Up to this point, the exercises have not required that you work with your book. Now is the time for you to get out the real thing. You are going to work on developing consistent voices for each of your characters, and your narrator's voice. So put away your other practice material and get out your book.

You will not be doing any markup for this section. So keep your pen in your pocket.

Now's a good time to consider the differences between the printed word, movies (or tv) and audiobooks. In a book, you can write what the character is thinking, so the reader knows, even if no words are spoken. In the movies, unless there is dialogue, the viewer has to rely on action and facial expressions to get a glimmer of what the character is thinking. In an audiobook, there is often a three-way mind state going on:

• Sometimes, you will be the voice of the character, who talks faster or slower, higher pitched or lower pitched, with certain mannerisms, emotions and attitudes.
• At other times, you will be the voice of narrator, who is none of characters.
• And also there is the subjectified narrator, those passages where the narration goes into the mind of a character.

When the book is told in the first-person, the narrator-role may carry over some mannerisms, it is not okay to go into the mind of any character other than the first-person narrator, so the second and third mind states tend to merge. But even in a first-person narration, there is always some difference in mind state between the narrator talking to the reader and the narrator talking to the other characters in the book.

Your goal is to give your characters (and your narrator) two key qualities: attitude and emotion. The challenge for you is to make those attitudes and emotions sound as real as possible.