There are voices in their heads, too
Maybe it's just the last couple of days. Those bruises. Danny in tears, Tom lost for words - now there's two things I never thought I'd see. You. Rehearsal, the TV studio, all that stuff yesterday, last night, afraid to go to sleep.
That's Harry, of course, trying to figure out some strange new feelings.
He's thinking, and for that kind of thing, I like to get straight into his head and listen to his internal voice, which, like quoted speech, works at more than one level: the words he says, the way he says them, what he doesn't say, and what all that suggests about his state of mind.
I wanted to give each character a distinctive internal voice as well as an identifiable external one. As with a lot of AtST, it was something of a challenge to myself, but I also wanted to avoid a couple of things that bother me when I see them.
Why give them an internal voice at all?
Look again at that little bit of Harry from Chapter 14. I could have written this:
He thought about the bewildering events of the last forty-eight hours. Seeing Doug lying there, the bruises almost standing out from his ribs. It had been a terrible shock. The reactions of the others: Danny in tears, Tom completely at a loss for words. He'd never imagined he'd ever see them like that; in a way, it left him more scared than the bruises. And Doug himself, cringing in the rehearsal room; almost losing it in the TV studio; straining and gasping over the toilet; hollow-eyed and exhausted, but too afraid to risk going to sleep. He'd never felt like this about someone before; was this, he wondered, why he suddenly felt so attached to the little guy?
Your starter for ten, no conferring: who is talking in what you just read?
Right. It's me, the author, not only telling you what Harry's thinking, but also what he's feeling.
As a reader, I don't like being told what to feel or what the character feels. I want to have the chance to interpret and empathise (or not) for myself. Imagine a film or TV show where someone continually wandered into shot to say he's very sad now or you should feel sorry for her; she's completely devastated because… Dunno about you, but I'd walk out or switch off. (There's a much broader principle at work here, Show, Don't Tell, which we'll deal with some other time.)
How about if we do it without the feeling bits, then?
He thought about the events of the last forty-eight hours. Seeing Doug lying there, the bruises almost standing out from his ribs; the reactions of the others: Danny in tears, Tom completely at a loss for words. He'd never imagined he'd ever see them like that. And Doug himself, cringing in the rehearsal room; almost losing it in the TV studio; straining and gasping over the toilet; hollow-eyed and tired, but too afraid to risk going to sleep. Was this, he wondered, why he felt like he did?
It's still the author speaking, though; a look inside the heads of the other characters would look and sound very much the same. I want the characters to look and feel and sound distinct, and the author's voice gets in the way of that - even if it is my rich, mellifluous voice, the one that John Hurt and Tom Baker so desperately want to emulate. (Oh yes they do.)
OK, then, suppose I stepped back and simply reported what Harry was thinking:
He wondered if it was just the last couple of days that had done it. He remembered seeing the bruises, and Danny in tears, and Tom lost for words - never imagined either thing could happen. You, he thought, looking down into Doug's ruffled hair, yesterday in rehearsal, the TV studio, all that stuff yesterday, last night, afraid to go to sleep.
Compare that to the version I actually used in the story:
Maybe it's just the last couple of days. Those bruises. Danny in tears, Tom lost for words - now there's two things I never thought I'd see. You. Rehearsal, the TV studio, all that stuff yesterday, last night, afraid to go to sleep.
Which feels more “immediate”? Which would you rather have for the whole scene?
For me, the he wondered… he thought version still has a little person in shot, although they're sitting well-behaved in the lower right hand corner. I just prefer it without.
As a (big) bonus, giving voice to the character's thoughts lets me use all the tricks I use when the character's talking aloud to convey meaning, portray the character's personality, reveal or suggest something of his state of mind. Harry doesn't actually say exactly how confused and off-balance and scared he is,” but as a reader, I feel it, and much more richly than in the written-out he's thinking this and he feels that version.
Well, that's the idea, anyway.
So you just write down what they say, without quotes and without attributions?
Yup. No quotes, because nobody's actually saying anything. No attributions (the phrases like he said and he thought) because it should be perfectly obvious who is doing the thinking (and it gets in the way most of the time).
I also ease up a lot on how “formally” they speak in their heads. Do you think in full, grammatical sentences all the time? Any of the time? I don't, and the characters don't.
Actually, there's one fairly important rule: go into at most one head in a scene. If I wanted to go inside a different head (in this story, I don't think I ever do), I'd use a linebreak (two or more empty lines between paragraphs), rather like hopping to a different camera in a movie. Also like a movie, sometimes we start in the character's head and pull out as the scene progresses, or vice versa. The last scene of Chapter 14 is like that: we're in Harry's head when he wakes up, pull away after about five lines, and stay outside for the remainder.
There is one catch to doing this: it's important to make it easy for the reader to tell what is inside the character's head and what is action outside it. I use paragraphs, either separate ones for action and thoughts, or action at the start of the paragraph and thoughts after it. Usually, anyway.
How do you make different characters thoughts sound different?
Well, since it's essentially the characters talking inside their heads, a lot of it comes directly from thei the same stuff that makes their speaking voices unique.
Plus…
Quite a lot of the time, a character thinks by, in effect, talking to himself. And there's an easy way to have each character do that in a particular way. Have a think, see if you know what I'm about to say…
Got it yet?
OK. Each character in AtST addresses himself in a different person.
Harry talks to himself in the first person (“I”) and addresses the person he's thinking about in second person (“you”). If he refers to somebody else as well, it'll be in third person (“he, she, they”):
I'm sorry Dougie, I should have stayed with you. Where are you? Tom's going to kill me.
Tom, on the other hand, talks to himself in second person, and about everyone else in third person:
You were supposed to look after him. Now he's gone and run away. Harry was right: you're a waste of skin.
Danny… Well, he manages to think in a way that's almost like first, second, and third person rolled into one:
Should've been watching. Wouldn't have happened then. God, what if it's too late.
The interesting thing for me was just how naturally those treatments emerged from the characters. I'd like to claim I planned it; what actually happened was I noticed a couple of places where I'd just written it that way, decided it worked well, and so I went back over the whole story and made it consistent.
Oh yes. I haven't mentioned Doug's internal voice, have I? It's Exercise for the Reader time, folks. Two questions: what did I do to represent Doug's internal voice? and how does that affect the way you perceive his character?
Ain't I a stinker?