Inside the Strange Writer’s Block That Nearly Doomed a Stephen King Classic

Stephen King says The Stand ballooned into such a beast it stopped him cold — and on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert he reveals how he finally got it moving again.

Stephen King is famous for blasting through pages like he’s outrunning a deadline, but even he hit a wall with 'The Stand'. The story got so huge it stopped him cold for weeks. Then he did something drastic to get the book moving again.

Spoiler alert: I’m about to talk about a key plot event in 'The Stand'.

When King put 'The Stand' on ice

On 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert', King remembered the stretch when he set the manuscript aside and had no clue what came next. Not exactly the vibe you expect from the guy who wrote 'Carrie' in his laundry room and practically never slows down.

"The book stayed out on the shelf for about three weeks, while I just went for long walks and tried to figure out what to do with this story. And the worst thing was, I was thinking, 'What if this thing never gets done?' You talk about heavy... that was, that was pretty heavy."

He wasn’t stuck because of a lack of ideas. The opposite: the book had sprawled into tons of characters (a lot of them young), overlapping threads, and a focus that kept jumping. The scale was swallowing the shape.

The Chandler rule and the reset button

While he was stewing on it, King remembered a Raymond Chandler line: "When you don’t know what to do next, bring on the man with a gun." He didn’t take that literally, but the spirit clicked. Instead of gently untangling every subplot, he needed a hard reset that would thin the crowd and shove the story toward its end.

That led to one of the novel’s most abrupt, wild turns: the bomb that detonates during a Free Zone committee meeting. In one strike, multiple characters are gone. It’s not just for shock; it strips the narrative down and forces the focus onto the people who matter for the finale. From there, the road to the conclusion finally came into view.

Why 'The Stand' felt different from King’s earlier stuff

• Scope: Before this, King mostly stuck to tighter settings with a smaller cast facing one central threat. 'The Stand' goes cross-country and tracks dozens of people reacting to society falling apart.
• Aftermath obsession: It isn’t just about the catastrophe; it lingers on the quiet pieces left behind — deserted highways, empty towns, and the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding.
• Pace: The book takes its time, letting those spaces breathe instead of sprinting for the finish line.
• Moral map: Good and evil are drawn in bold lines, with characters gradually gravitating to one side or the other. That gives the whole thing a bigger, mythic feel, compared to the more intimate vibe of his earlier novels.

It’s a great example of a writer wrestling a monster of his own making — then choosing a bold, slightly chaotic solution that makes the story stronger. Very King.