[MUSIC] I'm going to share again in this segment, on inflection, which is really about the tone of the voice, whether that is the voice for your character or that is a voice for you as an author. Those sentences which tell us what's happening but are not necessarily spoken by a character. So, when you say, the flowers were in bloom, that is your voice as an author. And whether you choose to use a lot of adjectives to describe the flowers, or you choose to say the flowers were not in bloom. The flowers had wilted. The flowers were dead. I couldn't find any flowers. All of those are your choice, and they reveal not only story but also the nature of the author. And we're going to focus now on how you continue to reveal the nature of your character through how they speak, and why and about what they speak. It's important to craft your characters in such a way that they have distinct voices that the reader can identify, to help identify who's telling the story. That's always what we want to know. Whose story is it? In the story about the little boy who loses his dog, and the unsavory man in the neighborhood finds the dog and returns it to the little boy, and the little boy's mother invites the unsavory man to come to dinner, a lot of what kind of story this is depends on who's telling it. They can be very sweet if the little boy is telling it. It can also be very scary if the little boy is telling it. It can be a little uncomfortable if the neighborhood pariah is telling it. It can also be complicated, both hopeful and a little worrisome, if the mother is telling it. And if you want to go completely outside the box, then you have the little dog telling the story. In this little example from a novel called, Do They Know I'm Running?, we listen to two men talking, first the rancher. It was daybreak and the rancher, standing at his kitchen window, watched two silhouettes stagger forward through the desert scrub. One clutched the other but they both seemed hurt. The porch light, the rancher thought, that's the night thing they been walking toward all night. See it for miles. All the way from the footpaths snaking through the mountains out of Mexico. What we hear here is not just the scene, we hear how the character sees it, and the words that character chooses to use. The character uses the word desert scrub rather than the name of the bush. We have the rancher's thoughts, which are always going to appear in the rancher's language. All the way from the footpaths. That's how the rancher thinks about it. And we're looking out the window, with this man, with this rancher, and we are in his thoughts. And we are in his clipped, laconic language. Now we have another character. He sat up in the pre-dawn stillness, startled awake by a nasty dream, menacing dog, desolate twilight. The sticky dampness of blood and a sense he was carrying some kind of treasure, something he'd have to fight to keep. Rising on one elbow, he glanced past Mariko, toward the bedside clock. 3:30, the hour of ghosts. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he told himself it was time to go. This is in contrast to the rancher's language which was not poetic, not lyrical. It was sharp and clear and flat. This brings us a sense of someone sleepiness, of his dreams, of his fear of death. And now we have the third character. What the whole thing gets down to, Godo thought, head tilted back, draining the last few drips from the can-the trick to it, as it were, the pissy little secret no once wants you to know? He crushed the empty and tossed it onto the floor where it clattered among the others, then belched, backhanding his scarred lips to wipe them dry. Figure it out. The whole thing gets down to knowing which guilt you can live with. Part of the reason I chose that sample is because we have three men who have a relationship, who on the surface might not seem that different. The way in which we discover them, and their difference, and their natures, is through the language that they use. We reveal ourselves by our actions and by our speech. But when you're writing a character, the speech is not just in dialogue, it's also in the words that they choose as they are expressing their thoughts. So one of the things to always think about is, is it poetic, is it lyrical, is it everyday, are they from one kind of community or another? Everybody is from somewhere. Everybody has parents. Everybody is born somewhere in the economic spectrum, somewhere in the socioeconomic spectrum. Everybody is influenced by their region. Very few of us actually talk like TV news anchors. Most of us talk like the way other people in our families talk. And you have to be willing to hear that, to listen for that, to listen for differences in speech. Who speaks quickly? Who speaks slowly? Who uses a lot of expressions that are familiar to a family, or to a community? Who's language is very precise, and formal, and careful? Who's language is slangy, and even rude or profane? All of those possibilities are there for you to consider. And it's like creating an orchestra. It's an orchestra of voices that you get to compose so that you achieve for your character the sound that is unique to him or her.
