Our featured writer today is our very own Frankensteinbeck. Let’s give him a warm welcome!
I had to look up necromancer, wondering if a necromancer is someone who has sex with dead people. Happy to say that it is not!
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PLEASE DON’T TELL MY PARENTS I SAVED THE WORLD AGAIN.
by Richard Roberts
Voice!
How many of you are already nodding? Balloon Juice is full of authors.
For those unfamiliar, Voice is a major writing technique, but control of it is kind of advanced stuff. It’s one of my strengths, so I thought it would make a neat lecture while everyone buys my new book: PLEASE DON’T TELL MY PARENTS I SAVED THE WORLD AGAIN. It’s about a teenage necromancer and a cyborg.
Ahem.
Voice is the speech pattern of writing. Characters have a Voice. Narrators have a Voice. If you can tell which character in a book is speaking just by what they say, then they have strong Voices. If the text is fun to listen to, that’s a strong Voice. Among commenters here, Betty Cracker, Rikyah, and Baud all leap to mind as having strong Voices. When they post, you don’t need to read the byline, you know who it was.
So, how does Voice work? I figured I’d share some of the strategies and gimmicks I use. Some of it’s blunt. Penny Akk said ‘criminy’ all the time and readers loved it. Irene stuffed her sentences with alliteration and puns, and was never ashamed to make them forced and eye-rolling. Magenta went in for bizarre, dramatic, extended metaphors. Cassie constantly makes up new nicknames for people. In my WIP, my main character imagines sound effects for people, so the text is full of woosh and crackow!
But it gets subtler. The theme of Mirabelle’s life is feeling restrained. When she speaks, she never uses contractions, and doesn’t go for exclamations. In Wild Children I leaned heavily into the easiest trick to make text sound like a child – start lots of sentences with ‘and’. Vanity Rose leaned heavily to sarcasm. Even though her accent doesn’t show in her internal monologue, Avery Special uses southernisms like ‘expect’ and ‘mighty’.
It gets subtler than that. Narrative text, even third person, reflects the personality of the main character. What they notice, what they think about, creates a book’s voice. Penny was kind, but self-centered. She described things in terms of how they affected her. In my WIP, popularity-obsessed Stella pays even closer attention to body language and clothing than my text normally does, and is always assessing what impression she gives.
Okay, other authors. I’ve shared some of what I do. Got any tricks of your own to share? Non-authors, any examples of strong voices from books you’ve read?
We can also talk about this book in particular, too, if you like. Conversation does not need to be limited to discussion of “voices”!
Richard Roberts – Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Saved the World Again!Post + Comments (39)