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King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. His father, Donald Edwin King, a traveling vacuum salesman after returning from World War II,[10] was born in Indiana with the surname Pollock, changing it to King as an adult.[11][12] King's mother was Nellie Ruth King (nรฉe Pillsbury).[13] His parents were married in Scarborough, Maine on July 23, 1939.[14] Shortly afterwards, they lived with Donald's family in Chicago before moving to Croton-on-Hudson, New York.[15] King's parents returned to Maine towards the end of World War II, living in a modest house in Scarborough. King is of Scots-Irish descent.[16] When King was two, his father left the family. His mother raised him and his older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. They moved from Scarborough and depended on relatives in Chicago, Illinois; Croton-on-Hudson; West De Pere, Wisconsin; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Malden, Massachusetts; and Stratford, Connecticut.[17] When King was 11, his family moved to Durham, Maine, where his mother cared for her parents until their deaths. She then became a caregiver in a local residential facility for the mentally challenged.[1] King was raised Methodist,[18][19] but lost his belief in organized religion while in high school. While no longer religious, he says he chooses to believe in the existence of God.[20] As a child, King apparently witnessed one of his friends being struck and killed by a train, though he has no memory of the event. His family told him that after leaving home to play with the boy, King returned speechless and seemingly in shock. Only later did the family learn of the friend's death. Some commentators have suggested that this event may have psychologically inspired some of King's darker works,[21] but King makes no mention of it in his memoir On Writing (2000). King says he started writing when he was "about six or seven, just copying panels out of comic books and then making up my own stories... Film was also a major influence. I loved the movies from the start. So when I started to write, I had a tendency to write in images because that was all I knew at the time."[22] King told Terry Gross, "I've been queried a lot about where I get my ideas or how I got interested in this stuff. And at some point, a lot of interviewers just turn into Dr. Freud and put me on the couch and say, what was your childhood like? And I say various things, and I confabulate a little bit and kind of dance around the question as best as I can, but bottom line - my childhood was pretty ordinary, except from a very early age, I wanted to be scared. I just did."[23] He cites Tales From the Crypt and other horror comics as an early influence. King was a voracious reader in his youth: "I read everything from Nancy Drew to Psycho. My favorite was The Shrinking Man, by Richard Matheson — I was 8 when I found that. I also loved comic books, and my favorite characters (I can't remember any I'd call 'beloved') were Plastic Man and his clueless sidekick, Woozy Winks."[24] He compared his uncle's dowsing for water to the sudden realization of what he wanted to do for a living. That inspiration occurred while browsing through an attic with his elder brother, where he discovered a box of his father's books: "The box I found that day was a treasure trove of old Avon paperbacks... The pick of the litter, however, was an H. P. Lovecraft collection from 1947 called The Lurking Fear and Other Stories... I was on my way. Lovecraft—courtesy of my father—opened the way for me."[25] King remembers asking a bookmobile driver, "Do you have any stories about how kids really are?" She gave him William Golding's Lord of the Flies. It proved formative, as he recalls in his introduction to the centenary edition of the novel: "It was, so far as I can remember, the first book with hands—strong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat. It said to me, 'This is not just entertainment; it's life or death.'... To me, Lord of the Flies has always represented what novels are for."[26] King named his town of Castle Rock after the mountain fort in Lord of the Flies, and used a quotation from it as an epigraph to Hearts in Atlantis.[27] Mark Singer writes that "He was twelve when he started submitting stories to pulp magazines, and his mother blessed this ambition, providing a secondhand typewriter that was soon missing the 'n' key—a machine that turns up, to excruciatingly funny effect, in Misery."[28] King attended Durham Elementary School and graduated from Lisbon High School (Maine) in Lisbon Falls, Maine, in 1966.[29] He contributed to Dave's Rag, the newspaper his brother published with a mimeograph machine, and later began selling stories to his friends based on movies he had seen. (He was forced to return the profits when it was discovered by his teachers.) The first of his stories to be independently published was "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber", which was serialized over four issues (three published and one unpublished) of the fanzine Comics Review, in 1965. It was republished the following year in revised form, as "In a Half-World of Terror", in another fanzine, Stories of Suspense, edited by Marv Wolfman.[30] As a teen, King also won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.[31] In high school, King worked as a sports reporter for Lisbon's Weekly Enterprise. His editor, John Gould, gave him some advice that stayed with him: "When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all of the things that are not the story." He also said "write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."[32] King entered the University of Maine in 1966. He held a variety of jobs to pay for his studies, working as a janitor, a gas-station attendant, and an industrial laundry worker. Singer writes that "King received solid encouragement from two professors, Edward Holmes and Burton Hatlen."[28] He wrote a column, Steve King's Garbage Truck, for the student newspaper, The Maine Campus, and participated in a writing workshop organized by Hatlen.[33][failed verification] He met Tabitha Spruce at the university's Raymond H. Fogler Library after one of Professor Hatlen's workshops. He graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English, and his daughter Naomi Rachel was born that year.[34] He and Tabitha wed in 1971.[33][failed verification] Career Beginnings In 1971, King worked as a teacher at Hampden Academy. King sold his first professional short story, "The Glass Floor", to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967.[1] After graduating from the University of Maine, King earned a certificate to teach high school but, unable to find a teaching post immediately, he supplemented his laboring wage by selling short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier. Many of these early stories were republished in the collection Night Shift. The short story "The Raft" was published in Adam, a men's magazine. After being arrested for stealing traffic cones (he was annoyed after one of the cones knocked his muffler loose), he was fined $250 for petty larceny but had no money to pay. However, a check then arrived for "The Raft" (then titled "The Float"), and King cashed it to pay the fine.[35] In 1971, King was hired as a teacher at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. He continued to contribute short stories to magazines and worked on ideas for novels.[1] During 1966–1970, he wrote a draft of his dystopian novel The Long Walk[36] and the anti-war novel Sword in the Darkness,[37] but neither of the works was published at the time; only The Long Walk was later released in 1979. 1970s: Carrie to The Dead Zone In 1973, King's novel Carrie was accepted by Doubleday. It was King's fourth novel, but the first to be published. He recalls that "Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together." He wrote it on his wife Tabitha's portable typewriter. It began as a short story intended for Cavalier magazine, but King tossed the first three pages in the trash. Tabitha recovered the pages and encouraged him to finish the story, saying she would help him with the female perspective; he followed her advice and expanded it into a novel.[38] She told him: "You've got something here. I really think you do."[39] He said: "I persisted because I was dry and had no better ideas… My considered opinion was that I had written the world's all-time loser."[40] Per The Guardian, Carrie "is the story of Carrie White, a high-school student with latent—and then, as the novel progresses, developing—telekinetic powers. It's brutal in places, affecting in others (Carrie's relationship with her almost hysterically religious mother being a particularly damaged one), and gory in even more."[41] When Carrie was chosen for publication, King's phone was out of service. Doubleday editor William Thompson—who became King's close friend—sent a telegram to King's house in late March or early April 1973 which read: "Carrie Officially A Doubleday Book. $2,500 Advance Against Royalties. Congrats, Kid – The Future Lies Ahead, Bill."[42] King said he bought a new Ford Pinto with the advance.[43] On May 13, 1973, New American Library bought the paperback rights for $400,000, which—in accordance with King's contract with Doubleday—was split between them.[44] In 1976, Carrie was made into a film by Brian De Palma.[45] King was teaching Dracula to high school students and wondered what would happen if Old World vampires came to a small New England town. This was the germ of 'Salem's Lot, which King described as "Peyton Place meets Dracula."[46][47] In a 1987 interview in The Highway Patrolman, he said it was his favorite of his books, "mostly because of what it says about small towns. They are kind of a dying organism right now. The story seems sort of down home to me. I have a special cold spot in my heart for it!"[48] (In 2015, King would call Lisey's Story his favorite of his novels.)[24] In 1979, 'Salem's Lot was made into a miniseries by Tobe Hooper. After his mother's death, King and his family moved to Boulder, Colorado. He paid a visit to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park which proved influential: "My wife and I went up there in October. It was their last weekend of the season, so the hotel was almost completely empty. They asked me if I could pay cash because they were taking the credit card receipts back down to Denver. I went past the first sign that said, Roads may be closed after November 1, and I said, Jeez, there's a story up here."[22] This was the basis for The Shining, about an alcoholic writer and his family taking care of a hotel for the winter. In 1980, it was made into a film by Stanley Kubrick. King's family returned to Auburn, Maine in 1975, where he completed The Stand, an apocalyptic novel about a pandemic and its aftermath. King recalls that it was the novel that took him the longest to write, and that it was "also the one my longtime readers still seem to like the best (there's something a little depressing about such a united opinion that you did your best work twenty years ago, but we won't go into that just now, thanks.)"[49] In 1977, the family, with the addition of Owen Philip, his third and youngest child, traveled briefly to England. They returned to Maine that fall, where King began teaching creative writing at the University of Maine.[50] In 1979, he published The Dead Zone, about Johnny Smith, an ordinary man gifted with second sight. It was the first of his novels to take place in Castle Rock, Maine. In 1983, it was adapted into a film by David Cronenberg. The 1980s: Danse Macabre to The Dark Half In 1981, King published Danse Macabre, an overview of the horror genre based on courses he taught at the University of Maine.[51] The following year, King published Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas with a more serious dramatic bent than the horror fiction for which he had become famous.[52] Three of its four novellas were adapted as films: The Body as Stand by Me (1986);[53] Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption as The Shawshank Redemption (1994);[54] and Apt Pupil as the film of the same name (1998).[55] The novella The Breathing Method won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.[56] King recalls "I sent them Different Seasons and [King's editor] said, well, first of all you call it seasons, and you have just written three. I wrote another one, The Breathing Method, and that was the book. I got the best reviews in my life. And that was the first time that people thought, woah, this isn't really a horror thing. I was down here in the supermarket, and this old woman comes around the corner... She said, 'I know who you are, you are the horror writer. I don't read anything that you do, but I respect your right to do it. I just like things more genuine, like that Shawshank Redemption.' And I said, 'I wrote that'. And she said, 'No you didn't'. And she walked off and went on her way."[57] In 1983 he published Christine, billed as "A love triangle involving 17-year-old misfit Arnie Cunningham, his new girlfriend and a haunted 1958 Plymouth Fury."[58] It was made into a film by John Carpenter. Later that year, he published Pet Sematary, a variation on the theme of "The Monkey's Paw" that King says he initially found too disturbing to publish.[59] He wrote it in 1979, when his family was living near a highway that "used up a lot of animals" as a neighbor put it. His daughter's cat was killed, and they buried it in a pet cemetery (spelled "sematary") built by the local children. King imagined a burial ground beyond it that could bring the dead back to life, albeit imperfectly. In 1985, King published Skeleton Crew, a book of short fiction including "The Reach" and The Mist. King recalls crossing a bridge and thought of the fairy tale The Three Billy-Goats Gruff, "and wondered what I would do if a troll called out from beneath me, 'Who is trip-trapping upon my bridge?' All of a sudden I wanted to write a novel about a real troll under a real bridge. I stopped, thinking of a line by Marianne Moore, something about 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' only it came out 'real trolls in imaginary gardens.'"[60] He recalls that "I would be asked, 'What happened in your childhood that makes you want to write those terrible things?' I couldn't think of any real answer to that. And I thought to myself, 'Why don't you write a final exam on horror, and put in all the monsters that everyone was afraid of as a kid? Put in Frankenstein, the werewolf, the vampire, the mummy, the giant creatures that ate up New York in the old B movies. Put 'em all in there."[61] These influences would coalesce into It, about a shapeshifting monster that takes the form of its victim's fears and haunts the town of Derry, Maine. He said he thought he was done writing about monsters, and wanted to "bring on all the monsters one last time…and call it It."[62] It won the August Derleth Award and was adapted as a miniseries of the same name in 1990 and as a feature film in 2017.[63] In 1987, he published the fantasy The Eyes of the Dragon. James Smythe writes that "It's dedicated to Ben (son of Peter) Straub and Naomi King, his then-13-year-old daughter. King wrote it for her, to give her something of his to read."[64] That same year, he published Misery, about Paul Sheldon, a popular writer who is injured in a car wreck and held captive by Annie Wilkes, his self-described "number-one fan."[65] King was inspired by Evelyn Waugh's "The Man Who Liked Dickens", about a prisoner who is forced to read Charles Dickens aloud: "I wondered what it would be like if Dickens himself was held captive."[66] King recalls that "Paul Sheldon turned out to be a good deal more resourceful than I initially thought, and his efforts to play Scheherazade and save his life gave me a chance to say some things about the redemptive power of writing I had long felt but never articulated."[67] It shared the inaugural Bram Stoker Award with Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon.[68] In 1990 Misery was made into a film by Rob Reiner starring James Caan and Kathy Bates. King says Misery was also influenced by his experiences with addiction: "Annie was my drug problem, and she was my number-one fan. God, she never wanted to leave."[22] Later in 1987 he published The Tommyknockers, "a forties-style science fiction tale" he says was influenced by his drug use: "These alien creatures get in your head and just started, well, tommyknocking around in there. What you got was energy and a kind of superficial intelligence... What you gave up in exchange was your soul. It was the best metaphor for drugs and alcohol my tired, overstressed mind could come up with."[69] King later called it "an awful book", adding that he thinks there's a good book in there, and that he'd like to return to it.[70] After the book was published, King's wife staged an intervention, which he recalls as "a kind of This is Your Life in Hell."[69] Two years later, he published The Dark Half, about an author whose literary alter-ego takes on a life of his own.[71] In the author's note, King writes that "I am indebted to the late Richard Bachman."[72 |
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Micromanagement has always existed. But remote work has birthed a new swathe of helicopter bosses, and workers are suffering. R Rarely does an hour go by without Alison, a software engineer, hearing from her line manager. "If she sees my Slack status has been switched to 'away', then I can bet within the next half an hour there'll be an email in my inbox checking how I'm getting on with a project," says the 24-year-old, based in Bristol, UK. "We're all required to attend a morning meeting every day where we're asked for updates on what we're working on – even though they're often long-term pieces of work that hardly change from one day to the next." The micromanagement wasn't nearly so bad when the team were based in a physical office, says Alison. But since the pandemic, the healthcare provider she works for took the decision to turn many of its technical roles permanently remote. "Even though we were busier than ever during Covid-19, which is when we went remote for the first time, my manager doesn't seem to believe any of us are capable of getting our work done without her constant input. It's infuriating." Micromanagement isn't a new phenomenon, of course; there have always been bosses who keep close tabs on their staff. But as the increase in workers performing their roles remotely has fuelled insecurities in some managers, experts say the pandemic has birthed a new swathe of remote helicopter bosses: think helicopter parents, who hover over their children and constantly monitor them, but for the workplace. A July 2020 study in the Harvard Business Review, which surveyed more than 1,200 people across 24 different countries, showed that a fifth of remote workers felt their supervisor was constantly evaluating their work, and one-third agreed their supervisors "expressed a lack of confidence in their work skills". They weren't imagining things: the same study showed 38% of managers felt workers simply weren't as productive at home, and 40% had low confidence in their ability to manage remotely. Even now, many managers are struggling to lead remote teams using the traditional tools they once relied on. These remote micromanagers bombard staff with constant check-ins and calls, unnecessary Zoom meetings or overly detailed instructions. And experts say it's doing significant damage to their employees. Remote workers who feel micromanaged by their boss are less engaged, less motivated and less capable than ever before. Remote micromanagers have driven some employees to go to great lengths to keep their status lights as 'active' (Credit: Getty Images) Remote micromanagers have driven some employees to go to great lengths to keep their status lights as 'active' (Credit: Getty Images) 'We all want control' Two leadership styles have increased since the switch to remote work, explains Katleen De Stobbeleir, professor of leadership and coaching at Vlerick Business School, Belgium. Neither, unfortunately, is positive. In one style, managers disconnect or even forget about their staff working from home, leading workers to feel isolated or alienated; the other style is the polar opposite: micromanagers. "They're constantly checking up on employees, and even pushing them to come back to the office," says De Stobbeleir. They may book endless video conferences, insist on being included on every email or deliver ultra-prescriptive project briefs that give no room for creativity or independence. There are clear reasons for the increase in this type of overzealous supervision, believes Arielle Sadan, a New York City-based executive and leadership coach. "Micromanagement has always been an issue that's primarily rooted in a lack of trust between a manager and their team," she says. "When we're in a remote environment, and a manager doesn't have direct physical oversight of what their employees are doing, then that mistrust gets amplified," she says. "We all want control, and for managers that aren't able to see their employees, that can feel like an even more acute need." The spike in reliance on digital platforms and tools can make it easier for managers to peek over an employee's virtual shoulder, too. Status indicators that show whether employees are in front of their computers can become a crutch for micromanagers, for instance. And for some employers, remote micromanagement goes one step further with the implementation of worker surveillance methods. A July 2022 survey from market-intelligence firm International Data Corporation showed about 68% of North American employers with at least 500 employees use some form of employee-monitoring software. Another September 2021 survey of 1,250 US employers from Digital.com showed that of those who said they used monitoring software, nearly 90% of them fired workers as a result. We all want control, and for managers that aren't able to see their employees, that can feel like an even more acute need – Arielle Sadan Workers are feeling pressure. Alison says she's ended up searching for ways to keep her Slack status as 'active' while she takes a coffee break, for instance, just to keep her boss off her back. Some employees are even investing in tools such as 'mouse jigglers', which keep their statuses active, in order to avoid productivity tracking. Less engaged, less capable Of course, micromanagement isn't always malicious by nature – De Stobbeleir underscores that some of these helicopter bosses are simply trying to reach out regularly to ensure a remote worker feels supported and connected. Similarly, most people like a little bit of structure and oversight from their manager, says Sadan (though the amount of "handholding" each employee needs certainly differs, especially among age and seniority, she points out). Yet regardless of a manager's intention, experts say results of micromanagement are nearly always negative – for everyone. Attrition is, of course, a major concern – something particularly worrying to firms right now, as they're still struggling to retain staff, in an ongoing swell of worker quits. "Micromanagement is a behaviour born out of bad management to a certain extent, and lack of wanting to relinquish control," says Mark Williams, managing director for EMEA at WorkJam, which develops digital tools to improve productivity, and regularly works with companies whose staff accuse them of micromanagement. The consequence is that "the employee feels undervalued, that their ideas and thoughts are not taken seriously. They become disconnected from the company and the brand". In an era of remote work, this becomes amplified, as employees are already physically disconnected from a company and colleagues, and micromanagement only increases this sense of disengagement. Hovering bosses can stunt their employees' growth both in the short- and long term, keeping them from developing key skills to grow (Credit: Getty Images) Hovering bosses can stunt their employees' growth both in the short- and long term, keeping them from developing key skills to grow (Credit: Getty Images) Ultimately, this can result in an uptick in resignations. Micromanagement is easier to navigate in an in-person setting, explains Sadan, as there are less intrusive ways for managers to keep an eye on a project's progress, such as strolling over for a quick chat which could be "interpreted as just being very supportive". But in a remote setting, where micromanagement takes the form of constant emails or calls, the impact on relationships can be more significant. It creates "more frustrations and more anxiety in employees, and less motivation," she says. "Ultimately, you'll see … disengagement and eventually people will leave." But there are also longer-term effects that can follow employees throughout their careers. When workers stick it out in micromanagerial organisations, say experts, they're less likely to end up capable in the long run. Micromanaged employees can end up without the initiative to carry out tasks independently, step outside their comfort zones and develop resilience in the face of adversity, explains Sadan. "An employee that doesn't learn the skills of being creative, to think critically and have the confidence to try something out will only want to do what feels comfortable," she says. "So, their growth in the organisation is going to be more stunted." Micromanagers themselves end up with a big increase in their workload, too, points out De Stobbeleir. "Very often we see these leaders are very stressed, and very often feel they're doing work that others should be doing. As a result, they're not focused enough on strategy as they're stuck in operations, rather than thinking in the long term – which is very important in turbulent times." Learning to trust As remote work has changed the workplace, this shift has left managers scrambling find new ways of interacting with their teams, such as how to assess good performance when they can't physically see work happening in front of them. It's a learning curve, says De Stobbeleir – and although the effects of micromanagement can be detrimental for workers, managers may also be struggling and coping in the best way they know how right now. On the upside, De Stobbeleir believes as remote and hybrid work becomes the norm, helicopter bosses will likely settle down as they learn how to develop more trust with employees based off-site. Alison is hoping that's the case. In the meantime, she's attending the daily Zoom meetings and responding to the constant emails as politely as she can. She's keeping up hope that, at some point, her manager will realise she's more than capable of doing her job without constantly hovering over her shoulder. For now, it's a waiting game. |
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