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A Writer’s Commitment is Expressed Through the Heart and Tested by Action
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” — Mark Twain
In the early 1970s, a young schoolteacher named Stephen King was working on a short story that had turned into something longer. He was writing about a girl named Carrie White — a social outcast with a terrifying supernatural gift — and he was stuck. The story wasn’t working. The world he was trying to create felt wrong to him, foreign and implausible. He crumpled up the pages and threw the manuscript in the trash.
His wife, Tabitha, found it.
She pulled it out, smoothed the pages, read them, and brought them back to her husband. She told him the story was good — better than he thought. She told him to keep going.
He did. Reluctantly, doubtfully, and with a commitment he almost abandoned, Stephen King finished Carrie. It was rejected by thirty publishers before Doubleday finally said yes. The paperback rights sold for $400,000 — an unheard-of sum in 1974. The novel became a bestseller, then a film, then a…
