Stephen King’s
Misery and On Writing
All the following quotations are extracted from: Stephen King, Misery, Signet Book, 1998 (First Edition, 1987), 338 pp. Stephen King, On Writing, Pocket, 2002 (First Edition, 2000), 320 pp. Written in 1987, Misery is one of Stephen King’s best-sellers. Paul Sheldon is a successful writer thanks to the soppy adventures of his heroine Misery Chastain. Weary of this kind of literature, he puts an end to his popular series by killing the main character. After withdrawing in the Colorado for a while to write another novel, Fast Cars, Paul goes home to present it to his editor… but he meets with an accident on a country road because of a fierce snowstorm. Badly wounded, his two leg broken, he is rescued by Annie Wilkes, a nurse who drives him in her isolated house. Straight away, she introduces herself as his best ardent admirer and undertakes to take care of him. Paul allows her to read his last manuscript, Fast Cars, exclusively. Very shocked by the style that she finds too violent, she begins to change her attitude and forces him to burn it. Worse, when she discovers the death of her favourite heroine, Misery, in the last volume of the series, she decides to keep him locked up. Stuck in bed, drugged, tortured, he is at the mercy of Annie. She obliges him to write a continuation to Misery adventures if he still wants to live… From that moment on a ruthless struggle for life begins. At the end, Paul will succeed in vanquish Annie. Thirteen years after Misery, King undertakes to explain the writing process to people who would like to become a writer in the book On Writing. Here, he explains what are, in his opinion, the essential rules to be a good writer. Especially in the chapter “Toolbox”, he begins to enumerate what everybody who wants to write should have in his toolbox: some vocabulary, grammar, elements of style (such as passive voice to avoid), the pattern (presentation with paragraphs…). And then, in the chapter called “On