Stephen King: The Use of Characters, Setting, and Diction

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Before they even pick up a pen, novelists are given a task of giving their book a point. Their audience are often searching for something specific when they pick up a novel: supernatural elements, a romance, or other elements. Having something “different” in a world of the same story being told over and over helps, but what makes a novel successful is how relatable a novel is to the masses. A theme is unable to be expressed unless the audience is able to associate themselves with the characters and situations that the author sets the story up with. One such author is Stephen King, whose real experiences and overwhelming amount of brand-tagging gives him credibility in his writing, making him one of the most popular modern writers of the past few decades. The novelist Stephen King demonstrates the theme of intolerance as seen in his book Carrie through the use of elements such as characters, setting, and diction.
The diction King's novels took on were not intentional in the beginning. King began writing novels with horror elements or completely based on the attention other horror novels such as Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby and William P. Blatty's The Exorcist had received after many of his naturalistic novels had been rejected (Keyishian 30). With this, King's novels change from a romantic prose to direct rhythms and characterizations. King begins instruction in his book On Writing by instructing not to constrict to a manual of writing a certain way, but by simply writing and seeing what comes structure is able to out of it (McCrillis). The shift in his writing comes from many factors, but most are from letting the structure take on its own course; to not write as his vision sees it beforehand, but to let the writing do itself, as...

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...sm Select. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 16 Jan. 2014.

King, Stephen. Carrie. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974.

McCrillis, M. P. "'Lynching Stephen King.'." World & I 18.7 (July 2003): 268-283. in Contemporary Literary Criticism Select. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 16 Jan. 2014.

Parini, Jay. American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2000.

Reino, Joseph. Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary. Boston: Twayne, 1988.

Stephen King, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,, and Nathaniel Rich. "Stephen King, The Art of Fiction No. 189." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 328. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Literature Resource Center. Web. 16 Jan. 2014.

Winter, Douglas E. Stephen King, the Art of Darkness. New York: New American Library, 1984.

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