Whose Voice is it Anyway?

I love this topic. Voice. In fact, I'm going to steal from five pages worth of notes I used in a workshop I gave at Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers' Colorado Gold Conference in 2004. I'd love to use the whole thing, but it's way to much for a blog so maybe I'll do it in parts.

Your voice comes from inside you
... but you have to dig deep to find it. In most cases, it won't jump out of you and onto the page with the flick of a pen (or click of a mouse, depending on how you write). Your voice is filtered through something powerful and special, something familiar, something wonderfully creative. The secret to finding your storytelling voice is through your characters. But that's only the first step.

"To set your voice free, set your words free. Set your characters free. Most important, set your heart free. It is from the unknowable shadows of your subconscious that your stories will find their drive and from which they will draw their meaning. No one can loan you that or teach you that. Your voice is your self in the story." Donald Maas, WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL

Voice is evident in all aspects of the storytelling craft. Characterization especially, but also plot, setting, description, and exposition when you explore the internal workings of your characters' thoughts and his perceptions of the world around him.

For today's blog I'll focus on using character peronalities as a tool to channel your voice.

To become your characters you need to call upon your own personal life experiences & emotions; even if your experience wasn't precisely like that of your character, the emotion may be similar. Grief, joy, pain, anger, heartbreak… Take the death of a child, for example. If you have children, it's not hard to imagine the agony and devastation you'd feel if the unthinkable ever happened. Think what it would be like for your character. It's your voice that will come through your character's thoughts and actions. Your unique imagination is what breathes life into the people in your stories. When you share your character's lives, they become a part of you and are therefore more real.

The external traits of your character are the easy part; that's just their two-dimensional persona like height and weight, hair and eye color, favorite food, favorite movie, etc. To make them 3-dimensiona, you have to go deeper to learn why they say and do the things they do. What are their politics? Religeous beliefs? Relationships with family? Do they hate their parents? Why? And what happened in their lives that caused them to disrespect authority? Or to donate every hard-earned cent to charity? What caused their fear of heights? What's at the root of who they are? The answers to these questions not only make the character interesting, but enable you to speak with your character's voice, which translates directly onto the page and makes your story real.

Your characters are not you. They're from a subconscious part of yourself so don't hold back when you create who might be your polar opposite. Open your mind and set free the serial killers, vampires, Victorian prudes, heavy-weight boxers, stoic accountants, and all those other folks living within the dark recesses of your mind. You may feel liberated by the experience.

When you become your character, you let his or her actions and reactions drive the plot. Though you as the writer hold the reigns, your character's behavior steers the way. Allow his or her instincts to guide the plot forward.

Now for your assignment:

You have two totally different characters in the same scene, which is a Star Trek Fan convention. These characters are very different from each other, yet they're in the same place, and they're seeing, hearing and smelling the same things. Their perceptions will be totally different. They probably don't even have the same vocabulary. One of them could be from another country, or another planet. Ha! Different gender, different attitude, different background, sky's the limit.

Now that you know who your two characters are, write a paragraph for each, from their point of view, about what they're experiencing at this Star Trek Fan convention. They each have their own unique voice, which is an extension of your voice.

I'll start. Check the comments section for my example.