Inspiration:

“In The Dark Half I tried to answer the question ‘Where do you get your ideas?’  It seems to me that for most writers there really is another person hiding inside, although it isn’t always dark and it’s hardly ever as much as a half.  I thought it would be fun to write a story about a novelist whose muse gets totally out of control. There was one problem: I didn’t how how to end it. Then, one day while I was on the way to my office, I saw a huge flock of crows—huge enough to darken an appreciable part of the sky—all take wing at once. They made me think of a poem by H.P. Lovecraft called “The Psychopomp,” about a bird who is an emissary of death, and a winged messenger between the land inhabited by mortals and that of the afterlife. In that instant, I knew exactly how to dispose of George Stark; all I had to do was go home and write it.”