What Stephen King Teaches Us About Communication, Writing & Success -Part 1

Great communication rarely happens on the first draft. In this episode of the How to Talk to Humans podcast, communication expert Larry Wilson explores the writing habits and success of bestselling author Stephen King to reveal powerful lessons about editing, refining, and improving your message. Whether you're writing a speech, preparing a presentation, selling an idea, or simply trying to communicate more effectively, Larry explains why rewriting, revising, and continuous improvement are essential to success. Discover how Stephen King's approach to writing can help you become a better communicator, build stronger connections, and achieve greater results in business and everyday life.

Hosted by Larry Wilson
Produced by: Verbal Ninja Productions
Producer: R. Scott Edwards
Sponsored by: The Wilson Method

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Transcript

Larry Wilson 0:02

Hi, this is Larry Wilson, and this is How to Talk to Humans. This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills. Are you looking to get a better job? Are you looking to find a relationship? Are you trying to do things in your life that have frustrated you and eluded you so far? I can show you so easily how to change that. Now, I can only do it with humans. If you're looking to deal with vampires or zombies extraterrestrials, this is not the show. But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned for 40 years in the show business working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world, and their secrets are unbelievable. What I'm going to be teaching you during the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use to communicate toward success. So I tell you this because that idea of a main character changing their need, that's completely legitimate, honorable, doable. You can do that. You might start off telling people, oh yeah, I wanted to be the most successful car salesman in America. And then at some point, which would be essentially like your midpoint in your story, you realized, oh, I can never compete with these huge companies and these this. And then you decided, well, I would like to become the most famous used car dealer in my state because of my honesty. I may not sell the most cars, I may not make the most money, but I want to have a reputation that everyone knows. Oh, you want to know who the most honest guy in this car is so-and-so. So maybe you could change the, maybe that's how you change your need, or it could be anything else. Or maybe you decide you meet a person and fall in love with them and get married, have a children, and you decide I don't want to be a car salesman anymore. I don't want to be away from my family. And so you come up with something that allows you to stay at home. I I can't write your story for you, and uh, you know, you can do whatever you like. But bringing this all full circle, I come back to Carolyn Bick's uh book about she um I I haven't read her book yet, uh, but I read a fascinating article about her. She was given an opportunity that had never ever happened before. Stephen King agreed to let her look in his uh archives. I guess, you know, in the days before computers, writers would type up manuscripts on a typewriter on paper, and they would keep every draft they wrote. Now, I know from having done this myself, uh not an easy thing to do. But sometimes before computers, we would cut up paper to change pieces of writing around. You don't realize how much easier it is now with computers. You highlight something, you drag it, move it to a different part, no problem. Or there's a big chunk you think shouldn't be in there, you highlight it, delete, you're fine. Not so in the old days. But apparently, King kept all of his original drafts, not just the first draft, but many subsequent drafts. And of course, when he goes back to reread them, he's handwriting notes on them stuff. So this woman, Carolyn Bix, gets a chance, is invited. I can't remember exactly what the impetus for this whole thing was, but she takes him up on it. So she's gonna go and wade through all these manuscripts and read all these things. And what she discovers shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone. But it's fascinating that uh King's first drafts were sometimes radically different than the finished published book. And if you take nothing else away from this training here, if one of the most successful writers in history, I mean, uh I would think King has to be number one or in the top five of published authors in terms of how many books he's sold. Literally tens of millions of copies of his books. And he's just like you. Although I will say this, I think he may be more disciplined as a writer than you. He writes every day. Doesn't matter if he's inspired or not. That's what real writers do every day. You write, you get some pages down. You may go back later and go, oh, that was terrible. Fine, no one's ever gonna see it. Especially in these days of computers where nothing's printed out, you know, they have to open a file you have. But that discipline of writing every day was a great habit to get in. As she starts to go through this, she sees uh very interesting things. Um she said she was surprised that so much of King's um, you know, King's his genre's horror, and uh she realized from reading his stuff, and I think also from talking to him, she had access to him, that he built the horror a lot of times on word choice and the sound and the music of the words. Um and uh he told her, he said, When I rewrite, I have to be aware of word reps. I assume he means repetition, and unintentional rhymes. Anything that will clang on the reader's ear. Now, something I've brought up again and again here is that uh when people ask me why what I have against emojis, I don't have anything against emojis. Um people ask me what I have against putting funny insertions into an email or plays on words or something. King is describing something that clangs on the reader's ear. I describe it differently, but it's the exact same thing. I can assure you that anything that interrupts the reader's attention, even literally for a microsecond, and this is why punctuation is critical, because I know that's very popular with young people to text with no punctuation, no capitalization. But if you've ever read a text from someone where you had to read it five times before you could figure out are they talking about something in the past or something that's going to happen? Are they talking about something they said or someone said to them, or something they're thinking, or something they want me to know? When you have to interrupt the flow of communication to figure out what's actually going on, you diminish the power of your communication. And that's why I don't ever want you to do anything. Now, in your personal life, you can do whatever you want. Uh, you know, I've said this before that about emojis. There's a study that found that uh people weren't aware that they were saying this, but the the study showed that people thought that others who wrote using emojis in their email or in their text were less intelligent. Doesn't mean they are less intelligent. It doesn't mean that everyone thinks, but a great majority of people felt that way. So only reason I mention it, bring it up to you, is if you would like to not be thought of as less intelligent, then don't use them. If you're dealing with someone who's your best friend from sixth grade, well, you can do anything you want. Of course you can, but they're not going to think that it has to do with people who maybe you don't know or you have only a business relationship with, something like that. But King in many ways puts it in a way that's much clearer than the way I said he says, I don't want something that will clang on the reader's ear. And what he means, of course, is it pulls them out of the suspension of disbelief when you're reading and it's very real, something that just strikes a wrong tone. Um and it's uh she gives an example of uh one of King's stories. Again, uh if you don't know these, you may really enjoy this. My complaint with him is in recent years, I find that a lot of his writing, you know, when you get to a certain level of fame and fortune and power, it's really hard for people to say no to you. Um, some I've heard people argue about why the first three Star Wars movies are so great and then they turn to crap. Well, by the time they make the fourth Star Wars, George Lucas is king of the world, and no one's gonna say to him, Oh, that uh Jar Jar Binks character is dreadful. What good can come of you telling George Lucas that? Not gonna help your career. He's not gonna say, I admire your honesty. Sorry, that's not gonna happen. This screenplay that he wrote for the fourth one is his baby. He wrote it, he loves it, you know, and so that's a problem. I I kind of feel like Stephen King fell into that mindset. And I could be completely wrong, and if I am, I'd be the first to apologize. But it seems to me, I can't give you uh the name of a book, but somewhere in there, he comes up with such clever ideas and startling and terrifying images and situations and all kinds of that they can be very compelling where you really have to stay up and find out what happens next. But then in a lot of his more recent work, the ending just falls apart. It either becomes so loopy or it goes off way afield from what he started with, or it almost in a couple of his books, it just seemed like he was tired of writing, and so he just wanted to wrap it up and didn't care whether it made sense or not. What had come before was very compelling, scary, powerful, and now okay, I'm done. I'll just, you know, I don't really know how it ends, I'll just wrap up. I don't know if that's the truth, but that was my feeling. But in his early days, there's a book he wrote called Pet Cemetery. And if you're interested in reading it, uh cemetery is spelled incorrectly, because it you learn in the story it's written by children. So it's spelled S-E-M, A-T-A-R-Y, Pet Cemetery. And there's some very scary stuff in it, and in this pet cemetery, things that are buried there have a tendency to come back to life. King talked with this woman, Carolyn Bix, specifically about uh stuff in this scene. His son is killed by a drunk driver. And of course, it is interesting, this woman, Carolyn Bix, points out, that the details of the son's accident, the little boy's accident, mirrors exactly uh Stephen King's own son almost got killed by a drunk driver and the road where it takes place and all these other things he's used in this fiction book. And you can feel it, you can feel the authenticity of it when you're reading. Anyway, of course, he buries the son there, and then his wife is killed. I don't remember how that happens, but he buries them both in the pet cemetery, and then he's waiting at home to see what happens. And King told Carolyn Bix said in in the first draft, this guy's sitting in his kitchen in the dark, hears one grating step. And King said he read that and reread it, and decided, nope, nope, that wasn't right. And so in a subsequent thing, it becomes a grating step, becomes a series of gritting footsteps. And the grating he said he moved into her throat, where his wife comes in and her voice is grating full of dirt, and she says, darling. So in the context of this book, it's some pretty scary stuff. But the important lesson for you is he didn't write it in the first draft. It's a process of rewriting and rewriting. Every time you rewrite, it gets better. And uh one of my favorite Stephen King books at that time was um was a book called uh Salem's Lot. And it's got vampires, it's got all sorts of great stuff, but it takes place in a little New England town similar to one that King grew up in. In the archives, Carolyn Bix finds a hand-drawn map of this fictional town. And she realizes, oh, this guy's thinking about all this stuff. He's the the map doesn't appear in the book, but it aids him in the process of visualizing the this story he's telling. So when he says, Oh, he went from this place to this place, and then someone took a shortcut through these woods, I I mean, it's it's not earth-shaking, it's not like we figured out a cure for cancer or something, but in terms of writing, in terms of you giving yourself permission to try things you've never tried before and make mistakes if you do, and no one gets hurt. There's no downside. I promise you, the more times you rewrite, the better it's gonna get. Guaranteed. It I'm not just saying this, it literally cannot help but get better. And of course, this is something that AI can't do. Now you can say to AI, oh, yeah, you wrote this thing for me. Now write another draft, make it better or something. It's not human. And so things that we do as humans, it doesn't know about. Maybe one day will, but it doesn't now. And your rewriting, whether it's conscious or unconscious, will be better. And if you rewrite whatever you're working on a dozen times, I'm not saying you may not get off course in the middle of that, but by that dozen, oof, it's gonna be tighter, clearer, better. Really better. This has been Larry Wilson. I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you found this information useful. If you're looking for more, you can find it at thewilsonmethod.com. There's a ton of stuff there. That if you want, you can even speak to me because I'm human. Send me an email at info at wilsonmethod.com because I read every single one. I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey. And you'll be with me for the next episode of How to Talk to You.