Finding Your Character's Voice

This is probably the most conscious aspect of voice, adjusting your voice to convey a specific, fictional character. It’s the part where you climb into the character’s skin.

One thing that I’ve learned I need to understand in order to make my characters breathe on the page is what piece of me is in that character. What of my own core emotional truths does this character have? This is usually the key for me to an authentic character voice.

The truth is, pieces of ourselves show up in all our work. I have been surprised many times by unplanned pieces of me that show up on the page, usually spotted long after the book went to print and I acquired some distance from the story. Since this happens even when we don’t intend it to, we might as well consciously choose which parts we include and let them do some of the heavy lifting for us.

It is entirely possible, easy even, to write a complete story using only your author or story voice. In fact, this often happens. That’s what happened to me with the first draft of Beastologist II, I wrote it from my head and heart, not my characters’.

But how do you develop that characters’ voice?

Well, if we agree that Voice is an author’s core emotional truths and personal wisdom, combined with their use of language, then to evoke a real-seeming, authentic character we need to understand their emotional truths, personal wisdom, and use of language. And while some of ourselves will be in them, they will in large part be wildly different from us, not unlike how kids have some of their parents in them, but are also their own unique selves.

This is where backstory comes in. Not because it belongs in the story—it doesn’t! Or only the very littlest bit you can get away with. No, we need all that backstory because authors need to understand what emotional truths and personal wisdom our character has acquired throughout their lives. We need to know his formative experiences, emotional scars and wounds, hopes and fears, what sort of environment he’s grown up in, all those things go into creating our character. In order to get him to live on the page, he has to have a fully developed life of his own in order for us to be able to nail his worldview and, therefore, his voice.

I’m not suggesting we have to account for every moment of his life before he shows up on page one, but definitely the big emotional events that have shaped him.

Personally, I don’t find those character worksheets that ask what color his hair and eyes are, and what pets and hobbies and quirks he has, all that helpful.

What I need to understand is WHY my character has a ferret for a pet and WHY he has a constant tic under his left eye and WHY collecting boogers is his favorite—only?—hobby.

I often joke about not knowing what color my character’s eyes are because I’m too busy looking through them, not at them.

I think one of the secrets to getting this strong character voice is using deep point of view, going deep into the character’s head so that it is HIS perspective that colors the story. Again, Emma Jean Lazarus Fell Out Of A Tree is a great example of this.

But how do we get deep inside our character’s head?

For me it’s usually character journaling—creating a “journal” written by my character in which he confesses and contemplates his deepest thoughts. Almost like a therapy session. I'll often do a "therapy session" with the character on how he feels about the plot point that just occurred in the story--that's where I find his emotional juice.

Whenever a story feels flat to me or has flat spots, I go deep. I ask what is the core emotion the hero is experiencing in this scene? And why? Then, more importantly, have I managed to get it on the page?

Either later on today or sometime this weekend, I'll post the characterization worksheet that I use to help me to fully understand my character.

Story Voice

Some authors' voices remain fairly constant throughout everything they write and it is that author voice that holds such great appeal. Alice Hoffman, Jenny Crusie, and Meg Cabot are some that immediately come to mind.

Then other authors create unique, individual voices for each of their stories so that you might not realize they’d been written by the same person. Jane Yolen, Tamora Pierce, Suzanne Collins, K. A. Applegate, Garth Nix.

If you're the former, then the story voice and author voice remain fairly constant and you don't have to wrestle with the idea of different voices for different stories. However, as I said, this need to tell wildly different stories had me wrestling with voice for a long, long time.

So now I consider story voice to be which aspect of your author voice you’re focusing on or which emotional truth you are exploring.

The thing is, we all have many aspects to our personality: funny sides, serious sides, dark sides, places where our deepest fears lay. To me, it makes perfect sense that our body of work will cover more than one side of ourselves, thus different flavors of stories.

However, while we might vary in whether we want to focus on humor or seriousness or hope or despair, WHAT makes us laugh or cry or hope or despair is part of the essence of who we are and that will very likely remain constant throughout the body of our work.

Whether it is center stage or backdrop is the variable.

If you are writing a scary story, you will be drawing on what frightens you, the terrifying moments you’ve experienced, your nightmares.

If you are writing a humorous or light-hearted story, you will probably draw on what parts of life you find absurd or ironic. A romance would focus on how you define love.

Now, having said all that, I do suspect that each of us has a particular type of story that is best suited to our natural voice. As I told Dave in yesterday’s comments, Theodosia is absolutely the closest to my own natural voice to date. But does that mean I’m destined to write only Theodosia-like books for the rest of forever? Well, as much as I enjoy writing those, I certainly hope not, because that character only explores some of the things I know to be emotionally true, certainly not all of them. Perhaps Theodosia is only one aspect of my voice, or perhaps she is only one step along the path to finding my Most True Voice. I can't say for certain which it is.

I do know that I am hugely drawn to writing in the medieval period. In fact, four of my first six books were set in a medieval type setting. And while I don’t think that those books’ voice are as strong as Theodosia’s, I think it’s more because I hadn’t matured as a writer and developed my voice enough rather than because I was writing in a different time period.

The project I’m working on now is a very dark, mythical YA fantasy set against a late medieval backdrop and this voice sounds nothing like Theodosia, but I still feel very much that it’s my voice. But it is my seventeen-year-old voice versus my eleven-year-old voice. My coming-of-age voice versus my still-firmly-rooted-in-childhood voice. I am also exploring a whole different set of emotional truths and thematic issues and they help dictate the tone and feel of the story.

It is also my voice as seen through a medieval lens and worldview rather than an Edwardian one—two time periods with distinctly different flavors. The medieval world was obsessed with finding a path to grace and assuring a place in heaven, while Edwardians were just stepping out of a dark, somber, restrictive Victorian society and embracing a lighter side. Not to mention the beginning advent of modern technologies. If I’m doing my job in developing my characters, the flavor of those different times comes through.

Or as PJ says, talking about religion instead of relaying a college prank.

Which is why I think asking By what moral authority am I writing this story? helps me be sure I’m telling a story for which I have an authentic voice. That moral authority is the key to my emotional authenticity.

I think the fact that voice is so much more than simply language style is what allows us to effectively explore these different cultures and time periods. And I honestly believe it’s more about capturing the Renaissance worldview or the medieval worldview rather than using absolutely correct language and sentence structure. My intention is usually to evoke the time period through the language rather than to recreate it. I think it can be more accessible to readers that way and it gives me greater creative license to tell the story. And I sincerely believe everything should serve the Story. Especially voice.

Going On a Voice Hunt

Unfortunately, re-connecting with broken or lost voice isn't quite as easy as filling out a worksheet or answering a quiz. However, there are a number of things we can do to explore, identify, and strengthen our voice. All of the below have really helped me get a better idea of my voice so that I could try to make it stronger.


1) Embrace your inner odd duck.

This is the dedication in the second Theodosia book, and something I talk to kids about all the time. Our unique, crazy self is our secret weapon—especially when we’re engaged in creative pursuits. It’s our strange, uniquely individual perspective, emotional truth, and acquired wisdom that makes our work stand out from others’. If you’re a smart ass, or have way too vivid an imagination, or are too sensitive, or have attitude to spare, or have a wicked temper, or always look on the bleak side, whatever it is; embrace that part of yourself and incorporate it into your work. The longer I’ve been writing the more I think that drilling down to this absolutely unique core view of the world we each possess is key.

When I was in Dallas I had a chance to hear Judy Schachner, author of the Skippy Jones books, speak. As she gave her presentation and read from her latest book, I was struck by how this book was so uniquely a product of her. After meeting her and listening to this presentation, I realized this book was such a product of her own completely unique world view that it simply could not have been written by anyone other than Judy. And it seems to me that all our books should be that tied to our own individual perspectives and have our voice stamped so indelibly on them.

2) Ask by what moral authority are you telling this story.

And no, I don’t mean the church lady type moral authority. What I mean is, what authentic emotional route do you have into this story? That doesn’t mean that you must have experienced sexual abuse to write about it, but it will make your story more authentic if you have experienced some sort of abuse—if you are intimately aware of what abuse feels like. Especially if you agree that an author’s emotional truths are part of their voice. (And you might not, and that's okay, too.)

You know that saying that says, Write what you know? It’s talking about the emotional truth of what you know, not whether or not you’ve ever been a fireman or in love with a vampire.

3) What is the favorite thing you’ve ever written?

Do you have one piece of writing, an essay, a novel, even just a paragraph, that you love so much you can’t even believe you wrote it? If not, do you have something that simply stands out from other pieces of writing in such a way that makes you sit up and take notice? What sets it apart from your other writing? Can you identify what makes it sing for you?

4) Try to get a sense of what sort of stories really call to you.

Make a list of your fifteen favorite books of all time, then your fifteen favorite movies of all time. What commonality emerges? Mine were from a wide variety of genres and tones and it took a while before I recognized that one factor was a strong voice (yes, even in movies). Another was that the stories I loved the most took the hero to the mat emotionally, the protagonist was truly reborn by the experience of the story. Big sweeping, redraw your entire emotional landscape, type stories.

5) Looking back in time, what were some of the most pivotal moments in your life? Your childhood? How did that betrayal, salvation, glimmer of kindness, moment of despair, shape you? Pick a couple of these moments and do a quick, five or ten minute timed writing. Timed writing means stream of consciousness, only you will see it, no editing, kind of writing. You’ll be surprised how much truth gets on the page.

Tomorrow we'll talk about story voice--how one's voice can shift from book to book.

Defining Voice

It’s interesting how sometimes one’s reading life and writing life can manage to intersect perfectly. It usually happens when I’m in need of a Lesson, and right now, that lesson is voice. It also probably has a lot to do with the fact that I’m working with three very disparate voices, and I find myself getting diluted a bit if I don’t pay attention. So clearly I need to pay attention, which is why I’ve been thinking so much about voice for the past couple of weeks.

The truth is, I am a sucker for voice. That is the one thing that can pull me into a book faster than anything. It’s nice to have character development and narrative drive show up at some point, but honestly, if the voice is strong enough, I’ll read just about anything. If a book has all of those? I’m in love.

And I’m not the only one. At conferences and in interviews, time and again I’ve heard editors say they are looking for a great voice. The thing is, everything else—plotting and characterization tools—can be taught. Voice must ooze up from the core of the author and takes time to develop.

The problem is, voice is difficult to define. It’s an, I-know-it-when-I-see-it, kind of thing. It can also, like a favorite fragrance we’ve worn for years, be impossible for us to detect in ourselves. How then do we recognize it? Work on it? Strengthen it?

I know that some people claim you don’t have to find your voice because it’s always there, and that may well be true. However, I do think one can lose one’s voice, either through misuse or because we’ve been educated by workshops or writing programs that our true voice isn’t valid or or because as we apprentice ourselves to the craft of writing, we lose sense of our own unique voice’s value. So while our true voice may not need to be found, sometimes it needs to be excavated or re-discovered. I suspect this may be especially true when writing stories for kids—we have to be able to reconnect with our child’s voice.

Of course, that brings us to the question of what exactly is voice?

For me, voice encompasses not only the words a writer chooses and how they string their sentences together, but also the very subjects they choose to write about, how they view those subjects, and in fact, their entire world view: hopeful or edgy, tragic or matter of fact.

Voice is an author’s core emotional truths and personal wisdom, combined with their use of language.

And when writing for children or YA, we must try to reconnect with what our emotional truths were at that younger age.

One of the things that made voice so hard for me to understand was that my voice changes pretty drastically (I think) from story to story. So how then, does an author’s voice and story voice fit together? Not to mention the shifting voices of our main characters?

A very brilliant writer and teacher, Barbara Samuels, gave me this extremely helpful analogy.

Think of your author voice as a potato. Your story voice, then, is whether you are baked, French fried, scalloped, boiled, or mashed.

To stretch this poor metaphor even further (and this is me mangling it, not Barbara) then character voice is whether it’s plain mashed potatoes or garlic mashed potatoes; scalloped potatoes or au gratin, chili cheese fries or shoe string fries. (Lord, is anyone else getting hungry besides me??)

Your author voice encompasses your core stories, those thematic issues that you are drawn to time and time again. Perhaps it is finding a place to belong, or coping with great loss, being free of the past, or issues of trust. I know for me, finding one’s personal power shows up over and over again in my work and issues of power are very much a part of my core themes. I so remember being powerless as a kid—and that amazing feeling when I first learned I did have some power. In fact, I think that’s why I write fantasy—fantastical powers create such a great subtext for personal power.

I am also (clearly) drawn to historical settings, although I am unsure why that is. Maybe it’s a distance thing—maybe I need the distance of time to explore issues that would feel too painfully raw if I dealt with them in a contemporary setting? Or maybe that’s simply where I feel fantasy and reality meet in the most convincing way?

How do we reconnect with our author voice? Well, that's the challenge, isn't it? I'll talk about that tomorrow and maybe have a few exercises as well. . .

p.s. Speaking of language, notice how fond I am of clauses and adverbs and qualifiers...