By the time of writing Carrie, King lived in a trailer in Hermon, Maine with his wife Tabitha and two children. He had a job teaching English at Hampden Academy, and wrote short stories for men's magazines such as Cavalier.[21][22] Carrie was originally a short story intended for Cavalier,[23][24] and King started conceptualizing the story after a friend suggested writing a story about a female character.[25]
The basis of the story was King imagining a scene of a girl menstruating for the first time in the shower similar to the opening scene of Carrie and an article from Life about telekinesis.[26] As he wrote the opening shower scene, King experienced discomfort due to not being female and not knowing how he would react to the scene if he were female. He also felt apathy toward Carrie when writing the scene. After three pages, King eventually threw away the manuscript of the story. The next day, Tabitha retrieved the pages from the trash and convinced King to continue writing the story with input from her.[24][27] King was ultimately able to emotionally connect to Carrie through the influence of two girls he knew. One was constantly abused at school due to her family's poverty forcing her to wear only one outfit to school. The other was a timid girl from a devoutly religious family.[28][29]
King believed Carrie would not be successful, thinking it would not be marketable in any genre or to any audience.[30] He also found writing it to be a "waste of time" and found no point in sending out what he perceived as a failed story. King only continued writing it in order to please his wife and because he was unable to think of anything else to write.[31] When King finished the first draft, Carrie was a 98-page long novella that he detested. In December 1972, King decided to rewrite Carrie and strive for it to become novel-length. He wrote in fabricated documents that were purported to be from periodicals such as Esquire and Reader's Digest, imitating their style accordingly; a process that King found entertaining. After Carrie was accepted by the publisher Doubleday, King revised the novel with editor and friend Bill Thompson.[32] The original ending of Carrie had Carrie growing demon horns and destroying an airplane thousands of miles above her. Thompson convinced King to rewrite the ending to be more subtle.[33]
