During this year’s Pike’s Peak Writer’s Conference, Carol Berg taught her view of Voice in writing. Not the writer’s voice, mind you, which involves how an author tells the story. That would be another day-long lecture altogether. No, she talked about the character’s voice within the story. How do they speak? How do they process thoughts and emotions in a way that sets them apart from other characters?
Let me clarify for those that don’t know about Carol. She has written more than ten fantasy novels, and recently won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and the Colorado Book Award for Popular Fiction. So when she spoke, all the writers in the room listened, and hard.
First off, a character’s voice is defined by two things.
1. Form
2. Content
Form is the patterns and rhythms of the voice, while content is defined by the word choice and what the character actually says or thinks. Content most often is seen through a character’s specific dialogue or the way a scene is described through their eyes.
A character’s voice can convey a lot of information. It can tell the reader the time frame of the story, a character’s age, social status, educational levels and religious perspective. It can reveal the place, culture, mythology and story background.
The one thing writers have to be careful of is having point-of-view characters who end up being emotionless cameras. This is something I tend to struggle with in my writing. Because I am the writer who has developed this character from the ground up, I usually have their emotional and thinking processes worked out in my own mind. However, in first drafts I usually fail to convey those things on the page, and characters end up less than three-dimensional. I have to go back through and reveal why they made those decisions, or how they felt about a particular situation or another character.
Carol made one statement that particularly stuck with me: “Voice doesn’t define a character. It reveals them.”
For me, I find that it takes a chapter or two before I discover a character’s voice which then continues through the rest of the story. I then have to go back and tweak the first chapters so the voice is cohesive throughout. When you are working to get into the groove of a particular character and they way they think and speak, here are some questions to ask yourself:
1. What does your character notice first when they enter a scene?
2. What do they feel about what they see?
3. How do they describe things?
The answers to these questions reveal your character’s worldview and priorities. A detective who enters a dinner party will notice different things than a band member playing up on stage at the same party. They will feel differently about the people enjoying the party, and may use vastly different words and metaphors to describe what they see. This sets them apart in numerous ways and helps them come across as distinct individuals in the story.
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