Look, I’m not going to lie to you. I’ll spoil it. This dude gets eaten by a dog. You saw this coming. He’s a bad guy. There’s nothing unexpected about a villain being eaten by a dog, but there is nothing more horrible than seeing this guy get eaten by a dog right after, more or less, the moment you come to realize that he’s a real human being. It really struck me hard when I read that passage—the sheer gut punch of seeing that incredibly subtle turning moment from hate to love on Joe Camber’s part, and from love to hate on Brett Camber’s part. It just blew me away.

But King’s command of character doesn’t just extend to the humans in Cujo. The fact that he narrates sections of the book from the point of view of this rabid, slowly deranging St. Bernard, is itself incredible. Would I have had the guts to try to write part of the book from that point of view? No. I would have said, “That’s dumb,” and not done it. But that’s something I love about Stephen King: If he has an idea, he’ll throw it out there. I’m sure there’s a ton of going back, and cutting, and rewording, and everything else—but if it’s in his mind to write from the point of view of a dog, he’s just gonna do it. He’ll inhabit that dog’s point of view completely. And somehow the sincerity of the effort makes the section work.

In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King talks about how alcoholism and other addictions led him to produce what he considers to be lesser works in the ’80s. He mentions Cujo specifically as book that he does not remember writing due to intoxication. I do not wish to promote the myth that substance abuse makes for better art—it doesn’t. It makes for horrible, horrible sadness among families. But it did remind me that if Stephen King is telling the truth and he doesn’t remember writing Cujo, that there is artistic merit in not trying too hard. No matter what your plot device is—whatever rabid dog you’re sending out into the story—if you don’t plan and scheme too hard, and let the characters and ideas gently introduce themselves to you, you will find storylines that you didn’t expect. You’ll find symmetries and quiet moments that will be so much better than anything you could ever plan.

I’m glad that Stephen King is better now, and he clearly knows how to do it without booze and drugs, but there is value in not pushing too hard. The ideal is to have the kind of creative experience where, when you’re done, you don’t remember writing it. Somehow it just happened.

Recently, I had an experience where I had to learn to let go in that way. For years, I had written books of so-called Complete World Knowledge where I was purposefully lying about history, the present, and the future—all the while exaggerating myself in bizarre ways. It was an honest expression of my own derangement, one I hoped would honestly connect with people. Along the way, I discovered the pleasure of performing my own imitation of standup comedy, largely based on the stuff in the book—but by the time I’d finished the last one, I realized that I was out of material. I needed to fix that, if I wanted to keep doing live performance. So I did something that was suggested to me by the comedian and storyteller Mike Birbiglia: I booked a residency in a small performance space in Brooklyn called Union Hall, with absolutely no idea what I would say there.