According to their accounting department, production costs wouldn’t allow the printing of a book so ridiculously massive, and as a result King was forced to cut approximately 400 pages (the “Complete and Uncut Edition” of the book was eventually published in 1990). The manuscript that Stephen King turned in to Doubleday was a monster, stacked like a skyscraper at about 1,200 pages… and the publisher didn’t exactly appreciate it.
He considered giving up on the idea, and spent weeks going on walks to overcome blocks – but coming to the realization that he needed another element of massive destruction, namely a bomb, put him back on the right path. Hundreds of pages in, King found that his characters were recovering from the plague and starting to rebuild familiar modern life, and it was becoming a story he wasn’t particularly interested in telling. King read that a simple change in wind direction could have resulted in the toxic cloud blowing to Salt Lake City, and had that happened the results would have been catastrophic.Ĭombined with Stephen King’s greater aspirations to create a Lord of the Rings-style fantasy epic with America as the backdrop, The Stand began to flow. Lastly, there was what’s referred to as the "Dugway sheep incident." In 1968, testing of a chemical weapon at the United States Army-controlled Dugway Proving Ground in Utah resulted in approximately 6,000 sheep on neighboring farms being poisoned and killed. By pure coincidence he landed on a station broadcasting a minister delivering a fire-and-brimstone sermon, and one line in particular stuck in his mind: “Once in every generation a plague shall fall among them.” He ended up tacking this phrase right above his typewriter (bit of trivia: while it’s not a direct line in the finished book, King did use that line in dialogue in the adaptation). The second ingredient came from randomly flipping around the radio dial.
To paraphrase King from the commentary track on the miniseries’ Blu-ray, he was struck by the idea of strong evil overcoming weak good. The journey began in the mid-1970s when the author and his family lived in Colorado, and the writer began reading about Patty Hearst – the granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, who saw famously kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army and ended up joining their cause. As described by Stephen King, The Stand was the result of three disparate ideas that found haven together in his brain.
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