5 December 2024
The King of Double-Entendres: On Stephen King’s Misery
Spoilers—in case anyone out there isn’t already aware of what happens in this storyline
Of course, the most obvious double-entendre is the title itself: Misery is not just what Paul Sheldon, our miserable protagonist writer, endures at the torturous hands of Annie Wilkes. It’s also the name of the protagonist in his popular romance series whom Paul Sheldon kills off: Misery Chastain. This character’s death inflames Annie Wilkes and serves as the inciting incident for Sheldon’s imprisonment in King’s novel. Yes. Like my beloved Frankenstein, this is a story inside a story. Finally, Annie Wilkes has named her beloved pig Misery after the protagonist in Sheldon’s romance series.
Okay. But that’s not really the double-meaning that engaged my imagination in this story. No; for me, it was the writing process. King wrote the novel during or after a dry spell in his writing career. It mirrors yet fictionalizes and embellishes the experience of “writer’s block.” This is the first novel King wrote after going sober (he was addicted to drugs and alcohol). Hence all the allusions to Sheldon’s addiction to the fictitious drug, Novril. Interestingly, though, the book Sheldon writes while incarcerated by Wilkes, Misery’s Return, is written in its entirety while Sheldon is hooked on Novril. He doesn’t get sober until…well…later. So the mirroring isn’t precise.
The more important allusion here is to the writing process itself. King speaks to this in his memoir, On Writing: he was originally convinced that he could only write good stories if he was high (on drugs or alcohol). Thus, his commitment to sobriety must’ve been terror-inducing. His stories were his bread and butter. Misery is about King writing his first story, wrangling that merciless monster of his writers’ block, sober. The shattered body. The pain. The brain fog. Pushing through and ultimately finding that “hole in the paper” into which he could fall, blissfully, to escape reality for hours at a time. All of it was about convincing himself that he could write something worthwhile, sober.
Of course, I hold a soft space for writers writing about writing, and I most certainly took Misery as instructional: King is teaching us how he writes through challenges. My favorite lesson in the book is the “Can You?” game. As a child, Sheldon played a game with friends where someone presented you an impossible situation and asked, “Can you?” As in, can you get this protagonist out of this impossible situation? You’d invent a plot foil so your protagonist could escape, and then the group would vote whether that solution was “right” or not. The solution didn’t have to be realistic, but it did have to be right—or perhaps believable, given the situation. Wilkes did not like Sheldon’s first attempt to bring Misery back from dead. She said, “It isn’t right.” Sheldon failed the “Can You?” game the first time because he wasn’t trying hard enough. So he tried again with remarkable success.
King’s “Can You?” game should be one we all play as novelists. It’s almost imperative that we place our protagonists into impossible situations—moreover, such impossible situations are opportunities to MacGyver creative, unique plot solutions. Misery’s was one such situation, but we see how King unravels that very same lesson in Sheldon’s situation. One way to ensure that the “Can You?” solution is right is to set it up early in the novel: place objects, backstories, nuanced details early in the storyline that might be later mined for use. A ring. A watch. A flower. In Sheldon’s case, a bee or a cigarette or lighter fluid. Let the reader forget about that thing for a little while, then bring it back for the big “OH” reveal. Make the solution right in the universe of the story.
Yes. King’s greatest double-entendre in this story is that it is a novel about how to write a novel. It instructs by showing instead of telling. Everything Sheldon implements in his story for Misery Chastain, King is likewise implementing in his story for Paul Sheldon.
I haven’t watched the movie yet. I’ve heard Kathy Bates is phenomenal, but I’m afraid it will scramble the story set in place in my mind—which is what Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining did for that novel. Kubrick’s movie was a masterpiece, no doubt, but laying it over the novel smudged out so many details…I’ll have to re-read it to remind myself of the plot’s complexities.
In any case, in this story, King kept me guessing the whole time. The ending was unexpected, but King asked himself, “Can you?” and oh yes, yes he could.
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