This is an excerpt from Stephen King’s The Stand. It is a fictional book, so it uses a lot of creative style strategies. It was published in 1978 and the uncut version was reprinted in 1990. It took him around two years to write, and was about 823 pages. Critics and audiences both consider it to be one of King’s best books and it has inspired a comic series, three songs and two television miniseries so far. It has won awards and made several best book lists.
The Stand is about a flu that manages to wipe out 99% of the population in about a month. The survivors then try to band together and form a new society. They also have to deal with the threat of another, more evil society. This particular excerpt is in the beginning and is describing one of the main characters, Stu Redman. This is the first time the reader meets Stu Redman and King uses creative styles to share the most important aspects of his backstory. He uses creative style strategies to keep the readers engaged. He could have used plain style to just give the readers the information they need, but he uses creative style. This style means that the excerpt is more interesting to read:
Stuart Redman, who was perhaps the quietest man in Arnette, was sitting in one of the cracked plastic Woolco chairs, a can of Pabst in his hand, looking out the big service station window at Number 93. Stu knew about poor. He had grown up that way right here in town, the son of a dentist who had died when Stu was seven, leaving his wife and two other children besides Stu.
His mother had gotten work at the Red Ball Truck Stop just outside of Arnette—Stu could have seen it from where he sat right now if it hadn't burned down in 1979. It had been enough to keep the four of them eating, but that was all. At the age of nine, Stu had gone to work, first for Rog Tucker, who owned the Red Ball, helping to unload trucks after school for thirty-five cents an hour, and then at the stockyards in the neighboring town of Braintree, lying about his age to get twenty back breaking hours of labor a week at the minimum wage.
Now, listening to Hap and Vic Palfrey argue on about money and the mysterious way it had of drying up, he thought about the way his hands had bled at first from pulling the endless handtrucks of hides and guts. He had tried to keep that from his mother, but she had seen, less than a week after he started. She wept over them a little, and she hadn't been a woman who wept easily. But she hadn't asked him to quit the job. She knew what the situation was. She was a realist.
Some of the silence in him came from the fact that he had never had friends, or the time for them. There was school, and there was work. His youngest brother, Dev, had died of pneumonia the year he began at the yards, and Stu had never quite gotten over that. Guilt, he supposed. He had loved Dev the best . . . but his passing had also meant there was one less mouth to feed.
In high school he had found football, and that was something his mother had encouraged even though it cut into his work hours. "You play," she said. "If you got a ticket out of here, it's football, Stuart. You play. Remember Eddie Warfield." Eddie Warfield was a local hero. He had come from a family even poorer than Stu's own, had covered himself with glory as quarterback of the regional high school team, had gone onto Texas A&M with an athletic scholarship, and had played for ten years with the Green Bay Packers, mostly as a second-string quarterback but on several memorable occasions as the starter. Eddie now owned a string of fast-food restaurants across the West and Southwest, and in Arnette he was an enduring figure of myth. In Arnette, when you said "success," you meant Eddie Warfield.
Link:https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/92992/the-stand-by-stephen-king/9780307947307/excerpt
This excerpt is full of rhetorical devices and creative writing strategies, including a variety of sentence lengths and structures. There are many exemplums that King uses to enrich this backstory. King’s examples give readers a better picture of what he is talking about. There is also some understatement in here, especially since it is being told from Stu’s point of view. He is not dwelling on events that could be considered traumatic. He also uses ellipsis to indicate hesitation in Stu’s internal dialogue and he uses actual dialogues. He also has a couple appositives, most notably the one in the very first sentence. This inserts information in an efficient, yet interesting way.
This entire excerpt is an example of amplification. King took the idea of Stu being poor and kept adding more detail to amplify this idea. King uses amplification to discuss one of the most important parts of Stu’s backstory. He even does this within Stu’s backstory; he amplifies Eddie Warfield’s character and the jobs Stu had when he was younger. King restates the original idea, in slightly different words, then adds more detail to build on these ideas. Amplification like this is common in King’s books, and this excerpt is an example of it.
Using creative styles is a way to keep readers engaged. Nothing is really happening in this part because it’s just background information on Stu, but King needs to make it interesting in order to keep his readers interested. If the readers aren’t interested, they won’t read the book. People could write a story in plain style too and get the message across, but authors choose to write in creative styles, to keep readers engaged. Using rhetorical devices can paint a better picture and describe things in unique ways, and that will interest readers more than just stating something in plain language. This is why authors use creative style strategies instead of plain or official style strategies.
King, in particular, uses amplification in an extreme way to highlight what he thinks is most important. He also uses devices such as exemplums, dialogues and ellipsis all within this one excerpt. A lot of fiction authors use rhetorical devices to develop their own voice within their writing, and King is doing the same thing. These rhetorical devices aren’t unique to certain authors, but the way they use them can make their writing different and distinct.
This story would look a lot different if it was written in plain or official style. Would fiction still be a popular genre if it didn’t use creative style? How would the genre look if it was all written in plain style? Are these rhetorical devices used in King’s other stories?
Rhetorical devices and variety of structure and language can contribute to creative style. These things make texts more interesting for readers to read, which is likely why authors use creative styles. It also helps them develop a unique voice and it paints a clearer picture and keeps readers engaged.
Kira Nerat
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