McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Chapter Perspectives and How to Start Them
Aminar:
Thought isn't that organized. It's sporadic and stops mid sentence to follow another track. It starts at I should go to work but and layers into three different thoughts there on what needs to get done. The mind just isn't organized or focused enough to just go on in a monologue.
Show me examples of voice then. Because all I see in what you're discussing is character(which takes too much time to build to be voice) and to an extent perspective/tense(if that's what you mean by writing style.)
If you read something a personal friend posts on a forum you hear their voice while reading it. You can hear that not because they write any differently than anybody else or follow specific patterns but because you know them. The same applies to voice, except that the reader has one sentence to get that voice. So they assign it immediatley, almost always by the first sentence you write from the characters perspective. If that thought is, "The sky was always beautiful at night" the reader will get a voice filled with wonder and appreciation for beauty. But if it's, "The plane shook, jarring Bryan out of his book with an unpleasant thump." You get a sense the person is bookish, introverted, and prone to being unhappy.
They define voice right there.
Another example. I can't read The Dresden Files unless I place a voice in that slows the pace down. At the same time I can throw a voice onto anything.
Writers talk about voice like its magic. It isn't that its magic, but that it is entirely up to the reader what voice is. I spent months trying to figure out how to put voice into things and it never read any differently for me. I tried what you've talked about, trying to emulate other writer's voices. There isn't much there. I can write from harry's perspective if I want, but if I change the voice I read it in it stops being Harry and Starts being Atticus O'Sullivan really easy.
Now the forum is bugging out for me and not showing the line I'm typing on, which is driving me nuts. So enjoy.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Aminar on October 17, 2012, 04:27:24 PM ---Thought isn't that organized. It's sporadic and stops mid sentence to follow another track. It starts at I should go to work but and layers into three different thoughts there on what needs to get done. The mind just isn't organized or focused enough to just go on in a monologue.
--- End quote ---
I'll tell you again; most of the time, when I'm not three-quarters asleep, mine does. If you're not minded to believe me, that's fine, but it won't add much to the conversation if you're not willing to take me in good faith here.
--- Quote ---Show me examples of voice then. Because all I see in what you're discussing is character(which takes too much time to build to be voice) and to an extent perspective/tense(if that's what you mean by writing style.)
--- End quote ---
Voice is character. Every word a character says or thinks, every word on the page, is an example of how that character says/thinks/experiences things.
--- Quote ---If you read something a personal friend posts on a forum you hear their voice while reading it.
--- End quote ---
You do ? That seems very weird to me. Text is text. I don't "hear" it, it's written down.
--- Quote ---You can hear that not because they write any differently than anybody else or follow specific patterns but because you know them.
--- End quote ---
Whereas for me it's quite the reverse; almost all of my personal friends I met online first, and I know them by the patterns in how they write, long before I have met them in person or have anything derived from meeting them in person to add to their written voice.
--- Quote ---The same applies to voice, except that the reader has one sentence to get that voice. So they assign it immediatley, almost always by the first sentence you write from the characters perspective. If that thought is, "The sky was always beautiful at night" the reader will get a voice filled with wonder and appreciation for beauty. But if it's, "The plane shook, jarring Bryan out of his book with an unpleasant thump." You get a sense the person is bookish, introverted, and prone to being unhappy.
They define voice right there.
--- End quote ---
You read very differently from most of the readers I know, then. One sentence ? That's just alien to me. "The sky was the colour of a television set tuned to a dead channel" is a first line that allows a whole range of voices (from the faux-Harrison-Ford narrative in Blade Runner to William Gibson's own drawl) but it rules out a bunch of others (no way that sentence can be d'Artagnan or Sherlock Holmes) and you need a lot more to narrow the voice down further.
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