{"id":15262,"date":"2018-08-27T20:05:32","date_gmt":"2018-08-28T00:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=15262"},"modified":"2018-08-28T09:39:04","modified_gmt":"2018-08-28T13:39:04","slug":"modern-family-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/modern-family-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Modern Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

September 2018 | view this story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

Dad Stephen <\/strong>casts no shadow over new generations of Kings.<\/span><\/h3>\n

By Nina Livingstone<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Sept18-Kings\"A<\/span>t 47 West Broadway in Bangor, three children grew up in a Gothic mansion surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence decorated with spiders, bats, and three-headed reptiles. <\/span><\/p>\n

Inside, Stephen and Tabitha King wrote novels while their kids experimented with their own stories. Two of the children\u2014both boys\u2014would go on to become award-winning novelists, and the eldest would take her writing talents to the pulpit and become a minister.<\/span><\/p>\n

In The Beginning<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

As a fellow at the University of Maine, Tabitha immediately recognized her boyfriend\u2019s gift, as she herself was a writer with an editor\u2019s eye. In 1967, Stephen sold a short story to Startling Mystery Stories<\/em>\u2014his first professional sale. The two married in 1971 shortly after graduation. While working to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, they started a family, with Naomi their first born. When the novel Carrie<\/em> skyrocketed Stephen into the recognition that had eluded him, his career was on its trajectory.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI was cognizant that our family was different,\u201d Owen King<\/strong>, 41, the youngest sibling, says. \u201cHowever, my parents did everything they could to be regular members of the community. They were accessible. They were present. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cE<\/span>veryone knew my old man. He was always at the store, a game, or the movies wearing his old jeans and his ball cap. He\u2019s very approachable. That made a huge difference, so it was a little easier for me to fit in than you might expect.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c[Bangor] made it possible for me to have a relatively normal childhood. I don\u2019t know exactly how that played into becoming a writer, but I\u2019m grateful for it,\u201d Owen says.<\/span><\/p>\n

This grounded sense of self might explain Owen\u2019s earlier works, which strikingly did not channel his father\u2019s love of horror, nor match Stephen\u2019s prolific output.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI worked so hard for so many years on Double Feature<\/em>,\u201d Owen says of his 2013 novel. \u201cI came so close to quitting on the book [before I was able] to get to the other side and to have it resemble what I\u2019d originally imagined.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Owen\u2019s hard work paid off. Double Feature<\/em> drew resounding cheers, with David Thomas of the New York Times<\/em> Sunday Book Review venturing some constructive criticism. \u201cThe novel is maybe a third too long, chiefly because as he wanders around King can hardly see a place, a face or a chair without embarking on a wordy, if not literary, description of it.\u201d Even so, Thomas finishes with a big thumbs up: \u201c[Owen] should persevere, for when he is good\u2014and that is often enough to make a page-turner of this book\u2014he has a captivating energy, a precision and a fondness for people that are rare and that make the reader doubly impatient for him to do what he does best.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Owen did persevere, and in 2017 his epic novel Sleeping Beauties<\/em> was published. Co-written with his father, Sleeping Beauties<\/em> woke up the critics. Xan Brooks of The Guardian<\/em> credits Owen with revitalizing his father\u2019s work. \u201cMaybe all [Stephen King] required was his son\u2019s intervention,\u201d Brooks writes.<\/span><\/p>\n

F<\/span>or Owen, Sleeping Beauties<\/em> has played a much different role. \u201cI\u2019m sure there are plenty of people who won\u2019t believe it, but neither of us went into the project thinking \u2018we\u2019re going to write a big bestseller.\u2019 We wrote Sleeping Beauties<\/em> because we had this idea that we were both excited to explore. We didn\u2019t know if it would work. We didn\u2019t even know if we\u2019d be able to finish, [or] if we\u2019d be able to mesh styles and create a shared voice that was coherent,\u201d Owen says.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cMore than anything, I was excited about the opportunity for us to spend the time together that we got to spend.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The steep slope of collaborating with his father was not lost on Owen. \u201cHe was pretty successful already. He didn\u2019t need any help from me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But helping is a family tradition. It was Tabitha King who retrieved three wadded up sheets of paper that were the beginning of Carrie <\/em>from the trash. The novel ultimately ignited Stephen\u2019s career and brought nearly 100 more novels to bookstore shelves.<\/span><\/p>\n

Catching Flames<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

On May 18, Joe Hill<\/strong>, a New York Times<\/em> best-selling author, tweeted, \u201cAnother writer I admire also has a story available on the internet.\u201d In the tweet, Hill provided a link to a 32-page manuscript by his father, Stephen King.<\/span><\/p>\n

Born Joseph Hillstrom King on June 4, 1972, Joe recalls that throughout his childhood he\u2019d write stories and share them with his parents. Since age 13, he\u2019s maintained a daily writing routine, completing at least four books by the time he was in his mid-teens. But it was during his time at Vassar College (where brother Owen also graduated) when the writer Joe Hill was born.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I went into writing,\u201d Hill confided to The Telegraph<\/em> in 2016, \u201cI had to know that if someone bought one of my stories they\u2019d bought it for the right reasons\u2014that it is a good story and not because of who my dad is.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Joe Hill, now 47, divorced, a father of three, and living in New Hampshire, has since learned to make peace with his dad\u2019s fame, telling GQ<\/em> in 2017, \u201cI sort of put aside my pride and started writing screenplays as Joseph King.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, it was a screenplay that Joe and Owen wrote together that produced a paycheck.<\/span><\/p>\n

After three years of working on the supernatural murder mystery Fadeaway<\/em>, \u201cwe came up with a script that up to this day I still feel is one of the best things I\u2019ve ever been involved with,\u201d Hill says.<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Hill\u2019s fourth novel, The Fireman<\/em>, was published, pushing him to the top of The New York Times<\/em> best sellers list. \u201cHill\u2019s work is often compared to that of his father Stephen King, but it is time we treated him as standing on his own,\u201d writes The Guardian\u2019s<\/em> James Smythe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Leading up to The Fireman<\/em>, Hill and his father had collaborated, too. In 2009, Joe and Stephen wrote the novella Throttle<\/em>. Their second novella, In the Tall Grass<\/em>, came out in 2012. Netflix recently announced buying the rights to In the Tall Grass<\/em>, with plans to adapt it into a feature film.<\/p>\n

Disappearing into Storytelling<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A<\/span>s for how much labor goes into a labor of love, \u201cThe first draft of [Sleeping Beauties<\/em>] took something like 10 months to write,\u201d Owen says. \u201cThere was additional writing on either end, though.\u201d He and Stephen \u201cstarted out writing the story as a television script and actually had two full episodes. When we switched to prose, we used those episodes as narrative blueprints. Then, once we had a first draft, it took us a while to get the book into its final shape. If you put it altogether, there was probably twenty months of writing that went into Sleeping Beauties<\/em>. The collaboration was honestly such a delight. It was so fun to plan stuff out with my dad and to see the way that he approached each particular character and scene. He continually surprised me in the best possible way. I treasure the time we spent talking it all through. I often felt challenged to match him when he wrote something especially great, but I liked that too.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere have been positive reviews, negative reviews, readers who loved it, readers who hated it, and plenty in between,\u201d he says. \u201cIt all comes with the territory. If you publish a book, you have to accept that you have in a way given it up. Now it belongs to the world, and the world gets to say whatever it wants. I\u2019m happy that readers are engaging with the book.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Sensations and Inspirations<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

It took a while for Owen to get here from there. Early on, \u201cI\u2019d had some anxiety about being able to commit myself to the number of solitary hours I knew being a writer required.\u201d The big change came when \u201cI took a class called Senior Composition when I was a college senior, and that made me feel like maybe I could become a writer,\u201d he says. \u201cYou had to produce a fairly large number of pages of fiction, and they came pretty easily for me. While I liked to write stories as an adolescent, and I felt I had some talent for it, I wasn\u2019t dedicated.\u201d He waits a beat. \u201cThat is, I wouldn\u2019t let myself become dedicated. The earliest story I can vaguely remember writing was something in third or fourth grade. It featured Hammett\u2019s detective Sam Spade, who I\u2019d learned about by watching a little of The Maltese Falcon<\/em> with my dad.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Senior Comp.\u2019 changed everything for Owen \u201cso completely that I decided I wanted to attend graduate school and try to get an MFA in fiction writing.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The Maine Ingredient<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Although Owen chose to keep the name King, he and his wife, bestselling novelist Kelly Braffet, moved from Bangor to upstate New York as they both carved out their own careers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite living 20 years \u2018away,\u2019 Owen knows his writing doesn\u2019t stray too far from his roots here. \u201cMaine has always been an accepting place; a place that\u2019s all right with eccentricity.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

O<\/span>wen boosts the \u201camazing environment\u201d as another lure for writers. \u201cI would hypothesize that Maine\u2019s biggest influence on my writing has to do with setting.\u201d Well, naturally. His father has made many fictional Maine small towns places of wonder for readers. Derry and Castle Rock are likely the most recognized. Derry was the setting for his 1986 novel, IT<\/em>. Castle Rock\u2013now also the title of a Hulu series that follows the intertwined storylines of past King novels\u2013first appeared in The Dead Zone<\/em> (1979).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEven if I were writing a story set in, say, ancient Greece, I\u2019m sure there\u2019d be a touch of Maine in the landscape I described,\u201d Owen says. \u201cI saw Maine first, and I saw it for quite a while. Everything since appears [to me] in comparison.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Onward<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

With Sleeping Beauties<\/em> by his side, Owen has made it made it clear that he wants to keep growing. \u201cI read as widely as I can. I don\u2019t want to get stuck in a rut. I don\u2019t want my perspective to get smaller. I want it to get bigger.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Owen\u2019s growth as a writer is paralleled by Braffet\u2019s, whose novels have received high praise from those who know, including Boston-based writer Dennis Lehane, who describes Save Yourself<\/em> as \u201can electrifying tomahawk missile of a thriller with honest-to-God people at its core.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cP<\/span>eople are always very curious about how it works with the two of us both being writers and working at home,\u201d Kelly says. \u201cI think they expect it to be far more interesting than it is. Honestly, he has his office, and I have mine. I always joke that we spend all day in different rooms together. Sometimes we meet up in the kitchen for lunch. During the day we text a lot.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Owen\u2019s marriage to Kelly is what he lists as his \u201cbest accomplishment\u201d to date.<\/span><\/p>\n

So You Want to Write…<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Owen\u2019s best advice to fledgling writers? \u201cYour work will be rejected, and it will be discouraging, [but] you have to keep pushing ahead. I can be quite persistent once I\u2019ve set my teeth into a project. There\u2019s a lot of rejection in my line of work, and you can\u2019t let it beat you down. Even enormously successful writers get told \u2018No\u2019 frequently. The New Yorker<\/em> doesn\u2019t publish everything George Saunders sends them, I promise you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Writer Nina Livingstone, who is blind and hard of hearing, covers a wide range of topics in her work, which includes columns, film, and public speaking. To learn more, visit her website Destination Mirth or contact her at\u00a0nina@destinationmirth.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

September 2018
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