Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card

Author:Orson Scott Card [Card, Orson Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-18T07:00:00+00:00

VOICES

WHO IS TELLING YOUR STORY?

You are, of course. You choose what story to tell, which incidents matter, which scenes to show, which events to tell about. It is out of your mind that all the invention comes, all the characters, all the background details, all the ideas.

But when it comes time to speak the words of the story, whose voice will the reader hear?

It is never exactly your own voice. The very fact that you're writing down the words rather than speaking them will make the style more formal. The fact that you write more slowly than you speak, that you can see your words as you put them down, changes the way you produce and control your language. It's another voice.

Also, the fact that you can't see the audience's response requires you to be more precise and calculating in your written language—in speech, when you can look at your audience and judge whether or not they understand you, such precision isn't necessary. Even if you "write" by dictating into a tape recorder, it will not be your normal speech patterns, but rather your more regulated "dictation dialect." You've made this distinction many times—you instantly recognize the difference between natural extemporaneous speech, memorized speech, and speech that is being read.

It isn't just the difference between writing and speaking, though. You have many voices. You have one voice you use with your parents; another you use with your siblings. You might have a company voice. Most people have a separate telephone voice—professional secretaries and receptionists almost always do. If you have children, you doubtless have not one but two, probably three voices—the stern reproving voice, the affectionate approving voice, and the baby talk you used when they were little, which still drifts back when they're hurt and you're comforting them. You have a voice for service people and clerks, and another voice for public speaking.

Of course, your larynx produces the sound for all these oral voices. But the sound is only a small part of a "voice"—at least the kind of voice I'm talking about. Each of your voices has its own vocabulary. They overlap, but less than you might suppose. Each has its own sentence structure, its own level of diction. One might be slangy, another formal, another relaxed; in one voice you might have some blue language available, while another voice never produces those words.

This came home to me when I was a teenager. One summer I worked as an actor in a summer theater, where the language among the company could have made sailors blush; I was as colorful as any of them. Yet I lived at home, where such language simply wasn't used. So clear was the difference in the two voices that I didn't even have to think about not using certain words where my parents could hear them. I never caught myself about to use the wrong words at home, because those words just weren't available in my "home" voice.

Does that sound like a split

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