10 Most Important Features Of Stephen King's Writing

Stephen King seems to have a pretty open household. His own parenting style apparently included a great deal of honesty over the more traditional ideas of protecting his children from bad language and certain home truths. This ethos seems to extend to the language used in his books. Characters swear – often a lot. His wide range of young characters swear just as much as their older equivalents.

But there is a simple and very effective explanation for this. In his memoir of the craft On Writing, King explains that he truly believes that characters must be allowed to speak ‘in their own voices.’ If a character would swear in real life, then, he says, they just need to swear in his writing. They have to! This allows the characters to be fully realised, well-rounded creations with mannerisms that ring true.

Similarly, he says that a writer must listen to people when they speak, and how they do it. King captures the accents and cadence of how people speak in a way that seems natural and deeply convincing. Many of his characters come with their own speech patterns and it is common for him to provide phonetic spellings. Most frequently, we are given a lesson in the accent of his native New England when many a character is reported as saying Ayuh (yeah) or caaaaah (car) to help us to feel and hear the way that they would really speak.