Ugh.
Voice. Vox. Voce.
That irritating narration that drones on and on in my head while I am trying to fall asleep...yet seems to myseteriously step out for coffee the exact moment I sit down at the comptuter, Word document opened at the ready.
I've been reading a lot of blogs lately.
Some from fellow authors. Some mommy bloggers. A couple craft, DIY sorts, a religious one thrown in for good measure. It’s like an overload of unique, individual voices. I love “hearing” them speak to me and tell me their stories. They inspire me. They start that afore-mentioned annoying monoluge in my brain as I go about mundane, ordinary tasks.
“I wonder if the making of peanut butter cookies would be blog-worthy?” (Unless you’ve managed to use that stick of butter in the recipe and STILL make it nonfat, probably not.)
Ridiculous questions that bounce around in my head suddenly become candidates for blog posts. (What would Julia Child do? Did Carol Brady ever feel like locking her toddlers in a closet? I wonder if Ernest Hemingway ever had a peanut butter cookie this good?)
Rid-onk-u-lous, I tell you.
But I also look to my WIP(s) and try to pick apart the tapestry of voices that go into a compelling story—not that I’m there yet, I’m just sayin’…end goals and such.
I’ve gone back through this current work and analyzed it from three perspectives: the narrator, the heroine, and the hero. Deep POV isn’t a skill that came naturally and it’s one that I struggle with—so for the sake of my sanity, I kept to only two characters’ worth of POV in this work. I can’t head hop between a man, a woman, a narrator, and a bad guy or two. Not yet, anyway.
So what I picked up from this exercise is that I have one voice down pretty good—the heroine. Because, duh, it’s a prettier, skinnier, smarter me I’m creating, so she’s fairly genuine.
What’s not genuine, however, is the narrator. I’m finding the narrator’s “voice” to be pretty damn boring most of the time, which is in direct conflict with pretty much the whole point of telling a story, right?
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s tough work coming up with, at minimum, three, distinct voices to carry throughout the course of 80k+ words.
The upshot, however, is that this fantastic little invention called “the highlighter” has been invented.
And with these fantastic, see-through markers, I am able to take the green one, and highlight the areas that the narrator is in control and telling my story. I then take pink (because I am a traditionalist and seem to fulfill those gender stereotypes so readily) and highlight Heroine’s speaking parts, as well as those deep POV chunks (which are separate from the narrator’s take on the story, right? Right!) Then, you guessed it, I take blue. And I highlight Mr. Hunky’s speech and deep POV (though his deep POV is decidedly smaller than hers. I just can’t comfortably dwell in a man’s head for very long, despite spending most of my adult life trying to understand the cogs and pistons in there.)So with my manuscript all highlighty and fancy looking, I have the ability to compare characters against themselves and each other. Do they have similar speech patterns? Are they unique enough? Does my narrator do more than just relate chronological events…is there anything interesting about the narrator as character?
You see where this is headed.
I blame my fascination/obsession with voice on blogging in general. I’ve never had so much access to the inner-thought processes and workings of so many people at one time, which is not always a great thing, but extremely helpful when it comes time for a little WIP examination.
Happy writing,
h.
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