Kelley said: “Other points of view are more flexible. One of the things I love about Stephen King’s work is his facility in wandering in and out of everyone’s heads, primary and secondary characters, and combining their real-time thoughts with memory, behavior, observation and feeling to paint a complex picture in a few simple strokes. He’s fantastic at creating character.”
Sticking my thoughts into this: I think also what King does so well is motivation. I guess that’s really covered in “creating character” but it’s a distinction that I like to make because so many writers don’t nail what makes people or any other thing such as a dog or a car do what they do as well as he does.
Sly
I totally agree. People hardly ever do things in a psychological vacuum. But often, the reasons are soâ¦. small. So everyday. An accumulation of little wants, small frustrations, bad choices that seem unimportant at the time. Or just the desire to stand for a minute longer with one’s face in the sun, or stop for ice cream. King has a gift for making those things interesting and recognizable, and for picking the ones that matter most in the character’s overall behavior in the story. What his people do, and why, almost always matters later on in the story.
King has such a generosity toward his characters, even the ones we aren’t really meant to like. He’s always willing to inhabit them, to see them from the inside out. I think that’s what makes it possible for the reader to see them too.