Capturing a voice

I almost went to sleep, but thankfully I had a stray thought float by and I remembered I hadn’t written anything today.

I’ve been working on a set of instructions for doing an analysis of character voice using AI. With the right instructions I can start collecting a mountain of data from various sources. It’s still not coming out exactly right, but one part that’s working well is a sentence-pattern analysis.

Here is an example, not from a character, but from an author interview with David Baldacci.

Pattern: Absolute and its echo

• Stencil: [flat absolute declarative] + [one-to-four-word restatement that presses the same claim again]
• Examples from text:
  • “No one should make more off of the book than the person who wrote it. No one.”
  • “It just is. Nobody forgets their relationships they had growing up with their family. They don’t.”
  • “Books are like body armor against every bad thing in the whole world. They just, they just are, you know.”
• Invented variation: “A scene that costs the character nothing is not a scene. It isn’t.”

This first step is essential. I need a reliable set of instructions to capture the right data about voice. It’s essential.