Tag: how do I make my characters believable?

Voice Week 2011: Friday

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Ah…the end of an incredible week. The project turned out better than I possibly could have expected. I think we’ve all learned a lot, had a lot of fun–and written some amazing stuff.

And as I write this now, there are still a few un-posted pieces to look forward to! Keep reading up on everyone’s fantastic work here. And tune in Monday for a recap of the entire week–plus the drawing (announcement) of our first prize winner!

 

I struggled for a bit with this one, but finally got into it when I decided it should be a first-day-of-school homework assignment.

See what you think:

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What did you do this summer?

This summer I tried one of mommy’s drinks. I wanted to see what it tasted like because she drinks it all the time and I thought it would be o.k. if I had just a taste but she was mad. It tasted bad. Worse than medicine. It burnt my throat and I felt sick. I asked her why she drank that bad stuff. Then she threw it and it hit the wall and almost hit me but I moved. Sometimes it scares me when she gets mad, but it’s o.k. because when she’s done being mad she’s nice and sometimes we go out for Snickers bars.

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From the prompt “alcoholic mother.” Read the other versions: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4

Who does the character feel like to you? How old, what gender? Where did you think the voice was strong or weak? Let me know!

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Voice Week 2011: Thursday

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Voice Week is almost over! I can hardly wait to read the genius work tomorrow, but it’ll be sad to see it end!

I decided to travel back in time for today’s piece.

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If the woman had a single flaw, her flaw was weakness; weakness for the caresses of wandering sirs who were more knave than knight, and weakness for spirits when they left her for their more elegant wives. With tender, purplish splotches here and there on her once-lovely face, she would sit hunched over the bottle, her feet spread wide beneath her skirt, abandoning the feminine charms with which she so often veiled her pain. My father very likely had noble blood, but I cannot imagine he had a noble heart to match it.

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From the prompt “alcoholic mother.” Read the other versions: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 5

 

Who does the character feel like to you? How old, what gender? Where did you think the voice was strong or weak? Let me know!

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5 fantastic examples of voice

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Photo by Anna Gutermuth

Photo by Anna Gutermuth

Following last week’s post on how to find your voice, here are the first 100-ish words from five books with unique and strong voices; a mix of first and third person, and of new and classic authors.

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge Signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Unnecessary words like “of my own knowledge,” “myself,” and “emphatically.” Beginning sentences with articles and ending them with prepositions! And of course his completely pointless rabbit trail about the door nail. Yet none of it is truly pointless. By breaking these rules in the way he did, Mr. Dickens makes the story conversational. We’re not simply reading a story; we’re hearing it told by a charming, if slightly wordy, English gentleman.

First the colors.

Then the humans.

That’s usually how I see things.

Or at least, how I try.

***Here is a small fact***

You are going to die.

I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. Please, trust me. I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that’s only the A’s. Just don’t ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.

***Reaction to the aforementioned fact***

Does this worry you? I urge you—don’t be afraid. I’m nothing if not fair.

You can tell at a glance that Mr. Zusak is different. His bold interruptions to his own prose are a fascinating quirk all by themselves. Add the narrator’s somewhat depressed sense of humor and subtle conveyance of authority, and you become hooked. Notice the things he says and doesn’t say. He doesn’t say who or what he is, but we can infer from what he does say (“Then the humans.”) that he is not human and (“I’m nothing if not fair.”) that he has some control over whether we live or die.

 

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has—or rather had—a problem. Which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

Note the intentional wordiness, the amusing use of adverbs, how quickly he zeroes in from the hugeness of the universe to the ordinariness of digital watches. Mr. Adams has a unique way of looking at life, the universe, and everything—it is all absurd to him, and he enjoys the simple pleasure of sharing that absurdity with the rest of us.

You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunty Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas, is all told about in that book—which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

Breaking rules left and right here. Note the atrocious grammar and the way he interrupts and repeats himself. Mr. Twain puts us right in the room with Huck Finn. Simply the way it is worded helps us to both hear the accent and see the boy—before ever being told what he sounds or looks like.

 

All my life I’ve wanted to go to Earth. Not to live, of course—just to see it. As everybody knows, Terra is a wonderful place to visit but not to live. Not truly suited to human habitation.

Personally, I’m not convinced that the human race originated on Earth. I mean to say, how much reliance should you place on the evidence of a few pounds of old bones plus the opinions of anthropologists who usually contradict each other anyhow when what you are being asked to swallow so obviously flies in the face of all common sense?

Look at how long that last sentence is, with only one comma, and how it makes you read straight through it without breathing—and how subtly it conveys the talkative teenage girl. Mr. Heinlein achieves the ultimate victory in turning himself into an underage female.

 

Which of your favorite books have unique voices? Post an excerpt in the comments, or on your blog and link it back here!

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WANT HELP FINDING YOUR VOICE? Join us for Voice Week 2014, September 22-26

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5 ways to find your voice…in 5 voices

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  1. Understand what voice is

Voice is the personality behind your writing, the thing that makes readers recognize your work even when they don’t recognize the byline. Many things contribute to voice: sentence structure, word choice, mood, tone, and more—so by definition, all books have voice. But not all of them have really standout voices; the writing may be clean, but it lacks personality. But a unique and strong voice is priceless; it can make a book un-put-down-able regardless of plot.

  1. Train yourself to recognize a strong voice

This is easy, like if you read a lot or whatever. I mean, anybody can tell the difference between Ray Bradbury and Doug Adams and Earny Heming-whats-it, even if you throw out the plots. You just gotta know how to listen. Like, Bradbury is real poetic and descriptive and stuff. He can take you right back to summer vacation even if you’re freezing your toes off in December. Adams just thinks the whole universe is a joke, which makes him kind of depressing and really funny at the same time. And Heming…the Old Man and the Sea guy? He cuts out all the fancy words and just tells a simple story, but it’s pretty deep and stuff. I’ll post some little word clippy things next week so you can see what I mean.

  1. Remember, your narrator is a character, too

If you are behooved to write in the first person—telling the tale through, for instance, the eyes of your protagonist—you have certainly delved into that character’s innermost thoughts. But have you skewed every line of narrative with a unique, stylistic flourish?

Worse, a third-person writer may not have dreamed there was another character waiting to be tended to. But even a narrator who never steps upon the threshold of a single scene, is as vital as your hero—nay, perhaps more so. He is the voice within the reader’s ear. The eye peeking over their shoulder. Wouldst thou really let him wallow in commonplace prose?

Naturally, he must come from within you, and thus must start out as a part of you. Mayhaps he is an uttermost extreme version of a one side of yourself. Or mayhaps he is the darkest corner of your mind. Mayhaps he is the wit you wish you were. Ask yourself why he is telling the story. To entertain? To teach? To confront? To rant? Why does he bother himself to write it all down?

You may write in his voice all the time, or you may change narrators, as you would shoes, for each story you write. But whatever you do, do not let him (or, as it may be, her) become a bore.

  1. Experiment

When write long piece, piece like novel, you maybe accidentally write different voices. Maybe you read this book when you write chapter one, make you write one way. Maybe you listen to this song when you write chapter two, make you write another way. Then you go back, you read different voices, you see one you like, you write again to make all sound like voice you like. But you should try do more.

Take paragraph, write five different ways. Like a different person write each one. Maybe one a scared little child. Maybe one a drama queen. Maybe one a angry man. Or a alien. Or Death.

Find voice you like? Write more. Write whole scene.

We go deeper in voice experimentation in two weeks.

  1. Rewrite!

Come on people. You should have guessed this one. Did you not read the title of this website? What is wrong with you? Finding your voice isn’t as easy as changing a word or two. Oh-ho, of course you wish it was. But we can’t all have what we wish for, now can we? You’re going to have to go over that baby a few times, maybe alotta times, before it sounds peachy-keen. You should already know this. Why are you still reading?

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Show, don’t tell: on hiding morals in stories

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If you’re like me, you believe that fiction – more precisely, the story – is one of the most powerful forces on earth. And if we don’t use that power to try to make the world a better place, we are wasting a gift.

Trouble is, if you have an agenda – whether political, religious, or moral – your readers will smell it from a mile away, and it will make them mad. Not in the “oh, this is controversial” kind of mad, but the “quit trying to sell me something” kind of mad. Because, no matter how worthy the cause, you are selling something; a point of view.

As a copywriter for an advertising agency, I have a full time job selling things through writing – before you get out your pitchforks, hear me out; I’m a novelist first and foremost  – and I’ve learned the difference between good advertising and bad, and how the same difference can make your novel a powerful message instead of a soapbox sermon. That difference is simple: a poorly-moralized novel just says “believe me” in the same way a bad advertisement just says “buy me.” It touts its own benefits, insults the competition, and ultimately cares for nothing but the message. Much like that closeout furniture salesman who waves his arms and yells “lowest prices ever!” at the camera.

On the other side, the message-in-a-novel done well cares about the story. That story is driven by the characters, not by an agenda. Take the eBay commercial above (click through if you’re reading in RSS or email). eBay didn’t just say “buy stuff from us!” – in fact, they didn’t say it once. Instead, they created a character and a story we could relate to. It’s simple, but it’s moving, and the message (buy stuff on eBay) is an organic part of that story, not just tacked on at the end. It is, in fact, a prime example of show-don’t-tell.

Do not, then, simply construct a story to serve your agenda. Instead, when you  write your novel, put aside your agenda for a moment. Focus on your characters and the story they create with their personalities, desires, and actions. Write as honestly as possible, and if you are truly pouring your soul into it, a deeper meaning will grow naturally out of the story.

Remember to make your villain – the character with the opposing viewpoint – as realistic as possible. Don’t become bigoted in your passion, making the villain stupid, heartless, or insane. Make them as smart, as human, as grounded as you are. Argue both sides of the question, and do it with conviction. Otherwise, your novel will be nothing but a 300-page commercial.

So the moral of this story is, focus on the story, not the moral.

What books that you’ve read seemed to be selling a certain point of view? Which ones delivered a message that seemed to spring forth naturally?

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