I’ve got a post up on Romancing the Blog today, about things I find, and wish I’d find, in my keyboard. It’s the sort of procrastination technique I use when I’m avoiding writing. Please check it out and leave a comment so I don’t feel like a weirdo.
(That said, last week I wrote just under 10,000 words. So I can’t be that stuck.)
I’m now obsessed with voice, of course, and I’ve been thinking about character voices. I may have mentioned once or twice (or SEVERAL FREAKING TIMES) that I’ve had some difficulty getting into this book I’m writing now, and that the first section of it is totally wrong. One of the things that’s wrong is a character’s voice. See, the heroine has a friend at the beginning of the book, and when I was writing her, her voice just leapt off the page. She’s quirky and quite extravagant, and she was lots of fun to write.
This is great, of course. Except that as I kept writing, this friend faded into the background, as the heroine has left her behind to go somewhere else, and in this new place, the heroine meets another woman, a fairly odd person with whom she’s destined to get close. Now, as soon as I started writing her, her voice leapt off the page, too. She was speaking straight into my ear.
What’s the problem, here? Well, you’ve probably guessed it–both characters had the same voice.
If something like this happens, usually it’s telling me I’ve got something wrong. Maybe the characters can be merged into one, for example. That can’t happen here–both characters are necessary, but for different reasons, and they’re separated by time and space. What it means is that one of the characters is going to need to be given a different voice. In this case, the first, original character needs to change, probably to be made more conventional, so that the second character, when she arrives, will have the full impact.
Ohhhh, revisions are such a good, good thing. And these revisions are going to be such hell.
Has this happened to you?
A few years back, my internal narrator got bored and quit, and was replaced by an old guy with a British accent. Didn’t think anything of it at the time.
Then I sent it to a friend of mine. She responded with, “Um… why are you pretending to be Patrick Stewart?”
A few years ago my best friend handed me a book and said, “She writes just like you.” I read the book and thought, “My God, I’m sarcastic.”
Like this is a surprise.
Ehle, channelling Patrick Stewart is just SO COOL. Had you been watching a lot of Star Trek?
Kate, what was the book? And isn’t it irony when it’s done by you British people?
Hey Julie
Just wanna say I AM LOVING this discussion on voice – very interesting! And so cool about the picture books – I’m gonna go test my own two year old tomorrow
Would love to hear more about how you revise and whether this is purely from editorial feedback or you have a method of revision you go through for each book… if ya have the time to explain that is!
Rach!
Thanks, Rach. I’ll happily blog about my revision process. I’ve got one more post I want to do about voice, and then I’ll go onto revision, how does that sound?
Interested to know what your two-year-old recognises as style.
Julie, I think it was called My Fake Wedding or something very similar.
And I believe it’s only called irony if you’re Alanis Morisette.
Well, that’s a very special kind of irony called “Canadian irony”, pioneered by Ms Morisette.