As a lifelong Stephen King fan, I have a handful of the master of horror’s books in regular rotation. In any given year I’m likely to reread The Stand, Pet Semetery, Firestarter, Different Seasons, It, or The Shining, just to name a few favorites. Despite the darkness of the stories, they feel like comfort reads to me, probably because they lead me down that irresistible and shadowy path into the past where I first discovered them. For some reason though, it had been decades since I’d reread Misery.
That’s easily remedied, I thought back in March as I was searching for the perfect book to wrap up a lovely spring break. I still have my copy from the 90s, an old mass market paperback with a torn cover and yellowed pages, although I had to steal it back from my daughter (Misery’s the one Stephen King book she’s read, and she adored it so much I think she’s afraid nothing else will live up to that standard). After plucking it off her bookshelf I settled in to reacquaint myself with the story, which I did with immense pleasure and predictable nostalgia on sunny days in the shade of my porch and long evenings propped up against my wedge pillow, sipping coffee (teacher breaks really are the best).
A few things surprised me about Misery. One is that, at 340 pages, the novel is uncharacteristically short. Another is that it is an absolute treasure trove of authorial insights that I can appreciate now in ways I wouldn’t have been able to before; after all, the last time I read the book, I hadn’t yet written one of my own.
For those unfamiliar with the story, the main character Paul Sheldon is a famous author who gets rescued from a car crash by his number one fan, who proceeds to kidnap him and force him to write a book just for her. In doing so, he must revisit a series he’d put behind him and resurrect a character he’d previously killed off, all while suffering the excruciating pain of two shattered legs and the constant terror of disappointing his sadistic captor.
That’s way more pressure than I’ve ever faced with a mere deadline, yet the ways in which Paul struggles with the work are universal to writers. He has several false starts. He types a chapter heading and stares at all of the white space below it. He gets ideas and then rejects them. He begins to feel like the typewriter is mocking him. Paul is stuck, frustrated, desperately trying to figure out how to bring a character back from the dead in a way that feels fair.
And then he remembers a game he played as a young boy in summer camp, where the kids would sit in a circle and tell a story, led by the camp counselor. The counselor would introduce the main character and set a scene which immediately put him or her in danger. Then the counselor would choose one camper, say, “Can You?” and start a ten-second timer. In that time, the camper had to further the narrative, which included getting the main character out of whatever dilemma they were in. Some kids would go blank; some would try to cheat by using a deux ex machina. Those kids had to leave the circle. The ones who managed to advance the plot fairly got to stay in the game.
Paul remembers how he almost always won. Something in him—that quality that would lead him to becoming a prolific best-selling author—drove him to embrace the challenge, to furiously work out the plot in a race against the timer. And so, in the room where he’s being held prisoner and forced to write a book from a premise that feels impossible, he asks himself the question: Can You? And he does.
Anyone who writes novels can relate to the inevitable and seemingly insurmountable plot issues that come with drafting hundreds of pages of a manuscript. At some point your story is going to stall. You get tangled up in narrative threads. You get lost in the weeds. You write yourself into corners. You begin to doubt everything. You want to give up. But that question persists—refusing to leave you alone, following you every waking moment and into your dreams, a challenge, a taunt: Can You?
Of course you can.
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