Our laundry room is a small, narrow alcove on the second floor. One day in the late fall of 1987, while these things were tumbling around in my head, I stopped in the laundry room of our house to drop a dirty shirt in the washing machine. This I had tried to to at least once before, restructuring and updating the basic elements of Bram Stoker's Dracula to create 'Salem's Lot, and I was fairly comfortable with the idea. What I wanted to do was to take familar elements and put them together in an entirely new way. I knew that writers have from time to time revised old works-John Fowles did it with The Magus, and I have done it myself with The Stand-but revision was not what I had in mind. Writing, it seems to me, is a secret act-as secret as dreaming-and that was one aspect of this strange and dangerous craft I had never thought about much. While that book was between drafts, I started to think that there might be a way to tell both stories at the same time by approaching some of the plot elements of The Dark Half from a totally different angle. I published The Dark Half, where I tried to explore the converse: the powerful hold fiction can achieve over the writer. I published a novel called Misery, which tried, at least in part, to illustrate the powerful hold fiction can achieve over the reader.
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