The germ of the novel arrived not at a desk but on a road. King was a freshman at the University of Maine in the spring of 1966, without a car, relying on rides to get anywhere, when a cluster of men waiting to collect unemployment checks outside the woods gave him the image he needed.

Stephen King

I got the idea for The Long Walk in the spring of 1966. I was in my freshman year at the University of Maine at Orono and I was walking home one day from class... I was waiting for my ride and I passed this place where a lot of guys would wait to go into the woods, to pick up their unemployment checks from the state. And I just thought that would be a fascinating book to do. I mean, if you had a group of kids, they were on a road, and they were always going to the state of Maine. And the object was to outlast each other. [paraphrased from audio]

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Marvelous Videos, “15 Major Differences Between The Long Walk Movie and Stephen King’s Original Novel”

The leap from an unemployment line to a death march of boys is not explained by logic. It arrived whole, the way King’s best premises tend to: as a felt image before it was a thought.

A real physical experience fed the premise. The early 1960s had produced a national craze for organized 50-mile hikes, promoted by radio and television, and King had tried one himself. He remembered exactly how far his own legs carried him before they quit.

Stephen King

I had that in mind. I didn’t have a car when I wrote that book. I was hitchhiking everywhere. I didn’t finish my 50-mile hike, though. I fell out after 20 miles.

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stephenking.com, “Stephen King | The Long Walk”

Vietnam was not the book’s subject, but it was the air King was breathing at 19, watching men his own age get drafted into a war that promised purpose and delivered death. He did not set out to write a political novel about it.

Stephen King

You write from your times, so certainly, that was in my mind. But I never thought about it consciously. I was writing a kind of a brutal thing. It was hopeless, and just what you write when you’re 19 years old, man. You’re full of beans and you’re full of cynicism, and that’s the way it was.

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slashfilm.com, “The Real-Life Horrors That Inspired Stephen King’s The Long Walk”

King wrote the first draft at a speed that matched his age. Back in his dorm with a Royal portable typewriter, he produced roughly 30,000 words in a couple of weeks, submitted the manuscript to Doubleday as part of a collection, received a rejection, and put it in a drawer. Years later, working through an old trunk of manuscripts, he pulled it back out and read it fresh.

Stephen King

I pulled out The Walk. And I read it, and I said, ‘This is a pretty good story.’ [paraphrased from audio]

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Marvelous Videos, “15 Major Differences Between The Long Walk Movie and Stephen King’s Original Novel”

He revised the sections that needed it, but described the finished novel as essentially done in one draft, a circumstance he noted was unusual for him.

The choice to keep the boys nearly anonymous was not an oversight but a calculated structural decision. Readers expecting the genre machinery of backstory and motivation will not find it here, and King was explicit about why.

Stephen King

the characters, the kids who are in the book, are not particularly fleshed out in terms of their backstories. You don’t know who their parents are, where they’re from, what they do, anything like that. Because it’s not important. Because all that’s important is what they’re doing right now. And, uh, that’s what I wanted to focus on. [paraphrased from audio]

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Marvelous Videos, “15 Major Differences Between The Long Walk Movie and Stephen King’s Original Novel”

The book appeared in 1979 not under King’s own name but as the work of Richard Bachman, a pseudonym he had created partly to test whether his success was tied to talent or to the accident of being Stephen King first. His 1985 introduction to The Bachman Books, the omnibus that eventually outed the pen name, made the psychology of that experiment plain.

Stephen King

It is depressing to think it was all — or even mostly — an accident. So maybe you try to find out if you could do it again. Or in my case, if Bachman could do it again.

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British Broadcasting Corporation, “‘It’s still so relevant’: The power of Stephen King’s first - and most disturbing - novel The Long Walk”

The question readers return to most often is the one King says he cannot answer: why would any boy willingly enter a contest that kills everyone but one? He has treated that unanswerable quality not as a flaw to explain away but as the engine of what the book is actually doing.

Stephen King

people ask me, ‘Why do they do it?’ And I said, ‘Well, if I knew why they did it, I probably wouldn’t have written the book.’ Because that’s the whole point of it. It’s a game. It’s a death game. And they’re walking, and they’re going to die. And it’s not a question of why they’re doing it, it’s a question of how long they can last. And it’s a metaphor for life, I think, in a lot of ways. [paraphrased from audio]

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Marvelous Videos, “15 Major Differences Between The Long Walk Movie and Stephen King’s Original Novel”

For decades, studios optioned the book and then walked away from it. King’s own read on why it took so long to reach the screen points to the same quality that makes the novel difficult to put down and impossible to feel comfortable about afterward.

Stephen King

I think maybe what held it back in those other adaptations is that merciless quality. Somebody putting down the money for it must’ve been, like, ‘I don’t know... this is hard. This is a painful one.’

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slashfilm.com, “Stephen King Has A Theory Why It Took So Long To Film The Long Walk”