Possible inspiration for Garth Marenghi?

I think he's mostly based on a terrible horror writer called Shaun Hutson. http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/166672.Shaun_Hutson

http://thepicturestheyremoving.blogspot.com/

Have you ever seen any photos of horror writer Ramsey Campbell back in the day?
He looks so much like him.

You have to scroll down a bit to see him but....

http://toomuchhorrorfiction.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/faces-of-fear-encounters-with-creators.html

I always thought they were making fun of the film director William Friedkin. The glasses, hair, and outfits as well as the pompous attitude.

I have always felt it was a combination of people. I think that even Stephen King is lampooned due to his excessive writing. Garth mentions once that he has written more books than he has read and his books are largely unedited and long. While Stephen King is actually an extremely avid reader (reads a minimum of four hours every day) this can still be a joke about his tendency to overwrite and the fact that he doesn't outline his works at all.

I will go one further than most of these people and say he is a parody of horror writers in general during the 80s and 90s. During that time Stephen King became one of if not the highest paid writer in the world and the media took notice. Suddenly Stephen King was not only doing interviews, he was directing movies and TV series and making tons of money for doing what he had always done. He had always been a very successful writer but suddenly he was a really hot property who needed to churn out lots of books and his work suffered in my opinion.

This era was the birth of his dreary, cookie-cutter fiction with painfully one-dimensional characters. His heroes were always these ridiculous paradigm of virtue types who were what I imagine King thought the cool kids were like in high school. The problem was that they were always writers with a sensitive and vulnerable streak, but they would puff up like a robin at danger when up until that point they had given you every indication that they were not the heroic type. Furthermore in every book the hero would end up being the most psychic or the most powerful figure in the book. I think that's the vibe we are supposed to get off of Rick/Garth. Everywhere he goes he kills the tension and ruins the vibe by just taking over every scene he is in. It's definitely hilarious, but not scary.

For the record I'm not implying that Stephen King and Garth are similar but rather I think that Garth is like a Stephen King character come to life. Garth has a lot more in common with some of the other writers mentioned on this board, and the look of the character was clearly inspired by some of those guys. Just my two cents though. Glad to be talking to other fans of the series.