new book by Stephen King” just doesn’t hit the same when he’s cranking them out like some kind of R.L. Stein for adults. So, his publishers put him in timeout with a strict “one per year” release schedule. However, they didn’t say anything about how many books Richard Bachman could publish.
The other reason is one that I imagine anyone who has ever found success can relate to. The meteoric rise of Stephen King™ was just as much of a surprise to the author himself. In the span of a few years, he’d gone from struggling writer to capital “A” author. If he had been that good this whole time, why hadn’t success come home sooner? If he wasn’t actually that good, how long until people figured it out and the ride came grinding to a halt? Stephen coped with this existential crisis in the traditional way; he made up a guy.
Publishing under the Bachmann name was as much a business decision as it was an exercise to see if he was actually a good writer. Would people buy Stephen King’s writing without Stephen King's name? Well, dear viewer, we are from the future so we can answer that very easily.
No. The short answer is no.
Long answer: the Bachmann books were building an audience before a gang of meddling kids and their dog tore off the Richard Bachmann mask and revealed that he was actually Ol’ Shockmeister Steve publishing under a pseudonym. Once the jig was up, “the Bachman books” started doing gangbusters. However, despite Bachman’s growing reputation prior to the reveal, lightning didn’t strike twice.
In a neat bit of personal trivia, the first Stephen King book I read was The Dark Half; a novel that boldly asks the question “What if you were haunted by the guy you made up?” Having no knowledge of Richard Bachman or King’s relationship with the persona, the entire thrust of the book went completely over my middle-school head. I mentally filed it away as “ok, I guess” and figured that Stephen King wasn’t as scary as the VHS cover of It had led my generation to believe. Somewhere in my quest for the Tower, the Ivory Tower, I unfortunately picked up some snobbish ideas about King’s work as being “popular” in the negative sense. I didn’t read another King book or know any of that context until a friend recommended I listen to a podcast about reading the works of Stephen King in publication order; Just King Things. I highly recommend giving them a listen. Learning to read for fun again as I continue my prescribed seven years of post-PhD recovery and going through King’s novels has been a highlight of what has been an otherwise pretty challenging year. Y’all ever heard about this reading stuff? Anyway, back to the point of departure.
Let us take a moment and appreciate the sheer number of things that had to come together for Stephen King to become Stephen King™. Tabitha had to fish manuscript pages out of the garbage and like them enough to suggest that her husband keep working on them. What if there was some icky goop on them making them either too gross to touch or too illegible to read? What if De Palma thought the book was mid? What if Sissy Spacek hadn’t acted her ass off in that movie? Not only would we not get Stephen King™ but De Palma might not have gone on to direct the first installment of a franchise that would feature some of the best train-centric action to ever grace the silver screen.
That’s what makes this story so captivating to me. I look at someone like Stephen King and the man might as well be a wizard. To me, he is someone who has “made it.” He’s made it in a way that most people can’t even dream of. Despite his apparent power to bend reality and the publishing industry to his will, he is still human and has grappled with the dilemma of luck and skill about as publicly as a person can and found out the hard way that not even he could make lightning strike twice. As you know, I am not a wizard. However, I do know a thing or two about getting struck by lighting (metaphorically).
Odds are good that if you’re watching this you’re familiar with Hbomberguy and his video covering plagiarism on youtube. If you haven’t, pause the video and go check it out. It’s a certified banger™. If you have seen it, you know that I, or rather the pseudonym I make stuff under, was mentioned at the end of that video as an example of creators on youtube that are doing things right aka creating original work and not plagiarizing. That mention was a huge windfall for me on youtube and may very well be why you’re watching this video right now.
I’ve never talked to hbomberguy (If you’re watching this. Hi! I find you very intimidating and hope you’re well). From what I gather, my video on the appeal of body horror to queer audiences just happened to jump through whatever hoop google was holding when someone researching for the video was looking for creators that played at the intersection of queerness and horror. That person happened to like it enough to feature it in what happened to become one of the biggest videos to hit youtube that year. Last I checked, around 39 million people have now watched one of my favorite people on youtube give me the nod.
I didn’t know I was going to be mentioned like that. The night it went up, I saw there was a new video from hbomberguy, went to bed and woke up to hundreds of messages — a number that only grew when people, like me, who have a 10pm bedtime started waking up.
The influx of attention changed a lot for me. Back before I started uploading things to theinternetdotcom, I thought that a few hundred subscribers felt like a lot. I try to avoid metrics, but the last time I was forced to gaze into the void, my youtube channel had somewhere around 50k subscribers. To put things in perspective, that is higher than the capacity of Yankee Stadium. By some, maybe even several, accounts, I am a capital “S” success as much as anyone can be while making videos about gay anime.
I don’t recall what I used to imagine success would feel like, but I certainly thought it would feel different than this.
As a species, we're not very good at numbers. Our brains are systematically bad at comprehending base rate information and after a certain point large numbers are flattened out into “ITS BIG.” How we emotionally process numbers is very different from how we cognitively process them. This is how I can type out that my subscriber base could fill Yankee Stadium and then some and still feel like maybe it’s all a fluke. Maybe I’m not very good at whatever it is that this whole thing is.
I remember being over the moon the first time something I made passed a thousand views. Now, I would probably cry if I put something out and it didn’t pass at least ten thousand views. It’s normal for a person to want other people to see the things they share. It’s normal to be disappointed when the things they share don’t land the way they’d hope. It’s also normal for a person to want something they can point to as proof that they’re good enough. Unfortunately, especially in the age of the internet, that can be almost impossible to find it.
If metrics are your game, hitting metric thresholds just unlocks more metrics. Trying to find stability on these platforms isn’t like walking a path, it’s running on a treadmill. What you thought was the ceiling becomes your new floor as your expectations rise higher and higher like some kind of tower that assuredly bears no resemblance to anything in the bible.
There are also all kinds of factors that are totally beyond your control and even more that are outside of your awareness. There is a whole cottage industry built up around selling people the latest fool-proof method for finding success. Even the ones that aren’t flat grifts are still just things that worked for one person at one time. The method they use for making thumbnails plays well with their audience but who knows if it’ll work well for yours. In truth, the product they’re actually selling isn’t advice. They’re selling the perception of control; the idea that success is a predictable outcome based on a set of rational factors.
Nevermind how much the actual platforms themselves shift around. You could ask your dog for advice and you’d probably have just as good of an idea of what’s being favored as anyone else. Heck, you might have a better idea since dogs are nature’s creatives. In the week I started working on this, Google's new AI age restriction feature promised to hide every video I’d made in the past two years. I had started on this as a video but opted to publish it as a blog when sinking the time into recording and editing seemed wasteful and the future of the platform dubious. That’s not to say that it doesn’t seem that way now.
So keeping with the treadmill imagery. Sometimes it feels more like trying to hit a moving target while running on a treadmill and a google employee is being paid in the mid six-figures to play with the lights. I don’t know how they got the job either but if you find out, please let me know. If that sounds easy, you can even toss in another mid-six-figure engineer slamming all the buttons on the treadmill at random. Some people are still going to make that shot. Some are even going to make it multiple times. Does being skilled help? Almost certainly yes. Is it possible to be so skilled that you would always make it? Almost certainly not.
After a certain point, it’s not possible to be that good. I’m also not entirely sure where the sweet spot between luck and skill is so I googled it and found out it’s ten percent luck, twenty percent skill, fifteen percent concentrated power of will, five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain and a hundred percent reason to remember the name. I’m pretty sure luck is a bigger part of it than that. However, accepting that there is always a near timeline, some other level of The Tower, where you’re the same person but things just didn’t come together is uncomfortable to think about.
In King’s own words “There is a time in the lives of most writers when they are vulnerable, when the vivid dreams and ambitions of childhood seem to pale in the harsh sunlight of what we call the real world. In short, there’s a time when things can go either way.”
There is an excellent episode of the Slate series Decoder Ring that digs into these ideas. It focuses on the career of an artist who doesn’t make it despite being, by the accounts of her contemporaries, good enough. She spends her career watching her peers go on to become famous artists while the same doors that opened for them stay locked for her. The host of the show, Willa Paskin, notes in the closing of the episode how often Van Gogh was brought up during her research. Comparing someone to Van Gogh is usually meant as a compliment, a way of saying that maybe you just haven’t found the right audience or that your work will be appreciated eventually, but people forget that Van Goah never got to benefit from his now famous work. Van Goah never got to be Van Goah™. Bringing him up is something of a consolation prize; a way of sidestepping the uncomfortable reality while asserting that everything works itself out in the end if the person is really good enough.
It’s a hard episode to listen to but one that I strongly recommend. Not to spoil too much but I found it, quite frankly, inspiring hearing the subject, Alona Granet, talk about both her resilience to and her acceptance of her own lack of control, which is something I’ve long struggled with both professionally as an academic and semi-professionally here on youtube. In particular, this passage from the back half of the episode has stayed with me
“…Artists don’t get to decide if their work is valuable, if it’s meaningful, if it moves people, all they get to do is make it in the face of so many material and psychological constraints and hardships. Most of us do everything we can to get whatever scrap of control we can manage. We give up our dreams and callings. We change jobs, careers. We find other things, partners, children, interests that can matter to us. But Alona hasn't done that. She's sat with her lack of control for decades. And that's been painful and disappointing. But that's not all it's been. As hard as it is to make it, as rare, it seems to me just as hard, just as rare to keep trying so single-mindedly when you don't.” - Willa Paskin, 2021
In 1962, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges published the poem Borges and I. In it, he opens with the phrase “The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.” Writing as himself about himself™, Borges finds himself in the shadow of the popular idea of himself. It’s that idea of Borges that people praise and award professorships to, not the man. The successes that everyone sees are attributed to you™. The things that no one sees — the worries, fears and doubts — those all tend to stay at home. After all, people at the theater want to see Pagliacci the clown; not Pagliacci the person.
Being a creator, especially in the age of the internet, means having a mediated relationship with your audience. Less talked about is how you as a creator are also part of that audience watching a performance of yourself. If you’re like me and lucky enough to be hit by lighting, you might end up feeling like you’re living in the shadow of a better version of yourself. Trying to chart the line between where you end and you™ begins can be complicated to say the least. At least it has been for me. I imagine there are people out there who are comfortable, maybe even thriving, with the degree of self-characterization having a persona requires. From where I’m sitting, they might as well be wizards.
The truth at the end of this video is that I don’t know anything about Stephen King. I only know Stephen King™.
I don’t know what kind of conclusions Stephen King has come to about himself and whether his work is good enough. Based on his acceptance speech for his 2003 lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation, I do know that his wife thinks so and she’s seemingly been right about everything else so far. However, my own beautiful butch wife’s thinking I’m good enough hasn't put my own suspicions to rest. Although they do tend to sleep through the night lately.
Even the people who like King’s work seem willing to acknowledge that not everything he does is great. When you take as many swings as he does, you’re bound to write at least one or two stories that work like Goosebumps books without the fun of Goosebumps books. My personal pick is the one about a set of mechanical chattering teeth that eat a guy. Even King himself seems willing to acknowledge when he whiffs like during his short career as a director (although I will contend that Maximum Overdrive is a brilliant piece of Americana preserved in amber like a mosquito just waiting for resurrection. Ideally, in my opinion, by Rob Zombie).
Even when the stories come off as goofy, I can still only admire someone who is willing to follow through on those swings. I’d venture that he’s also aware that some of those stories aren’t the best but continued polishing them anyway and set them out into the world. Guts, heart, grit, whatever you want to call it, that takes a lot of it. No one sets out to make bad art and no one is more aware of the faults of their work than the artist.
I’ve talked myself out of ideas wholesale. I very nearly talked myself out of writing the post that formed the basis for this video. I also can’t seem to finish a project without thinking that the whole thing has been a waste of time. When the bad brain creeps up and you start to wonder if you just don’t have the sauce, dropping the project can feel like the only way to regain control. You get to decide where it goes even if it only ends up in the trash.
Through all the doubts he’s shared and those he’s kept hidden Stephen King has never stopped swinging and it’s hard not to find that inspiring.
You can control how you and your work are received just as well as you can control lighting but you can always control whether you’re going to take that swing. Unless you are a wizard. In which case, what are you still doing here? For everyone else, until the next video, long days and pleasant nights.