Speaker for the Dead Read Free Page A

through their relationships with others.   If there are only two significant characters, then there is only one relationship to be explored.   If there are three characters, however. there are four relationships: Between A and B, between B and C, between C and A, and finally the relationship when all three are together.
    Even this does not begin to explain the complexity--for in real life, at least, most people change, at least subtly, when they are with different people. The changes can be pretty major--I remember well my summer as a performer at the Sundance Summer Theatre in Utah. I was a 19-year-old trying to convince myself and others that I was a man, so with the other performers I became at least as profane--nay, foul-mouthed and filthy-minded--as the most immature of them. I worked hard to develop some fluidity and cleverness in my vulgarity, and won my share of laughs from the others.   Yet during this whole time I lived with my parents, coming down the mountain at insane speeds late at night, only to end up in a home where certain words were simply never said.   And I never said them.   Not once did I slip and speak in front of my family the way I spoke constantly in front of the other performers at Sundance.   This was not by any herculean effort, either. I didn't think about changing my behavior; it simply happened.   When I was with my parents I wasn't the same person.
    I have seen this time and time again with my friends, with other family members.   Our whole demeanor changes, our mannerisms, our figures of speech, when we move from one context to another.   Listen to someone you know when they pick up the telephone.   We have special voices for different people; our attitudes, our moods change depending on whom we are with.
    So when a storyteller has to create three characters, each different relationship requires that each character in it must be transformed, however subtly, depending on how the relationship is shaping his or her present identity.   Thus, in a three-character story, a storyteller who wishes to convince us of the reality of these characters really has to come up with a dozen different personas, four for each of them.
    What happens, then, when you start with a family with a mother, a dead father, and six troubled children, and then add a stranger who intrudes into the family and transforms every one of them?   It seemed to me like a sisyphean task, for I had to develop (or at least imply) dozens of personas, including the persona they had developed in order to deal with their dead father, and then show, clearly, how they all changed because of Ender's influence on their lives.
    Much of that, however, would have to come with the actual writing of the new draft of the novel.   My immediate task was to differentiate clearly between Novinha's children when the reader first encounters them. I sat there in the room I shared with Gregg, assigning some immediate and obvious trait to each of the children that would help the reader keep track of them.   Oh, yes, Olhado is the one with the metal eyes; Quara is the one who says outrageous things after long silences; Grego is the violent one; Quim is the religious fanatic; Ela is the weary mother-figure; Miro is the eldest son, the hero in the others' eyes.   These "hooks" could only serve to introduce the children--I'd have to develop them far beyond that point--but having found those hooks, I had a plan that would let me proceed with confidence.
    My novel had, at last, opened up to me, and I came home from that Nebula weekend and wrote the whole novel, from beginning to end, in a month.   As I tell my writing students, once you get the beginning right, the ending almost writes itself.
    One more thing, though.   No matter how well-planned a novel is--and, in my case at least, it must be very well-planned before i can write it--there are still things that come up during the process of writing that you simply didn't plan on.   In my Alvin