11.22.63
11.22.63
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Stephen King on 11.22.63
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Forty years of not writing the bookKing was sixteen when Kennedy was shot, which put the assassination inside his own adolescent memory. By the time he sat down as a first-year high school English teacher in Maine, two years before Watergate, the event was still only a decade old. He started something he called Split Track and then quit fourteen pages in.
I actually tried to write this novel in 1973 when I was teaching high school. And at that time, it was called Split Track. And I got, I think, 14 single-space pages, um, and then stopped. [paraphrased from audio]
Stopping in 1973 turned out to be the right call, though King only understood why years later. The gap between the event and his return to it was not procrastination; it was a condition of the material.
I’m glad now when I think back on it that I didn’t go forward with it at that time. Because in 1973, the wound was still too fresh. It was only 10 years in the past. [paraphrased from audio]
With the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination approaching, King returned to the project. What he wanted to give readers, especially those too young to have any visceral sense of November 1963, was the scale of what a generation had lost.
I think that people today, people in their twenties and thirties, don’t realize what an event it was for people who were in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. That was our 9/11. Uh, it changed everything. [paraphrased from audio]
The historical occasion gave him permission to return, but the engine of the novel was a genuine question, not an argument he had already settled. He needed to follow the premise honestly to find out where it landed.
There was a real impetus to write this book to say, well, if this did change, what would happen? Could you change the past? [paraphrased from audio]
That the novel’s answer turns out to be deeply cautionary, not triumphant, suggests he let the story lead rather than the wish.
How he wrote it
The device he spent a career avoidingKing had watched time travel wreck novels by writers he admired, and he had spent decades keeping his distance from the mechanism as a result. When the Kennedy material finally demanded it, he had to reckon with exactly the trap he had spent years identifying.
Time travel is very tricky, and tricky is a kind word for it. This is something that I’ve steered clear of in a lot of my work because I’ve seen better writers than I’ll ever be fall afoul of the time travel story. [paraphrased from audio]
His solution was to establish the rules of the time portal quickly and then bury them under five years of lived experience: Jake’s courtship of Sadie, his teaching job in Jodie, Texas, his daily life in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The mechanics became scaffolding; the human story occupied the weight of the book’s 740 pages.
King had spent much of his career thinking about how the period in which a writer attempts a subject shapes what the subject can become. The first version of this book failed not because of craft but because of timing: the writer and the event were too close in time for the full picture to exist yet.
I’d always wanted to write about the Kennedy assassination. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
A teacher’s job, a teenager’s memoryThe autobiographical current running through the novel’s setup is impossible to miss once you know it. King gave his protagonist Jake Epping the same job he held in 1973, in the same state, at roughly the same age, when he first tried to write the book.
I actually tried to write this novel in 1973 when I was teaching high school. And at that time, it was called Split Track. And I got, I think, 14 single-space pages, um, and then stopped. [paraphrased from audio]
The choice to make the Kennedy assassination a generational dividing line, comparable in emotional scale to the September 11 attacks, is a personal claim as much as a historical one. King was sixteen on November 22, 1963, and the comparison comes from a felt experience, not a research conclusion.
I think that people today, people in their twenties and thirties, don’t realize what an event it was for people who were in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. That was our 9/11. Uh, it changed everything. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel is, among other things, an attempt to transfer that generational memory to readers who have no access to it through their own lives.
On context
The adaptation he watched arriveBy the time the Hulu miniseries entered production, King had been living with the material for over four decades in one form or another. His comments on the adaptation were less about what it changed and more about confidence in the people making it.
They’re doing 11/22/63 now as a nine-part thing: James Franco is fantastic, and the people who are involved were all involved in Friday Night Lights, and they know how to tell a story.
What he wants us to sit with
Consequence is larger than intentionThe novel’s ending, in which stopping the assassination produces a world worse than the one Jake left, answers the question King posed to himself at the start. He had framed it as an open inquiry, and the book followed it to a conclusion that refuses the comfort of the counterfactual fantasy.
There was a real impetus to write this book to say, well, if this did change, what would happen? Could you change the past? [paraphrased from audio]
The other thing King wanted the book to accomplish was more straightforward: a restoration of historical weight to an event that had faded for younger generations into documentary footage and trivia. The 9/11 comparison is his attempt to give that weight a unit of measure a contemporary reader can feel.
In 2013 it will be 50 years since Kennedy was assassinated, and I think that’s about long enough. [paraphrased from audio]
Long enough to see clearly, but not so long that the emotional frequency of the event had entirely died. The anniversary gave him a deadline the novel had been waiting forty years to meet.