After writing Carrie and 'Salem's Lot, which are both set in small towns in King's native Maine, King was looking for a change of pace for his next book: "I wanted to spend a year away from Maine so that my next novel would have a different sort of background".[5] King opened an atlas of the United States on his kitchen table and randomly pointed to a location, which turned out to be Boulder, Colorado.[6]
On October 30, 1974,[7] King and his wife Tabitha checked into The Stanley Hotel in nearby Estes Park, Colorado. They were the only two guests in the hotel that night: "When we arrived, they were just getting ready to close for the season, and we found ourselves the only guests in the place — with all those long, empty corridors".[5]
Ten years earlier, King had read Ray Bradbury's 1950 short story "The Veldt" and was inspired to write a story about a person whose dreams would become real. In 1972, King started a novel entitled Darkshine, which was to be about a psychic boy in a psychic amusement park, but the idea never came to fruition and he abandoned the book. During the night at the Stanley, this story came back to him.[8]
King and his wife had dinner that evening in the grand dining room, totally alone. They were offered one choice for dinner, the only meal still available. Taped orchestral music played in the room and theirs was the only table set for dining: "Except for our table all the chairs were up on the tables. So the music is echoing down the hall, and, I mean, it was like God had put me there to hear that and see those things. And by the time I went to bed that night, I had the whole book in my mind".[9] After dinner, his wife decided to turn in, but King took a walk around the empty hotel. He ended up in the bar and was served drinks by a bartender named Grady.[7]
In King's words: "That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire-hose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over, within an inch of falling out of bed. I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in a chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind".[6]
Sometimes you confess. You always hide what you're confessing to. That's one of the reasons why you make up the story. When I wrote The Shining, for instance, the protagonist of The Shining is a man who has broken his son's arm, who has a history of child beating, who is beaten himself. And as a young father with two children, I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism toward my children. Won't you ever stop? Won't you ever go to bed? And time has given me the idea that probably there are a lot of young fathers and young mothers both who feel very angry, who have angry feelings toward their children. But as somebody who has been raised with the idea that father knows best and Ward Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver, and all this stuff, I would think to myself, Oh, if he doesn't shut up, if he doesn't shut up... So when I wrote this book I wrote a lot of that down and tried to get it out of my system, but it was also a confession. Yes, there are times when I felt very angry toward my children and have even felt as though I could hurt them. Well, my kids are older now. Naomi is fifteen and Joey is thirteen and Owen is eight, and they're all super kids, and I don't think I've laid a hand on one of my kids in probably seven years, but there was a time...[5]
The Shining was also heavily influenced by Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House,[10] Edgar Allan Poe's short stories "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) and "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842),[8] and Robert Marasco's 1973 novel Burnt Offerings.[6] The story has often been compared to Guy de Maupassant's story "The Inn".[11]
Before writing The Shining, King had written the novel Roadwork and the novella The Body. The first draft of The Shining took less than four months to complete and he was able to publish it before the others.[6] The title was inspired by the 1970 John Lennon song "Instant Karma!", which contained the line "We all shine on".[12] Bill Thompson, King's editor at Doubleday Publishing, tried to talk him out of The Shining because he thought that after writing Carrie and 'Salem's Lot he would get "typed" as a horror writer. King considered that a compliment.[6]
