I've just finished working up a bit on voice in my WIP and thought I'd check in with my peers on this. Note I'm not talking about authorial voice here, but the manner of speaking for individual characters.
This is a chicken-and-egg thing that has bedeviled just about every novel I've written, but I'll stick with the current one. I have three main characters--the protagonist, the antagonist, and the villain. Each needs to speak in a distinctive way. Sure, that's obvious, but how does one get there?
The only way I know is to have them start to speak. Even when I know in a general way--this one's blunt, that one's sophisticated--there's the matter of how to do that specifically. Verbal tics. Mannerisms. So I start to write scenes.
This inevitably propels the story forward and the next thing you know I have several scenes and thousands of words and plenty of inconsistency. Sometimes it's not until well into the novel before I really settle on a character's voice.
By which time boy howdy do I have some editing to do. I've tried writing side-bits, specifcally to work on voice, but often it feels too much like a school exercise (with due apologies to teachers). I'm not well motivated, though I do try. I think it's because I need to hear the character speak within the actual story, inside scenes that actually mean something.
Anyway, I find that smoothing out character voice is one of the more difficult editing tasks. And it's one that an outside editor (the one's I've used, anyway) doesn't often do a good job with. I think it's because they don't know my characters as well as I.
How goes it with you? How do you develop and manage character voice?
This is a chicken-and-egg thing that has bedeviled just about every novel I've written, but I'll stick with the current one. I have three main characters--the protagonist, the antagonist, and the villain. Each needs to speak in a distinctive way. Sure, that's obvious, but how does one get there?
The only way I know is to have them start to speak. Even when I know in a general way--this one's blunt, that one's sophisticated--there's the matter of how to do that specifically. Verbal tics. Mannerisms. So I start to write scenes.
This inevitably propels the story forward and the next thing you know I have several scenes and thousands of words and plenty of inconsistency. Sometimes it's not until well into the novel before I really settle on a character's voice.
By which time boy howdy do I have some editing to do. I've tried writing side-bits, specifcally to work on voice, but often it feels too much like a school exercise (with due apologies to teachers). I'm not well motivated, though I do try. I think it's because I need to hear the character speak within the actual story, inside scenes that actually mean something.
Anyway, I find that smoothing out character voice is one of the more difficult editing tasks. And it's one that an outside editor (the one's I've used, anyway) doesn't often do a good job with. I think it's because they don't know my characters as well as I.
How goes it with you? How do you develop and manage character voice?