When I was nineteen, hobbits were becoming the talk of the town (they are featured in the stories you are about to read). There were half a dozen 'Merry' and 'Pipin' trudging through the mud that year at Woodstock on Max Yasger's ranch, along with at least a dozen 'Fro' Many", and countless hippie "Gandalfs".John Ronald Rel Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was an obsession at the time, and while I didn't make it to Woodstock (sorry here), I think I at least Enough for half a hippie.Having said that, I have read all of his works and loved them deeply. From this point of view, I can be regarded as a complete hippie.Like most long-form fantasy stories written by writers and men of my generation (The Chronicle of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson and The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks are just a few of them) Two), the "Dark Tower" series is also a story under the influence of Tolkien.

Although I read The Lord of the Rings series in 1966 and 1967, I was slow to start writing.I was overwhelmed by the breadth of Tolkien's imagination (quite emotionally wholeheartedly) and by the ambition of his stories.But, I wanted to write my own story, and if I had started then, I would have written only his kind of stuff.Then, as the late "Eloquent" Dick Nixon liked to say, it would be all wrong.Thanks to Mr. Tolkien, the twentieth century has all the elves and wizards it needs. In 1967, I had no idea what kind of story I wanted to write, but that didn't bother me; because I was sure I wouldn't let it pass by on the street.I was nineteen years old, and I felt like I was waiting for my muse and my masterpiece (as if I was sure that my work would become a masterpiece in the future).At nineteen, I seemed to think that one had something to be proud of; usually years have not yet begun the quiet, senile erosion.As the country song goes, the years will rip out your hair and take away the energy from your dance, but in fact, time will take away much more than that.In 1966 and 1967, I didn't understand the relentlessness of time, and if I did, I wouldn't care.I can't imagine--it's hard to imagine--what it would be like to live to be forty, or, to put it mildly, fifty?Take another step back.Sixty years old?will never!Sixty years old never thought about it.Nineteen years old is the time when I don't want to think about anything.Nineteen is an age where you just say: Watch out, world, I'm smoking TNT and drinking TNT, if you know your mind, get out of my way - Steve's here!

Nineteen is a selfish age with very few concerns.I have many goals to pursue and these are the ones I care about.My many ambitions are also what I care about.I carried my typewriter from one run-down apartment to another, always had a pack of cigarettes in my pocket, and always had a smile on my face.The compromise of middle age is still far away from me, and the shame of old age is far away.Like the hero of the Bob Seeger song—now used in a jingle to sell trucks—I felt empowered and confident; my pockets were empty, but my mind Full of ideas, full of stories in my heart, eager to express.Things that sound dry and tasteless now, at the time let themselves float through the nine heavens.I felt "cool" back then.I have no interest in anything other than breaking through readers' defenses, shocking them with my stories, fascinating them, intoxicating them, changing them forever.At the time I thought I could do it because I believed I was born to do it.

Does that sound arrogant?Overly arrogant or a little bit?Either way, I won't apologize.I was nineteen years old at the time, and my beard wasn't even gray.I had three pairs of jeans, one pair of boots, thought the world was my oyster, and spent the next twenty years proving that I was right.However, when I hit my mid-thirties, troubles followed: alcoholism, drugs, a car accident that changed the way I walked (among other changes, of course).I have described those events at length, so there is no need to repeat them here.Besides, you've had similar experiences, haven't you?Eventually, a nasty cop comes along to slow you down and show you who's really in charge.No doubt you who are reading these have met your "patrolman" (or may someday meet him); I have dealt with mine and know he will return, Because he has my address.He's a scumbag, a "bad cop," and he's at odds with stupidity, lewdness, complacency, ambition, loud music, and all the traits of nineteen.

But I still think it's a wonderful age, maybe the best years a person can have.You can play rock music all night, but when the music dies down and the beer bottles are bottomed out, you can still think and draw the big picture in your mind.In the end, the tough cop makes you realize how bad you are; but if you start out with no ambitions, by the time he's done with you, you may have nothing left but your trousers. "Another one!" he yelled, striding forward with notebook in hand.So, a bit of arrogance (even arrogance) isn't a bad thing -- though your mother certainly taught you to be modest.My mother taught me that all the time.She always said, Stephen, the proud must lose... As a result, I found that when people reach the age of thirty-eight or so, no matter what, they always end up falling or being pushed into the ditch.At nineteen, people can deliberately force you to take out your ID card in a bar, yelling at you to get the hell out, sending you back to the street pitifully, but when you sit down to draw a picture or write a poem or tell a story, They can't squeeze you out.Oh God, if you're a teenager reading this, don't let the elders or the smug pundits tell you what to do.Of course, you’ve probably never been to Paris; you’ve never run with the bulls at the Pamplona Bulls Festival.Yes, you're just a hairy guy who only started growing underarm hair three years ago - but so what?If you don't plan to stretch your pants to the point of breaking them in the first place, do you want to keep them until you grow up and try to fill them up?My attitude has always been, no matter what others say about you, you have to make big moves when you are young, don't be afraid of tearing your pants; sit down and smoke a cigarette.

I think there are two kinds of novelists, including beginners like me in the early 1970s.Writers who are inherently more concerned with maintaining the literariness or "seriousness" of their writing will carefully weigh every possible subject matter, and cannot avoid asking the question: What does writing this type of story mean to me?And those writers whose fate is bound up with popular fiction are more inclined to ask a very different question: What does writing this type of story mean to other people? The "serious" novelist is looking for answers and keys for himself; however, the "popular" novelist is looking for the reader.These writers are of two types, but equally selfish.I have seen too many writers to take off my watch and vouch for my assertion.

In conclusion, I believe that even at the age of nineteen I realized that the story of Frodo and his struggle to get rid of that great ring belongs to the second category.The story is basically the adventures of an essentially British group of pilgrims set in ancient Scandinavian mythology.I love the theme of exploration - in fact, I love it - but I'm not interested in these burly peasant characters in Tolkien's books (not that I don't like them, on the contrary I do like them ), and had no interest in that tree-lined Scandinavian scene.If I try to create in this direction, I will definitely screw everything up.

So I've been waiting.I was twenty-two in 1970, and the first strands of gray appeared in my beard (I guess it had to do with my smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes a day), but even at twenty-two, one can afford to wait First class.At the age of twenty-two, time is still in my own hands, even though the difficult patrolman has already started to sniff around the neighborhood. One day, in an almost empty movie theater (if you're curious, I can tell you it's at the Baijo Cinema in Bangor, Maine), I saw a Sergio Leone "The Lone Ranger Bravely Breaks Through the Gates of Hell" directed by him.Not even halfway through the film did I realize that I wanted to write a novel that contained the adventure and fantasy of Tolkien's novels, but set in the imposing, almost absurd West that Leone had created.If you've only seen this grotesque western on a TV screen, you won't understand how I feel - it may offend you, but it's true.After the precise projection of the lens, "The Lone Ranger Bravely Breaks through the Gates of Hell" on the widescreen is simply an epic masterpiece comparable to "Ben-Hur".Clint Eastwood looked to be eighteen feet tall, with each stubble of wire stubble sticking out of his cheeks the size of a young redwood.The lines on either side of Lee Van Cleef's mouth are as deep as a canyon, narrowing at the bottom (see "The Wizard and the Glass Ball").And the endless desert appears to extend at least as far as Neptune's orbit.The barrel diameters of the guns used by the characters in the film are all the size of the Holland Tunnel.

All I wanted besides this scene setup was the epic, apocalyptic feel of the size.Leone's ignorance of American geography (Chicago, as one character puts it, is on the edge of Phoenix, Arizona) is what lends the film its grand sense of dislocation.My passion—a passion that only a young man can ignite—drives me to write a novel, not just a novel, but the longest popular novel in history.I didn't get what I wanted, but I thought the story was decent enough; The Dark Tower, from volumes 1 to 7, tells one story, and the paperbacks of the first four volumes already run to over 2,000 pages.The manuscripts of the last three volumes also exceed 2,500 pages.I do not enumerate these figures to show that length has any relation to quality; I merely indicate that I wanted to write an epic, and in some respects my early wish was fulfilled.If you want to know why I have such a purpose, I can't say why.Maybe it's part of growing America: building the tallest buildings, digging the deepest holes, and writing the longest articles.Where does my motivation come from?Maybe you'll scratch your head and yell that you can't figure it out.It seems to me that maybe that's part of being an American too.In the end, we can all just say: it sounded like a good idea at the time.

Another fact about being nineteen—wonder if you still love watching it—is that at that age, many people feel in a bind (mentally and emotionally, if not physically).Time flies, and suddenly one day you stand in front of the mirror, full of confusion.Why are those wrinkles growing on my face?You are puzzled, where did this ugly beer belly come from?God, I'm only nineteen!It's hardly a creative idea, but that doesn't lessen your surprise. The years have grayed your beard, you can no longer take off and shoot the ball easily, yet all this time you thought—you ignorant—that time was still in your hands.Maybe the sane you are sober, but your heart refuses to accept the fact.If you're lucky, the cop who gave you a ticket for walking too fast and having too much fun along the way will also give you a dose of smelling salts agent.).That's pretty much what happened to me at the end of the twentieth century.This dose of smelling salts was when I was hit by a Plymouth Jetron van in a ditch on the side of the road in my hometown.

Three years after the accident, I went to the Bird Bookstore in Tilbo, Mich., for a book signing of "The Origin of the Buick 8."When a man came up to me in line, he said he was really, really happy that I was alive. (I was very moved to hear it, which is much more uplifting than "Why aren't you dead yet?".) "I was with a good friend when I heard you were hit by a car," he said. "At the time, we just shook our heads in regret and said, 'This is the end of the tower, it's tilted, it's about to collapse. , oh my god, he can't finish writing now.'” Similar thoughts have come to my head - it makes me anxious, I have built this "Dark Tower" in the collective imagination of millions of readers, as long as anyone is still interested in reading, I will Duty to keep it safe--even if only for the next five years' readers; but as far as I understand it, it might be a story for five hundred years.Fantasy stories, good or bad (even now, one might still be reading Sir Vagne or The Monk), seem to be able to stay on the shelf for a long time.Roland's method of protecting the tower is to eliminate those forces that threaten the beams and columns, so that the tower can stand.I realized after the car accident that the only way to protect my tower is to finish the Gunslinger story. In the long lull between writing and publishing the first four volumes of the "Dark Tower" series, I got hundreds of letters saying "pack your bags because we're so guilty" or something.In 1998 (when I was still nineteen years old, full of fanaticism), I got a letter from an eighty-two-year-old lady who "didn't mean to bother you, but these days It's getting worse." The old lady told me that she might only have a year to live ("up to fourteen months, and the cancer has spread all over her body"), and she knew that I couldn't be able to survive this time because of her. Finishing Roland's story, she just wanted to know if I could ("please") tell her how it would end.She swears to "never tell another soul", which is something that really bothers me (although not to the point where I can keep writing).A year later—it seems to be during the time I was in the hospital after the accident—one of my assistants, Martha DeFilippo, sent a letter from a man in Texas or Florida As a critically ill patient, he made exactly the same request: Want to know how the story ends? (He vowed to take this secret to his grave, which gave me goosebumps.) I'd grant these two wishes--help them summarize Roland's future adventures--if I could, but alas, neither can I.At that time, I myself did not know what would become of the gunslinger and his companions.To know, I have to start writing.I used to have an outline, but along the way I wrote it down and lost the outline. (It probably would have been worthless anyway.) All that's left are a few notes (as I write this, there's also a "chuck, chuck, twig, so-and-so-basket" This is a nursery rhyme that appears many times in The Dark Tower. Posted on my desk).Finally, in July 2001, I started writing again.At that time, I had accepted the fact that I was no longer nineteen, and knew that I would not be immune to the diseases that my physical body must suffer.I knew I would live to be sixty, maybe seventy.I wanted to finish my story before the Bad Patrol got to me one last time.And I'm in no hurry to hope that my story will be filed away with The Canterbury Tales or The Edwin Drood Mystery. My loyal reader, whether you are opening the first volume or preparing to embark on the journey of the fifth volume when you read these words, the result of my writing-whether good or bad-is right in front of you.Love it or hate it, Roland's story is over.I hope you enjoy it. For myself, I also have had a high-spirited years.

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