Carrie - Lesson 9 (Tension)

Tension in Carrie: In his first published novel, King shows that he knows how to create and hold tension. It's basically a shell-game that Bram Stoker used in Dracula, in which the dark and foreboding main character is introduced in the first few chapters and then for the rest of the book the focus is redirected to how everyone else is reacting to him. This formula increases the main character's mystique and danger.

Once Carrie and Tommy are crowned king and queen, the narrative switches away from Carrie's point of view for quite a while. We hear the dropping of the blood from Chris Desjardin's point of view. Sue Snell sees the explosion. What's happening inside? We get an account from survivor Norma Watson (We Survived the Black Prom published in Reader's Digest). We get Tommy's take on his death, an AP wire report, a transcript from the White Commission Report before Carrie's P.O.V. returns nearly 20 pages later. The result: the reader is captivated (169 - 178).

EXERCISE: At the climax of your story, are there opportunities to shift the point of view to raise tension?