Thursday

VOICE


 

 
 
I hope that everyone’s holidays were scrumptious, memorable, filled with family traditions, and enjoyable. But if you’re like me, you are ready to get back into the normal swing of things! I’ve had just about as many Christmas cookie’s as I can stand. Ok, I’m lying… I could eat more!

But now I have the dreaded task of coming up with a way to lose the weight I gained from over eating these last few months!

One way I plan to do it is by keeping busy. Nothing works better than when I’m so busy I forget to eat! However, unfortunately that doesn’t happen often enough. My voice just doesn’t speak to me loud enough and my mind takes over and imagines how good that bag of chips would taste.

So I not only need to control my mind better in 2013, I need to find my voice more often. Voice is so important in the world of writing as well.

I remember the first time someone commented on a story I’d written by saying, “I just love your voice!” At first I had no idea what they meant. But the more I write, the more I understand.

I have come to discover that voice comes from bits and pieces of myself that reveal the emotional truth of the story. My beliefs, my experiences, my dreams, my imagination, my feelings. By finding that emotional truth in myself, that is how I can make my character unique and different that no one else can totally replicate.

A voice can not only be the words your character speaks but also their hidden thoughts, motivations, desires, intentions, doubts, suspicions, expectations.  These things to me are what turn my characters into superstars versus just characters.

Voice to me is indeed tricky because you need to bring out a little bit of yourself in your characters and yet make each character unique. How do you do that? Practice, practice, practice and most of all imagine, imagine, imagine!

For me to accomplish a special voice for each character I first have to envision that character in my mind. That ultimately means I have to outline. Most writers hate to outline but I do believe a little outlining is necessary. It works for me.

How about you? Have you found your special voice yet?

 

 

 

5 comments:

  1. For me, the biggest challenge is staying true to a voice throughout a novel or story. One of the things that makes a voice work is a controlled use of vocabulary. Often the perfect word or phrase to describe something is not the correct word or phrase in terms of the story's voice, so you have to find a different approach. Very tricky. As you say, practice, practice, practice.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It took me a long time to understand voice as well, but it has come to me slowly (at least I think it has! LOL).

    ReplyDelete
  3. I know when I haven't 'hit' my character's voice. I wrote an MG novel draft last year, rewrote it, and I still know I'm not there with my narrator's voice yet. I'll keep writing to find it, hopefully soon!

    ReplyDelete
  4. This is a great post thanks for writing it

    ReplyDelete