OH NO I HAVE TO SAY ALL THIS TO PEOPLE O.O
I wrote a speech today!
I'm doing a speaking anxiety workshop at uni because I suck at the whole speaking in front of people thing, and I had to put together a little 2 minute piece on whatever I wanted. So I wrote about my favourite author - Mr Stephen King. Writing this made me want to read all my favourites again... which will probably realistically take a few years considering he likes to make his books >1000 pages long.
I chose to talk today about the author Stephen King, who I almost forgot was one of my favourite authors, until I was looking around my room last night trying to think of what to speak about.
I began collecting King novels about five years ago, when a friend recommended that I read the novel It, about an evil spiritual force that torments a group of children, feeding on their fear. Although it sounds cheesy and b-grade (and the film adaptation was rather bad), the thousand-page novel fascinated me.
On the surface it’s just another long-winded horror paperback, but it also takes a deep look at psychological phenomena and theories that fascinated me at 16, and still fascinate me today.
In It, he suggests that all the monsters we feared as children - the monster under the bed, or the ghost in the haunted house - were real; and that as we age into adults, our minds discount what they cannot comprehend or fit into conventional, “adult” life - but these horrors remain in the real world.
In a way, this actually happens to us in real, everyday life: if there is something that our mind has difficulty comprehending, there’s a strong chance that it will not register that we perceive it at all. King just extends this a little by suggesting that this “censoring” process might apply to other things that we can’t comprehend, in this case, supernatural forces.
King’s written over sixty-five full-length novels and novellas, as well as over a hundred short stories and dozens of essays and non-fiction pieces. He sold his first short story, The Glass Floor, when he was twenty, a few years before he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English, and became a high-school English teacher.
So far, I’ve read twenty-five of his books, and I’ve loved every one, even if they weren’t the happiest or most enjoyable stories to read. He has a unique sense of humour, and a brilliant knack for writing gory horror that has made me physically ill on several occasions - but I love it.
In 1974, he published his first novel, which would become his most famous: the story of Carrie, a repressed young girl trying to fit in as she comes of age - who just so happens to possess the power of telekinesis.
His earlier works tend to be his most recognised - the year after he published Carrie came The Shining, then the epic Stand, and the Dead Zone - all of which have been adapted into some of the better done and better known films based on King’s work.
Most of King’s stories have this mixture of the supernatural with the psychological; dealing with psychological phenomena that have in the past been associated with the occult; such as schizophrenia, autism, and our overall perception of reality as both individuals and the collective human race.
King portrays characters’ personalities and cognition with a depth and authenticity that I haven’t found with any other author. Even though most of the psychology he writes about might not be very factual, it’s really what inspired me to study in the field.
I'm doing a speaking anxiety workshop at uni because I suck at the whole speaking in front of people thing, and I had to put together a little 2 minute piece on whatever I wanted. So I wrote about my favourite author - Mr Stephen King. Writing this made me want to read all my favourites again... which will probably realistically take a few years considering he likes to make his books >1000 pages long.
I chose to talk today about the author Stephen King, who I almost forgot was one of my favourite authors, until I was looking around my room last night trying to think of what to speak about.
I began collecting King novels about five years ago, when a friend recommended that I read the novel It, about an evil spiritual force that torments a group of children, feeding on their fear. Although it sounds cheesy and b-grade (and the film adaptation was rather bad), the thousand-page novel fascinated me.
On the surface it’s just another long-winded horror paperback, but it also takes a deep look at psychological phenomena and theories that fascinated me at 16, and still fascinate me today.
In It, he suggests that all the monsters we feared as children - the monster under the bed, or the ghost in the haunted house - were real; and that as we age into adults, our minds discount what they cannot comprehend or fit into conventional, “adult” life - but these horrors remain in the real world.
In a way, this actually happens to us in real, everyday life: if there is something that our mind has difficulty comprehending, there’s a strong chance that it will not register that we perceive it at all. King just extends this a little by suggesting that this “censoring” process might apply to other things that we can’t comprehend, in this case, supernatural forces.
King’s written over sixty-five full-length novels and novellas, as well as over a hundred short stories and dozens of essays and non-fiction pieces. He sold his first short story, The Glass Floor, when he was twenty, a few years before he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English, and became a high-school English teacher.
So far, I’ve read twenty-five of his books, and I’ve loved every one, even if they weren’t the happiest or most enjoyable stories to read. He has a unique sense of humour, and a brilliant knack for writing gory horror that has made me physically ill on several occasions - but I love it.
In 1974, he published his first novel, which would become his most famous: the story of Carrie, a repressed young girl trying to fit in as she comes of age - who just so happens to possess the power of telekinesis.
His earlier works tend to be his most recognised - the year after he published Carrie came The Shining, then the epic Stand, and the Dead Zone - all of which have been adapted into some of the better done and better known films based on King’s work.
Most of King’s stories have this mixture of the supernatural with the psychological; dealing with psychological phenomena that have in the past been associated with the occult; such as schizophrenia, autism, and our overall perception of reality as both individuals and the collective human race.
King portrays characters’ personalities and cognition with a depth and authenticity that I haven’t found with any other author. Even though most of the psychology he writes about might not be very factual, it’s really what inspired me to study in the field.