Stephen King: The Green Mile

Doing The Green Mile as a single volume would present its own unique challenges, I have come to realize, partly because the book couldn’t be published as it was issued in its installments. Because I took Charles Dickens as my model, I asked several people how Dickens had handled the problem of refreshing his readers, recollections at the beginning of each new episode. I had expected something like the synopses which preceded each installment of my beloved Saturday Evening Post serials, and discovered that Dickens had not been so crude; he built the synopsis into the actual story.

While I was trying to decide how to do this, my Wife began telling me (she doesn’t exactly nag, but sometimes she advocates rather ruthlessly) that I had never really finished the story of Mr. Jingles, the circus mouse. I thought she was right, and began to see that, by making Mr. Jingles a secret of Paul Edgecombe’s in his old age, I could create a fairly interesting “front story.”(The result is a little bit like the form taken by the film version of Fried Green Tomatoes.) In fact, everything in Paul’s front story –

the story of his life at the Georgia Pines old folks, home – turned out to my satisfaction. I particularly liked the way that Dolan, the orderly, and Percy Wetmore became entwined in Paul’s mind. And that was not something I planned or did on purpose; like the happiest of fictions, it just ambled along and stepped into its place.

I want to thank Ralph Vicinanza for bringing me the – serial thriller – idea in the first place, and all my friends at Viking Penguin and Signet for getting behind it, even though they were scared to death at the beginning (all writers are crazy, and of course they knew that). I also want to thank Marsha DeFilippo, who transcribed a whole stenographer’s notebook full of my cramped handwriting and never complained.

Well … rarely complained.

Most of all, though, I want to thank my wife, Tabitha, who read this story and said she liked it. Writers almost always write with some ideal reader in mind, I think, and my wife is mine. We don’t always see eye to eye when it comes to what we each write (hell, we rarely see eye to eye when we’re shopping together in the supermarket), but when she says it’s good, it usually is. Because she’s tough, and if I try to cheat or cut a comer, she always sees it.