Stephen King: A Profile in Failure

The greatest people in history have been failures. Certainly, we remember these individuals as successes--success stories--and we treat those stories as legends and those individuals as gods. But each of them failed epically and repeatedly, more so than the combined successes of all of humanity.

Failure should not be overlooked in anyone, especially not those we admire. It is through failure that these individuals were able to learn, grow and ultimately succeed. We know this about ourselves but even as we learn to accept our own failures, sometimes we don’t recognize that the most successful people in the world have had an abundance of failure.

Our heroes need to be held to the same standard as the ancient Greek gods: awesome but not infallible. Failure is a humbling exercise, both for the observer and the observed. But learning is a humbling process. Once we realize that our heroes are just like us, we can examine how failure drives success. So I’ve started collecting stories about the failures of successful people, as a reminder that if you’re making mistakes and learning from them, you’re actually on the path to success.

Almost all successful writers amassed quite a few rejections before their first publication. Their stories are often told to inspire us to never quit: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was rejected 20 times, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind was rejected 25 times. Legend has it that Jack London’s first story was rejected 600 times, and—not to be outdone—C.S. Lewis received over 800 rejections before he sold a single piece of writing.

Compared to those tales, you could say that Stephen King got off relatively easy. His first short stories, written while still in elementary school, earned him 25 cents apiece from his mother who sought to encourage his writing. By his early teens his first novella, “In a Half-World of Terror,” was accepted for publication in a horror fanzine. He received more rejection slips than acceptance letters, but he recalls not being too phased by the rejection. “When you’re still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.” He pounded a nail into the wall and hung up his rejection slips, but by the time he was 14 years old, the nail couldn’t hold the weight of all the rejection slips so he “replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.”

Of course, as we get older, failure takes on a different tone, especially when coupled with economic realities. King married in 1971 at the age of 24 and had two children in short order thereafter. He had earned a teaching certificate but couldn’t get a job teaching at first so he worked at a laundry service while his new wife worked at Dunkin’ Donuts. He wrote short stories in his spare time and submitted them to various publications, selling “just enough to create a rough sliding margin between us and the welfare office.”

By 1973 King had gotten a job teaching high school English with a salary of $6400 a year, still not enough to make ends meet. His young family lived in a double wide trailer and owned a car that regularly broke down. They did not have a telephone because they could not afford the monthly bill. But King continued to write. When he got the idea for a story about a high school girl with telekinetic powers, he was hoping he could sell it as short fiction to Playboy magazine which paid $2000 for such work. It would have been enough to fix his broken down car and buy some groceries.

So King sat down to write the story, titled Carrie. He produced part of a first draft and then got frustrated. He didn’t have an emotional connection to the story, didn’t feel comfortable with all of the female characters, and, worst of all, he realized that to tell the story he needed a longer piece than would be appropriate for Playboy magazine. ““I couldn’t see wasting two weeks, maybe even a month, creating a novella I didn’t like and wouldn’t be able to sell.” So he crumpled up the pages and threw them away.

The next day, his wife, Tabitha King, pulled the crumped pages out of the trash. When he got home from teaching that evening she told him she thought he was on to something and that she wanted him to complete it. King respected her opinion and spent the time to finish the manuscript and send it to Doubleday. Shortly thereafter he received a telegram—because he had no phone—from editor Bill Thompson, saying that Carrie had been accepted for publication and that he would receive a $2500 advance.

King spent the advance on a new car and a telephone, and continued teaching. A few months later, King received a proper telephone call from Bill Thompson, who asked if King was sitting down before informing him that Signet Books had bought the paperback rights and he would receive $200,000.

"I was still standing in the doorway, looking across the living room toward our bedroom and the crib where Joe slept. Our place on Sanford Street rented for ninety dollars a month and this man I’d only met once face-to-face was telling me I’d just won the lottery. The strength ran out of my legs. I didn’t fall, exactly, but I kind of whooshed down to a sitting position there in the doorway."

The story that Tabitha had pulled out of the trash earned enough for him to quit teaching and write full time. Carrie sold over a million paperback copies in its first year and was made into a movie several years later. Since then King has written more than 55 novels and sold over 350 million copies. He’s received dozens of awards and his work has inspired numerous film and television adaptations including several Oscar nominated films.

The obvious lesson King learned from Carrie is to never give up: “Stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”

The less obvious lesson is to surround yourself with people you trust and let them influence you for the better. King’s wife has been vital to his success throughout his career. Even when they were struggling to make ends meet, Tabitha consistently encouraged him to write. At the 2003 National Book Awards he told the audience that if his wife had at any time asked him to quit writing and focus on supporting his family, he would have done so. In addition to pulling Carrie out of the trash, she also staged an intervention and pushed him to overcome drug and alcohol abuse in the 1980s. Then she nursed him back to health after a severe car accident in 1999. Whether you’re a writer, artist, or entrepreneur, the power of having someone in your corner can’t be understated. Everyone needs that one person who can pull our crumpled failures out of the trash, smooth them out, and help turn them into successes.

Be sure to check out the other articles in the failure series:

• Howard Schultz
• Steven Spielberg
• Oprah Winfrey
• Jeff Bezos
• Richard Branson
• Warren Buffett
• J.K. Rowling
• President Obama
• How to Fail the Right Way
• The Greatest Failures of All Time
• Two Years of Failure
• Lady Gaga
• The Science Behind Failure
• Jay-Z
• James Dyson