Stephen King is an American writer. He was born in Portland, Maine, in 1947. He won a scolarship award to the University of Maine and later taught English, while his wife, Tabitha, got her degree. His first book, Carrie, which was published in 1974, became a bestseller as almost all his following books have been. In his first novels he used a lot of horror movie tricks, but later he began to write more psychological novels where the most successfull ones are Misery (1987) and Dolores Claiborne (1992). A lot of his books have been filmatised. Now he lives in Bangor; Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
Stephen King's writing techniques
Stephen King is very occupied by the mysterious and unexplainable in life therefore many of his themes are the same in all of his work. He shows big effort in taking the reader inside the main characters' heads and understanding their thoughts. He uses descriptions in the same aspect but when he wants to characterize the settings, time eras etc. he uses little time indicators, for example by telling who the president is or mentioning toys and inventions from the specific time. Page 123, line 14: 'Bobby put his hand on her arm and lightly kissed her cheek. He smelled her hair, the perfume she was wearing, her face-powder. He would never kiss her with that same unshadowed love again.' Here S. King makes a direct description of what Bobby is feeling and thereafter makes a rupture that changes the positiveness in the sentence. The comment also gives an insight of Bobby's future life, which works as a cliff-hanger. Page 63, line 8: 'Ted was a little…well…cripes, a little what? Bobby couldn't express it. If the word eccentric had occurred to him he would have seized it with pleasure and relief.' In the passage S. King enters Bobby's mind and uses the inadequacy of Bobby's vocabulary as a technique to make the writing more vivid and easy for the reader to identify with. Page 58, line 32: 'But he liked to keep up with the news - these were very interesting times, didn't Mrs. Garfield think so?' Here S. King jumps from telling what is going on in the scene to entering the characters' head.