(electronic music)
- [Stephen] I was taking a walk one day and I happened
to spot a little girl on the corner of my street,
she was about five years old.
She was sitting in the dirt at the edge
of the road talking to herself or to invisible friends
and drawing in the dirt with a stick and I thought
you know if I did that, somebody would come along
and say there's a grown man sitting in the dirt,
talking to himself to people who aren’t there
and drawing with a stick which is very close
to what I do for a living, what people pay me to do.
So the two things that I've discovered
and the two things that interest me about childhood,
the first thing is that it's a secret world that exists
by its own rules and lives in its own culture.
And the second thing is that we forget what it is
to be a child and we forget that life which is kind of
exotic and strange and that’s what really interests me.
- [Thomas] Did you have a highly developed sense
of evil yourself as a child or were you obsessed
by the nature of evil?
- [Stephen] I'm always more interested
in the question itself than I am in any answer.
Why do people ask me about my childhood?
Hey, this is what I do for a living
but I don't remember having
a particularly unusual childhood.
It seems to me that the focus of that question
is always something terrible must have happened
to you when you were a kid, Steve, or you wouldn't
be writing this awful stuff that you're writing.
But I think that question grows out of a basic misconception
about why we remember so little.
I think a lot of people make the assumption
that we block memories that are terrible.
When I think what really happens is this
that we think in a different way as children.
We tend to think around corners instead of
in straight lines.
Sometimes for a kid, the shortest distance
between two points is not a straight line
and that's the way that we think and dream.
And I think that as children we tend to live in this kind of
dream state and we've forgotten it in the same way.
And because I equate that sort of dream state
with a heightened sort of mental state.
I make this easy cross-connection between childhood
and strange powers, paranormal powers or whatever,
and it has been successfully as a fictional device.
- [Thomas] Could you talk about
your sense of the origin of fear?
- [Stephen] I think that a lot of what we think of
as horror fiction or fiction of the macabre comes out
of this sense of futurity that we have, as we grow older
we become aware of the fact that we are going to die
and most of us are going to die in ways that are
are unpleasant.
For most of us, it’s there, it's waiting for us.
We understand that on an intellectual level.
But I don't think on an emotional level or a spiritual level
we ever quite come to terms with it.
Mentally we grasp it, emotionally we can't quite grasp it.
When we deal stories of the supernatural whatever
the supernatural element is, the mind sort of bifurcates
and the story begins to talk to us on two levels.
On the intellectual level you grasp the fact that it
is make believe.
But the subconscious grabs the story in a symbolic way,
whether we like to or not.
I'm not much when it comes to actual literal symbolism
in stories, but I do realize that you're dealing here
with things that substitute for other things the way
that in dreams, if you're dreaming about riding
in a car and you're out of control,
you're really dreaming about something else that has
to do with your waking life and the censor changes
it just enough for it to be acceptable to the front
of the brain.
And I think that in a lot of supernatural stories
we're dealing with fears that exist
on a very practical level.
And in between those two levels, the shout on top
where the make believe is going on
and the whisper underneath where the subconscious mind
is saying, yes but this could really happen
if you just changed a few things.
- [Thomas] Yes.
- [Stephen] That's where the story can succeed.
When we deal with the Grand Guigniol,
the things that really scare us are the things that
are going on just outside the spotlight
that you can’t quite see.
(creepy music)
- [Thomas] Listen, we've run out of time.
Thank you, Stephen King.
May your muse visit you often up in Maine
and may you continue to frighten and wow us
and entertain us and inspire us.
Frighten us to life, not to death.
- [Stephen] Thank you, Tom.
May your muse continue to visit you, as well.
- [Thomas] OK.
This is Thomas Smith saying so long until the next time
on the public radio book show.
(piano music)
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