While writing his epic plague novel The Stand, Stephen King hit a wall of writer's block, and getting around it led to a deadly plot twist. As prolific as he's always tended to be, one might be inclined to assume that King is simply a writing machine, and doesn't fall prey to bothersome phenomena like writer's block. But alas, as any person who writes often knows, writer's block is eventually a problem for everyone, and it can be extremely frustrating to try and deal with.
No matter how skilled one is with words, a severe bout of writer's block can make continuing with whatever one is trying to write down seem like an exercise in futility. Whether it's an essay, an important business email, a news article, or in King's case, a novel or short story, writer's block can make getting it finished into a true endurance test. It's a condition that unites all writers at one time or another, whether they be rich and famous authors or working class content producers.
So, when faced with an epic bout of writer's block that was worthy of an epic book like The Stand, King at first felt stuck, not knowing how to proceed. That's until he had a breakthrough and realized what needed to be done.
The Stand: How Stephen King's Writer's Block Created a Major Twist
After writing 500 pages, a full novel for most authors but less than half of the unabridged version of The Stand, Stephen King found himself trapped by writer's block. Despite how successful he already was by that point, King was seriously concerned that he wouldn't be able to pick the plot back up, and had to fight the urge to drop the book and move on to the next idea. Then, after an annoyingly long time spent trying madly to figure things out, the solution to King's writer's block hit all at once, in a manner akin to a ton of bricks. His heroic characters, those aligned with Mother Abigail, had gotten too complacent after surviving the Captain Trips superflu.
The good guys, such as they were, had proven too quick to try and rebuild the society that had led them to the apocalypse in the first place, instead of trying to build a new, better world, and carrying out the will of the God who spared them from the plague. This led King to his solution, that being the plot twist where Harold Lauder and Nadine Cross plant a bomb inside a closet at the behest of Randall Flagg, and blow up a good portion of the characters, including featured player Nick Andros. That was a turning point for King, and the remainder of the book was written within weeks. King recounts this journey in his non-fiction work On Writing, and seems amused that it took killing off multiple characters to save The Stand.