Stephen King doesn’t do plotting. “Plot is,” he decreed in his memoir On Writing, “the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.” Instead, he likes to drop his characters into a situation, start writing and see where things go. If he gets stuck, he follows the advice of Raymond Chandler: “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”
This freewheeling method has served the king of horror well for 65 novels and more than 200 short stories, many of which are universally recognised as masterpieces. Yet at 77, he has ditched his usual approach to write his latest book, Never Flinch, a detective mystery thriller. “This once I wanted to try to write something different,” he explained in a promotional video. “And that meant that I had to have a plot.”
