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According to On Writing, King wrote the 304-page book The Running Man in just 10 days. The author has said he used to write 2,000 to 3,000 words (or about 10 pages) in a matter of hours. More recently, he says he writes just 1,000 words a day. Phew, we're tired just thinking about it.

Throughout the '80s, King frequently used alcohol and co***ne. In his book On Writing, he wrote, "There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all. I don't say that with pride or shame, only with a vague sense of sorrow and loss. I like that book. I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page."

In 1973, King wrote a few pages of what would become his first novel, Carrie—then decided it was no good and threw it away. Fortunately, his wife, Tabitha, found the pages in the trashcan of the then-broke couple's double-wide trailer and convinced him otherwise. "You've got something here. I really think you do," King quotes her saying in his memoir On Writing. Turns out, she was right. The book sold more than 1 million copies in its first year. It was also King's first big-screen film adaptation.

King wrote Rage in 1965 and published it in 1977. The book is about a troubled high school student who holds his school hostage at gunpoint. After the book was linked to four real-life school shootings in 1988 and 1996, King had it removed from print. While he himself is a gun owner, King advocates for gun control, and in 2013 published a 25-page essay on the subject entitled "Guns."

A copy of The Lurker in the Shadows by H.P. Lovecraft inspired King to write horror fiction. In an interview with Barnes & Noble, King said he discovered an old paperback copy of the book among his father's things in the attic (King's father left the family when the writer was two years old under the pretense of "going to buy a pack of ci******es.") "I knew that I'd found home when I read that book," King said.

In 1974, King and his wife were staying in The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. That night, King had a dream. He writes on his website, "I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire-hose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over, within an inch of falling out of bed. I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in the chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind." The Stanley Hotel now includes a 30,000 square foot horror film museum.

Speaking of film adaptations, Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining is widely considered to be a classic. However, King famously hates it. He told Deadline: "The character of Jack Torrance has no arc in that movie. Absolutely no arc at all. When we first see Jack Nicholson, he's in the office of Mr. Ullman, the manager of the hotel, and you know, then, he's crazy as an outhouse house rat. All he does is get crazier. In the book, he's a guy who's struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that's a tragedy. In the movie, there's no tragedy because there's no real change."

Even if you haven't read any of King's books, you've likely seen the film adaptation of one of his works. The Guinness Superlatives has certified that with 34 movies based on his stories, King has the most film adaptations of any author. Andy Muschietti's 2017 adaptation of It was the highest grossing film based off a King work (and the highest-grossing horror film of all time!), earning $327,481,748 at the box office.

When publishers advised Stephen King against publishing more than one book per year in the late-70s, King published seven novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. And of course, Bachman was a fully developed character. According to his "about the author" blurbs, Bachman was born in New York, served a four-year stint in the Navy, followed by 10 years in the merchant marines, until finally settling down in rural-central New Hampshire to run a medium-sized dairy farm. Sounds legit.

And that says a lot, since this author stands 6'4". In some 45 years of writing, Stephen King has published 31,271 pages across 59 novels, plus five works of non-fiction and more than 200 short stories. His most well-known works include The Shining (1977), It (1986), Carrie (1974), Misery (1987), Pet Sematary (1983), and The Green Mile (1996). Plus, his memoir, On Writing (2000), is considered a must-read for every aspiring writer.