I recently finished reading Bloomability by Sharon Creech. In it, one of her characters tells
the story of two prisoners sharing a cell that has a small window. One prisoner
looks out the window and says, “What a lot of dirt,” while the other looks out
the same window and says, “What a lot of sky.”
As the story illustrates, everyone is different. My
murder mystery has two point-of-view characters—a female detective and the
victim’s daughter. Each needs her own distinctive character and voice. So how
do I accomplish that?
The two POV characters have different educational and family
backgrounds, and that plays into it. So do their individual interests and
personalities and the way they react to stress. But even more important is to
give them different speech patterns and dialogue quirks.
For example, the victim’s daughter is a college student whose mother
was a lawyer, while the detective and her parents all have high school
educations. Since the daughter is better educated and grew up with an eloquent
mother, her dialogue and thoughts contain higher-level language. She uses metaphors
and a more advanced vocabulary than the detective, who tends to use simple,
direct sentences. But their adherence to grammar rules are not what you might
expect. Since the daughter is comfortable with her use of language and status
in life, she doesn’t feel bound to the traditional grammar rules. Instead, she uses
some sentence fragments and often starts sentences with “and” and “but.” The
detective, on the other hand, is very conscious of her lower class and wants to
appear as educated as possible, so she follows traditional grammar rules unless
strong emotion takes over.
The ultimate goal is to create characters so distinct that a reader can
open the book in the middle of a chapter and, without any context clues, know
whose POV it is in.
But making sure I get there is hard work.
__________
I took the photo in February on one of the Iles du Salut in French
Guiana, which was the site of a famous French prison opened in 1852.
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