My only goal is to keep the energy of the voice high, to keep the character sounding like himself, which means, I’ve found, that the voice has to keep expanding. Having grasped the approximate “rules” of the voice, the reader will get restless if subjected to a series of sentences that (merely) abide by those rules. So I have to keep finding new ways to make the person sound like himself. The best way to do this is to keep putting new events in front of him, events that are escalatory (new to him), so that he has to find new registers in his voice with which to respond. (If a character,
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