Pen Names-King and Bachmann

[Flypsyde]

This one's in a shady area, mods, so if I've crossed the MPSIMS line, kick this sucker like an extra point.

Okay. I'm not a big King fan, but I know him well enough to know he's also Bachmann. My question is why did he make the distinction in the first place? And why does he continue to do so? (This also applies to any other author who has a pen name in addition to their regular names.)

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We interrupt this thread to increase
dramatic tension.

[Cartooniverse]

According to King's forwards in various books, he created Bachmann because he had a glut of books that he wanted published, and didn't want to flood the market with his own name. He was also interested in the IDEA of a pseudonym. But, it sounded to me like it was originally about marketing, and not much more. The fact that nowadays, Bachmann's tone and approach is different than Stephen King's is really just a game for us to enjoy.
I'm a big fan, I love the game. He does indeed handle material differently as Bachmann. And, that's the gift of a true storyteller.

Cartooniverse

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If you want to kiss the sky, you'd better learn how to kneel.

[Guy Propski]

King wrote the original four Bachman books as an experiment. He wanted to see what kind of reaction he'd get if he wrote in a different style than his "King" style. The reaction of the reading public, not surprisingly, was poor, until the secret was revealed. This was about the time "Thinner" came out, so that Bachman book had some good sales.

As to why King continues to sometimes write as Bachman, I think he likes to have the ability to both step outside his style of writing, as well as blur the lines between fiction and the real world. Also, it's sometimes easier for a writer to create under a different name; SF writer Philip Jose Farmer used to write under several diffent pen names as a way of getting around writer's block.

I think he wanted to see if it was his writing selling the books or his name.
Notice there haven't been any Bachman books in a long time.

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Lord Flasheart to Nursie: I like it firm and fruity. Am I glad to see you
or did I just put a canoe in my pocket?

Lord Flasheart: She's got a tongue like an electric eel and she likes the
taste of a man's tonsils.

[J String]

quote:
"I think he wanted to see if it was his writing selling the books or his name. Notice there haven't been any Bachman books in a long time."

Inside thr back cover of "The Regulators" (1996) we are told that Mr. Bachman died in 1985, and that his widow discovered the manuscript of the novel in the attic. So... Bachman will write no more, but Mr. King will probably "discover" and publish more "unfinished" works by the man. ;)

[Irishman]

As a subset of #8, marketing nowadays in the book world is a strange game where a name gets defined to a genre. I've heard numerous people wonder why King gets promoted and sold in the horror section when much of his stuff (especially newer stuff) is SF. Well, it's because his name is associated with horror, and the book dealers think that's the only place anybody would think to look for King.

There are some authors who use pseudonyms so they can write in more than one genre and have their stuff promoted independently. I can't recall any examples off-hand, but I know there are a couple mystery authors this applies to. It's an artifact of the book marketing industry.

[G.B.H. Hornswoggler]

We should also note that King has only published one novel as "Richard Bachman" since the secret came out.

Here's the timeline:
Rage was published in 1977
The Long Walk in 1979
Roadwork in 1981
The Running Man in 1982;
all of those were paperback orginals for Signet. Clearly, this wasn't a "marketing gimmick" at this point; the money he made for those books was miniscule compared to the money he could have gotten for selling them to Doubleday, his hardcover house at the time. In fact, the first two were "trunk novels," written before Carrie, and the other two were also relatively minor work.

Thinner was published as a hardcover in 1984, and the added attention paid to it ended up blowing the pseudonym. (IIRC, King never denied being Bachman at all; once the question arose, he immediately admitted to it.)

Since then, King has published exactly one novel as Bachman: The Regulators, in 1996. Even that was a special case, since it was published at the same time as the "Stephen King" novel Desperation, with a complimentary cover and a shared marketing plan. The two novels also tell similar stories, or, more specifically, tell related stories in different kinds of fictional worlds. "Bachman" became an excuse or reason to tell a story two different ways.

The Desperation/The Regulators diptych might be seen as a "marketing gimmick," but I seem to remember that King called his publisher and asked if they wanted to publish the books that way (i.e., it was his idea to begin with, and he did it for creative, not marketing, reasons).

Similarly (and off-topic, but I'm making a point here), The Green Mile didn't come about because Viking Penguin (as was) said, "You know, we'd really like to have six King paperbacks take over the whole bestseller list for most of a year." It was King who wondered, "Could I write a serial novel on deadline like the great Victorians?"

Whether or not you like his work (and I haven't kept up with his books in recent years), you have to admire Stephen King as a writer who takes risks with his books -- he genuinely seems to be more interested in telling the stories he has to tell than in fitting some audience's image of him.

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...but when you get blue, and you've lost all your dreams, there's nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!

[RM Mentock]

Originally posted by <font color=#FF30c0>Ukulele Ike</font>:
"Richard" was taken from Richard Stark, a pen-name of Donald E. Westlake. King admired the Stark books, which are a crime-fiction series about a career criminal named Parker (the films POINT BLANK (1967) and PAYBACK (1999) were both based on THE HUNTER, the first Parker novel). He phoned Westlake up and asked if he could help himself to the "Richard."

What? Why didn't he ask me too? Or, for that matter, why ask at all?
<font color=#FCFCFC>----------------
rocks</font>

[Ukulele Ike]

Well, he did call you, but you were out mowing the grass, and your Mom forgot to give you the message.

King called Westlake because he admired Westlake's writing, and he wanted him to know from whence his pseudonym sprang. I don't think King was afraid that Westlake was going to demand recompense. I think he did it because he knew Westlake would be tickled by the idea.

It was a NICE thing.

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Uke

[Arnold Winkelried]

Originally posted by Ukulele Ike:
It was a NICE thing.

Now explain that to me again. Stephen King, horrormeister, is in the habit of trying to be nice?!? What you're trying to say is that he's a big phony. Death and destruction in his novels, and mild-mannered milquetoast at home. Peh. I figured as much.

[Cartooniverse]

What is there to explain? That a person with an imagination could pen all of those books? Which part of this doesn't compute for you?
Since when do authors/actors/creative types have to live the lives they write about? Do any of us really think that Anne Rice is a witch ( well.......). I think that perhaps, even if you don't like his work, he deserves your respect for the myriad stories and ideas that he has brought out from within.
"The Shining" isn't really about an evil house. It's about being an alcoholic. "The Stand" isn't about the devil, it's about the threat of a large-scale BioHazard emergency. Think THAT'S Sci-Fi? Read "The Hot Zone'.
Yeah, I'm a big King fan. I enjoy where he takes his stories, and where he takes me along with 'em. But, give the creatives their due. They don't have to be what they write, they just have to know how to articulate that which 99% of humanity cannot.

Cartooniverse

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If you want to kiss the sky, you'd better learn how to kneel.

okay, if you really want to know exactly why King wrote as Bachman, you should go to your local MegaBookWorld or whatever they call it in your partes (Barnes&Noble.com?) and check out a book called "The Bachman Books". It is a collection of the four afforementioned stories, Rage, Roadwork, The Long Walk, and The Running Man. The foreword is actually entitled Why I Was Bachman. by Stephen King.
It answers not only why he wrote under a nomme de plume (sp?) but also says all the stuff about why authors do it in general that RealityChuck said.
Noonch.

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Fat Guy in a Little Coat,
SDMB Self-Righteous Clique
"And on the eighth day, God Created beer
to prevent the Irish from taking over
the Earth."

[Little Nemo]

Is there anyone else here who read any of the Bachman books before their true authorship was revealed? I remember reading The Long Walk and thinking "this Bachman is pretty good, I've got to keep an eye out for his other books."

[Ukulele Ike]

Re: the genesis of the pen-name...

King was listening to Bachman-Turner Overdrive when he realized he needed a pseudonym (I won't say anything about his musical taste), so the surname came from there.

"Richard" was taken from Richard Stark, a pen-name of Donald E. Westlake. King admired the Stark books, which are a crime-fiction series about a career criminal named Parker (the films POINT BLANK (1967) and PAYBACK (1999) were both based on THE HUNTER, the first Parker novel). He phoned Westlake up and asked if he could help himself to the "Richard."

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Uke

[RealityChuck]

Authors use pen names for a variety of reasons.

1. Most often, they don't want their identity known to the general public, either due to privacy concerns (e.g, James Tiptree, Jr.) or possible conflicts with their day job (Hal Clement).

2. Some authors use pen names because their actual name is difficult to remember or pronounce. Somtow P. Sutchuritkul writes horror as S.P. Somtow for this reason.

3. Sometimes an author uses a pen name because there's already an author with his name (thus Michael McDowell writes as Michael Kube-McDowell).

4. I know of a couple of cases (C.J. Cherryh and Lawrence Watt-Evans) where an author used
a pen name because the editor of their first novel insisted on it.

5. An established author may use a pseudonym if he or she writes something that is different from what they usually write. King/Bachman falls into this category. A big name author sometimes wants to see if the sales are due to his name or his writing, so will put out a book under a pseudonym.

6. Some prolific authors don't want to flood the market with their books (like Bachman/King and Asimov/Paul French).

7. In the old days, authors sometimes used pen names if they had two stories in one magazine (Robert Heinlein/Anson Macdonald, John Varley/Herb Boehm). Some magazines had "house names" -- pen names used by a variety of people.

8. There's a new reason: redefining yourself. Bookstores keep records on which authors sell badly (even if it's the fault of the bookstores themselves). If you didn't get the numbers the last time, they won't order you book this time. Since it's better to be a author with no track record than an author with a bad one, some authors use pseudenyms (Robin Hobb is one such example).

9. In a similar vein, Harry Turtledove (his real name) just published a book under a very close pseudonym. It was a labor of love and the book wasn't likely to sell as well as his usual, so he used a pen name so it wouldn't be a black mark against his sales.




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"East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does." -- Marx

Read "Sundials" in the new issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction. www.sff.net/people/rothman (http://www.sff.net/people/rothman)

[TwistofFate]

You should read the Dark Half, it gives a good reason as to why he wrote as Bachmann, to explare a different side of himself.

and as to the Horrormeister thing, King is quite a nice chap in reality. In the foreword to Salems Lot, he says how and where he comes across his Ideas, not praying to the gods of horror, but driving along in his car on a sunny day.

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J

"Cast a cold Eye, On Life, On Death, Horseman, ride by"
W.B. Yeats

Just to back-up what Smick said - check out "The Bachman Books" in my humble opinion, they are incredible ! (BTW "The Running Man" is nothing like the damned Anuld flick - its 10 times better.)

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"A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject." - Seneca

[Ukulele Ike]

It's TRUE...Stephen King wears bunny slippers around the house, gets henpecked by the wife, and uses a night-light.

[Arnold Winkelried]

Originally posted by Cartooniverse:
What is there to explain? That a person with an imagination could pen all of those books? Which part of this doesn't compute for you?

Sorry, Cartooniverse, it was another one of my misguided attempts at humor. I am in total agreement that an author doesn't have to live the life of his works.

[Arnold Winkelried]

BTW, Uke, the bunny slippers are a nice touch.

[G.B.H. Hornswoggler]

Originally posted by Ukulele Ike:
It's TRUE...Stephen King wears bunny slippers around the house, gets henpecked by the wife, and uses a night-light.

I have it on good authority that the bunny slippers in question (though undoubtedly pink and extrememly fuzzy) are of the southern Lepus carnivorus breed, similar to the rabbit that attacked Jimmy Carter...

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...but when you get blue, and you've lost all your dreams, there's nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!

[mangeorge]

I like King's stories a lot too. So does my younger daughter. Neither of us has been able to figure out why he lets the movie people butcher them so badly. Cujo, for example.
Opinions?
First time I read "Mine", by Robert McCammon, I thought that maybe King had sprung a new persona. Good story.
Peace,
mangeorge

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I only know two things;
I know what I need to know
And
I know what I want to know
Mangeorge, 2000

[AuntiePam]

Mangeorge -- but sometimes the movies are better -- like Shawshank and Misery, and Dead Zone.

It's like the Elvis thing, especially his movies. Talented people, especially when they get famous and successful, need someone who can keep them grounded, rein them in when they get to thinking they can do anything and people will love it.

King's needed a good editor for a long time. We know that Darabont can handle King's prison stories (shoot, there were just the two, I think) -- but now he needs someone with half a brain to put the stories of his everyday fears on film.

Or just forget the movies altogether. That'd be okay by me.

[mangeorge]

I agree, Auntie. Misery was great, although it rode heavily on Kings story and Kathy Bates' excellent acting. What's-his name wasn't bad, either. ;)
Guess I shouldn't grumble about a couple of stinkers. "Christine" was another stinker as a movie, in my opinion. Should have been easy to make that one.
Peace,
mangeorge

[mangeorge]

BTW, Auntie. Ever been to his web "presence"?
Pretty cool.
Peace,
mangeorge

[AuntiePam]

Yeah -- it's really improved over the last year or so.

So many writers have websites now -- Joe Lansdale's is good too -- his isn't quite as commercial as King's -- more focused on the writing.

George R. R. Martin sells his old books on his site -- and answers his mail, as does Dan Simmons. Guess there's an advantage to not being quiteas popular as King.

[G.B.H. Hornswoggler]

Originally posted by mangeorge:
I like King's stories a lot too. So does my younger daughter. Neither of us has been able to figure out why he lets the movie people butcher them so badly.

Mostly because he doesn't have the power? Even the hugest, most important, best-selling writers don't have much clout in Hollywood. You can sell the rights to your book or not, and sometimes you even get a choice of who to sell it to, but, after that, it's mostly not in your hands.

And let's not forget Maximum Overdrive the wonderful Stephen King movie scripted and directed by the man himself...

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...but when you get blue, and you've lost all your dreams, there's nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!

[KingDavid8]

Another author who is big on pen names is Dean R. Koontz. I like how he gives his pen names different personalities. For example, his pen name Leigh Nichols is a female, and all of her central characters are female. David Axton (another pen name) is a British spy story writer. He has about seven or eight different pen names in all, and most of the stories he's written under pen names have eventually been re-released under his own name in paperback.

David

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[Wendell Wagner]

Guy Propski writes:

> SF writer Philip Jose Farmer used to write
> under several diffent pen names as a way
> of getting around writer's block.

Excuse me, but since when has Farmer ever suffered from writer's block? Except for a few things written under the name of characters in other people works, which was done just as a clever way to find new material, Farmer has never written under pseudonyms.

RealityChuck writes:

> Most often, they don't want their identity
> known to the general public, either due to
> privacy concerns (e.g, James Tiptree,
> Jr.) . . .

Was that really the reason that Alice Sheldon used the named "James Tiptree, Jr."? I thought it was more a desire to not have her readers stereotype her work because she was a woman. Once her name was discovered though, she didn't make a big deal of it.

He further writes:

> Some authors use pen names because their
> actual name is difficult to remember or
> pronounce. Somtow P. Sutchuritkul writes
> horror as S.P. Somtow for this reason.

Sucharitkul started out publishing his books by his full name, but then an editor suggested that he put the name "S. P. Somtow" on one of them. Apparently this increased sales, so he's used the name since, even in re-issues of his earlier work. The editor probably suggested the name "S. P. Somtow" because it disguised his Thai ancestry. Probably most readers of his books assume that Somtow is Russian or something vaguely Eastern European.

He further writes:

> I know of a couple of cases (C.J. Cherryh
> and Lawrence Watt-Evans) where an author
> used a pen name because the editor of
> their first novel insisted on it.

Carolyn Cherry was going to use either that name or simply "C. J. Cherry", but the editor thought that it sounded like the author of a romance novel. She (Cherryh) decided to just add an "h" to the end of the name to make it sound exotic.

Lawrence Evans (whose middle name was Watt) said that his editor said that he might be confused with some other author with the same name, so he hyphenated his middle name with his last name.

I've specifically asked Somtow, Cherryh, and Watt-Evans about this, incidentally.

He further writes:

> Some prolific authors don't want to flood
> the market with their books (like
> Bachman/King and Asimov/Paul French).

I think that what Asimov has written about the name "Paul French" is that he didn't want this series (for adolescents) too strongly associated with his adult books.

mangeorge writes:

> Neither of us has been able to figure out
> why he lets the movie people butcher them
> so badly.

Perhaps because they're intrinsically undoable as films? Believe it or not, some novels and stories don't naturally translate to film.

Have people considered that King may be suffering from what I call the Jordan/Brooks syndrome? Why would Michael Jordan want to spend any time on being a minor league baseball player? Why would Garth Brooks want to spend any time on being a second-rate rock star like Chris Gaines? Apparently when someone so completely dominates their field, like Jordan, Brooks, and King did, it gets boring. It's natural for them to wonder if they could do well in some other field.

[G.B.H. Hornswoggler]

Originally posted by Wendell Wagner:
quoting RealityChuck:
> Most often, they don't want their identity
> known to the general public, either due to
> privacy concerns (e.g, James Tiptree,
> Jr.) . . .

Was that really the reason that Alice Sheldon used the named "James Tiptree, Jr."? I thought it was more a desire to not have her readers stereotype her work because she was a woman. Once her name was discovered though, she didn't make a big deal of it.

Well, Sheldon was an intensely private person, so she didn't want readers/editors/whoever knowing much of anything about her. She's written that she had planned to have a new pseudonym on each batch of stories she sent out -- on the assumption that she wouldn't get published for a while -- but I believe four out of the initial batch of five stories were bought, so she was stuck as Tiptree.

Afterwards, she did go out of her way to keep the pseudonym secret (not even her agent knew). The secret only came out when "Tiptree" mentioned the death of "his" mother in a letter. With all of the previously known facts about "Tiptree's" mother, a fan was able to track down the mother, who had only one child: Alice Sheldon.

Sheldon complained that the female "Tiptree" of the second half of her career didn't win as many awards and wasn't thought of as being as special as the mysterious male "Tiptree" of her first decade of writing. Part of that may be the letdown of having a mystery solved, part the natural progression of a writer from "new and exciting" to "established," but part probably was a kind of sexism.

Even after she was "outed," Sheldon wasn't the kind of social animal many SF writers are. And what kind of "big deal" can one make when one's cover is blown? There's no way to put things back the way they were.

The main reasons for a pseudonym in the first place were 1) privacy and 2) she assumed it would be several years before she had publishable stories and so she wouldn't have to worry until then about using her real name. But the choice of a male pseudonym was clearly not coincidental.

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...but when you get blue, and you've lost all your dreams, there's nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!

[SINsApple]

Wendall Wagner:
As a matter of fact, I believe that many if not all of King's stories could be done into movies, and done quite well at that.

If someone would take the time to pare down his writing a bit (he admits himself that he gets a little word happy), and then take the time to take the pared down story and turn it into a respectable (follow the story closely enough that the man doesn't have to sue to have his name taken off it as he did with Lawnmower Man) script, then the movies would be absolute hits.

He has a gift for writing, and part of that gift is the ability to write it so well that while you read, the story runs through your head like a movie. I know I could turn some of his stories into excellent scripts, but I don't have the time, money, or connections to do so. But I know it could be done. I also think the script writer needs to be a King fan (or atleast appreciate the story), and he or she needs to work closely with the author. The person who wrote the story is the only person who can say "No, that part is important to the storyling, and that part could be cut without damaging the tale I was trying to tell."

Oh, and one more thing. Stephen King does not only tell scary/gory stories. If you look closely at his stories, he almost always addresses larger concerns as well. For instance: Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder were both about spouse abuse, and DC was also about child molestation and the damage it causes; Insomnia dealt with the abortion issue; The Green Mile with the death penalty; etcetera. Read his books, and I guarantee that you will find very few that don't address an important issue atleast to some small degree.

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"I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." --Whitman