“Nothing bores me more than to be in New York and have a dinner in a big fancy restaurant, where you have to sit for three fucking hours, you know, and people will have drinks before, wine after, then three courses, then they want coffee and someone is going to ask for a fucking French press and all the rest of this crap. To me my idea of what’s good is to drive here and go to Waffle House, get a couple of eggs and a waffle. When I see the first Waffle House, I know I’m in the South. That’s good.

“They pay me absurd amounts of money,” he observes, “for something that I would do for free.”

STEPHEN KING’S FATHER went out for cigarettes when King was four, and he never came back, leaving King to be brought up by his mother. Steve and Tabby have three children: Naomi, a Unitarian minister with a digital ministry; Joe and Owen, both writers. Joe is finishing his third novel. Owen’s first novel is coming out in 2013.

I wonder about distance and change. How easy is it to write about characters who are working blue-collar jobs in 2012?

“It is definitely harder. When I wrote Carrie and ’Salem’s Lot, I was one step away from manual labor. But it’s like also true—Joe is going to find out this is true, that when you have small children of a certain age, it is easy to write about them because you observe them and you have them in your life all the time.

“But your kids grow up. It is harder for me to write about this little twelve-year-old girl in Doctor Sleep than it ever was for me to talk about five-year-old Danny Torrance because I had Joe as a model for Danny. I don’t mean that Joe has the shining like Danny but I knew who he was, how he played, what he wanted to do and all that stuff. But look, here’s the bottom line: if you can imagine all the fabulous stuff that happened in American Gods, and if I can imagine magic doors and everything, then surely I can still put my imagination to work and go: look, this is what I imagine it’s like to work a ten-hour day in a blue-collar job.”

We’re doing the writer thing, now: talking about craft, about how we do what we do, making things up for a living, and as a vocation. His next book, The Wind Through the Keyhole, is a Dark Tower novel, part of a sequence that King plotted and began when he was little more than a teenager himself. The sequence took him years to finish, and he only finished spurred on by his assistants, Marsha and Julie, who were tired of fielding fan letters asking when the story would be completed.

Now he’s finished the story he is trying to decide how much he can rewrite it, if he views the sequence as one very long novel. Can he do a second draft? He hopes so. Currently, Stephen King is a character in the fifth and sixth Dark Tower books, and Stephen King the nonfictional author is wondering whether to take him out in the next draft.