Orson Scott Card: Writing a narrator is like switching to the “voice”—viewpoint, vocabulary, sentence structure—of an alternate personality.

“Who is telling your story?…It is never exactly your own voice…You have many voices…Each of your voices has its own vocabulary. They overlap, but less than you might suppose. Each has its own sentence structure…

“Does that sound like a split personality? Perhaps the function of our brain that lets us develop these different ‘voices’ is the very function that drives multiple personalities—it seems likely enough…

“…when I’m at the keyboard telling a story, it’s almost as if I’m acting. I’m ‘in character’…using words and syntax that one of the characters in my tale might use…I find myself writing ‘in character’ even when I’m using third person, even when the narrator isn’t a specific person at all…In reading other writers’ work, I find that, as often as not, they do the same thing…” (1, pp. 126-128).

As noted in Wikipedia, Orson Scott Card has published under at least seven pseudonyms: Frederick Bliss, P.Q. Gump, Byron Walley, Brian Green, Dinah Kirkham, Noam D. Pellume, and Scott Richards. Are these the names of seven alternate personalities?

(Search “pseudonyms” to find previous posts on this recurring topic.)

1. Orson Scott Card. Characters and Viewpoint. Cincinnati, Ohio, Writer’s Digest Books, 1988.