I had some fun with ’em, and that’s usually a pretty good sign that the reader will have some fun too.” Each of them was written in a different house-three in Maine and one in Colorado.
King says the four stories were “written for love, not money…They have a pleasant, open-air feel, I think-even at the grimmest moments…there’s something about them, I hope, that says the writer was having a good time, hanging loose, worrying not about the storyteller but only the tale. However, in The Art of Darkness, Doug Winter argues that “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” was actually written after the first draft of The Stand and “The Breathing Method” following the first draft of Cujo. “Apt Pupil” was written in a two-week period after he finished The Shining (after which he wrote nothing for three months), “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” was written after The Dead Zone and “The Breathing Method” was written after Firestarter. In the book’s afterword, King states that “The Body,” the oldest story in the collection, was written directly after ‘Salem’s Lot. In a later interview, King says he originally submitted only three novellas to his then-editor John Williams but, since he called them “seasons,” Williams felt there should be a fourth, so he wrote “The Breathing Method.” Either that or he ended up telling the entire story to himself, so there was no point in writing it down. He says that he often has six or seven of these ideas going on at the same time and many of them never pan out. He couldn’t stop those books to tackle these ideas, so he got into the habit of telling the stories to himself while he was going to sleep at night instead of counting sheep. The ideas came to him while he writing other novels. He calls the stories in this collection his bedtime stories. Even “The Mist,” a later novella, was published as a standalone book from one of the big houses as a movie tie-in. This is a territory King called “an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic.” Nowadays, there are more opportunities to publish novellas, especially in the small press. In his lengthy afterword to Different Seasons, King bemoans the sad state of the novella, that peculiar form of fiction that falls between longer short stories and shorter novels, tales in the 25-30,000 word range. The publishing landscape was different in 1982. That may not seem unusual now, but at the time it was something of a departure for King. None of the stories had been previously published.
Different Seasons is a collection that contains only four tales and, with the exception of “The Breathing Method,” there is nothing remotely supernatural in them.
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