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This Single Realisation Will Change Your Life
The greatest gift you’ll ever give yourself.
Stephen King was in his mid-twenties, teaching high school English and living in a trailer in Maine. He wrote in the laundry room. With a typewriter balanced on a child’s desk. One day, he was working on a story about a girl who was bullied and had the power to move things with her mind. He didn’t like what he had written, so he threw the pages in the bin. King thought he had written “the world’s all time loser.” His wife, Tabitha, got them out, read the pages and encouraged him to keep going. That story became Carrie, his first published novel. Tabitha’s intervention saved the novel. But get this, publishers rejected it 30 times before Doubleday finally agreed to publish it. Before it sold, nobody owed him a publisher. Nobody owed him a reader. The rejections were the world’s indifferent response to his wants.
He didn’t wait for that to change.
He went back to the laundry room. Now the second part, which people rarely pay attention to. King has said he writes with the door closed. In On Writing he says, “write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
Remember both parts.
Nobody owes King anything, and he didn’t owe anyone his work. The world owes you nothing. The minute you…
