Stick to a task 'til it sticks to you;
Beginners are many, but enders are few.
honor, power, place and praise
Will come, in time, to the person who stays.
Stick to your task 'til it sticks to you;
Bend at it sweat at it, smile at it, too.
For out of the bend and the sweat and the smile
Will come life’s victories, after awhile.
You’ll know which to use if you know your character, and we’ll learn something about the speaker that will make him or her more vivid and interesting. The point is to let each character speak freely, without regard to what the Legion of decency or the Christian Ladies’ Reading Circle may approve of. To do otherwise would be cowardly as well as dishonest, and believe me, writing fiction in America as we enter the twenty-first century is no job for intellectual cowards. There are lots of would-be censors out there and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see… or to at least shut up about what you do see that’s different. They are agents of the status quo. Not necessarily bad guys, but dangerous guys if you happen to believe in intellectual freedom.