Failure as Opportunity 1: A Blog by Warren Bull

 Failure as Opportunity 1 : A Blog by Warren Bull  

Image from Wikipedia

In the Chinese language the symbol for “crisis” is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity. Some people turn the failures in their lives into experiences of growth and understanding. Buddhist teachers believe that a problem will not go away until we learn the lesson it is meant to teach us. By that standard Stephen King must be a very learned man.

For more information see:

https://medium.failfection.com/stephen-king-the-failure-that-became-a-success-c915181195fa 

Born in Portland, Maine, in 1947, Stephen King’s parents divorced when he was very young. He and his brother, David, shuttled back and forth between their parents in Indiana and Connecticut.   When Stephen King graduated from the University of Maine in 1970, with an English degree, he discovered that he could not get a job as a teacher. He worked as a janitor, gas pump attendant, and as an industrial laundry laborer among other necessary but menial jobs. He married a woman named Tabitha and they had two children. They lived in a double-wide trailer and drove an old car that broke down often.  The Kings couldn’t even afford a telephone.

King had to borrow a typewriter from his wife and wrote while his wife worked the second shift at Dunkin’ Donuts.

Working as a janitor, cleaning a girls’ bathroom was an experience that led him toward writing the novel Carrie, that became a classic horror novel. However, he quit after writing three pages.  Feeling the heroine was too passive and fearing he did not know enough about teenage girls, he crumpled up the pages and threw them away. Tabitha found the pages in the trash can and pulled them out. After taking a look, she told her husband to keep going. Stephen King listened to her.

After completing Carrie in nine months, he sent it to 30 publishers. They all rejected it. He began to abuse substances when he faced so many rejections. Even after Carrie was published and gained success, King’s addictions continued. He wrote his pain and fears into his fiction, thus calming his mind.

Even though he knew how to temporarily escape his mind’s terrors, he was still consumed by his addictions to alcohol and drugs, particularly cocaine. He had to stick cotton up his nose. Otherwise, blood would drip on his typewriter. King bought into the myth that so many writers believe, i.e., that addictive substances were crucial for his success as a writer.

Tabatha threw away everything that allowed him to abuse substances. She threatened to leave if he didn’t stop. King didn’t want to lose his family and his life, so he tried to quit his addictions. It took him multiple tries, but he eventually succeeded. Afterward, he experienced writer’s block, his greatest fear, but he slogged his way through it. 

Looking at failures as opportunities and exorcising his personal demons gave King a visceral sense of the struggle against seemingly impossible odds, which is reflected in his writing in ways a less tortured person could not understand and convey.