Finding Voice

Today, I want to touch the subject of voice. Not long ago, I finished Dean Koontz’s What the Night Knows. While reading it, I couldn’t help but notice the unique voice that each character, done in third-person limited POV, had. The use of words and just the general style of the sentences identified each character so that I could pretty accurately identify a character without seeing his or her name.

Normally when you hear ‘voice’, you think of the author’s identifiable writing style that made it possible for people to divine that Richard Bachman was in fact Stephen King. (If you find the possibility of identification through voice interesting, check out the experiment at Literary Lab here, and the conclusions here.)

But each character in a story has their own voice (or should have their own voice) and when you’re writing first person or third person limited, that voice has to come through the text.

How do you construct a unique voice? Look at these excerpts from What the Night Knows:

1) The previous night, his nerves had been fried because of the freaking dream in which the big hands had tried to tear off his face and gouge out his eyes, those fingertips as big as soup spoons. He was a little disappointed in himself that he’d been rattled by a moronic dream.

2) For a moment, this curious uneasiness threatened to disorient him – until he understood the cause of it. Together, the family was five targets clustered, therefore vulnerable to quick annihilation. Although he had no incontestable proof that any enemy waged war against him, he was thinking like a man embattled.

Do you see the difference? Though there are no names in the passages, the two voices clearly defines them. Can you guess which is the father and which is the son?

Vocabulary can often suggest a voice – a professor is apt to use bigger words than, say, a kid in high school. Another is the way in which they compare things (e.g. soup spoons and a war). The way in which their train of thought moves.

It is important to find your voice, but don’t forget to find your characters’ voices too.

Tweet

Experience

Can you become a great writer simply by sitting in a room and writing?

How do you write about a man freezing to death if you have lived your whole life in the tropics, where the lowest temperature is 18 degrees Celsius? You can guess and you can assume and even research. But the best way to show a man freezing to death is actually knowing how it feels – or at least a part of it. Take a holiday in the Alps. You don’t have to actually get yourself frostbite*, but you have to know what it feels like when the temperature is below freezing point.

There are some things in life that most people will never experience. Taking someone else’s life, for example. Anyone who has gone down this road will know that it is no simple matter. If you’re writing a war story, should you go and join the army?** I’m pretty sure that’s not necessary. If you’re writing a serial killer, do you go murder people? No.

Even though you can’t expect to experience everything your character will experience, there is always a middle ground. Tiny everyday experiences can be elevated to fantastical fictional experiences. If you were robbed on the street by a man with a knife, you can relate to a soldier being held at sword-point for treason. If you stand outside while it’s snowing and you shiver through your thin jacket, you can relate to someone freezing to death.

Combine your experiences with knowledge and you might have a better chance at getting your fiction to sound and feel realistic.

Get out of the house and experience life. The more experiences you have to draw from, the better your fiction will be.

If you get a chance to travel to the streets of Israel where your WIP is set in, it can only do your story good if you go and experience that which your characters will experience.

* Though doing that will give you a better perspective.

** This too.

Disclaimer: I am not saying that you should go out and get yourself robbed just to relate to your characters better.

Tweet

Crafting a Story

I’m going to replace my usual Monday entry with another series of posts. It’s going to be about crafting a longer story out of its main components, and using random words that I will get here as inspiration for each of the points. Maybe (okay, probably) it will fail, but I’d like to see what we (yes, that includes anyone reading this) can do to make it work.

First up, though, is to break down a story in its essential parts.

Here is everything I can think of at this point:

Protagonist

Antagonist

Setting

Inciting incident (the event that changes everything for the protagonist)

Catalyst (the thing that allows or helps the inciting incident to happen)

Theme

Of all these, I think we’ll have to leave theme out of the random word generator and rather deduce it in the end.

A secondary character might be useful but is not necessary for a story to be a story.

If you can think of anything else that is essential to a story, please share it in the comments.

Tweet