Writing Comes Alive: Voices in my Head

Old vs New: 

I have read my old writing recently, and it stayed black words on the page, clunky.  Of late, my writing has come alive.  I actually hear the voices of my characters and have to put them down.  How did this happen?  It’s probably a combination of things.  

1. Humor: 

One of those things was the discovery of the critical nature of including humor.  I will be writing a blog on this soon as a guest blogger on a friend's wall.  I can scarcely read a book or watch a movie anymore that doesn't have at least a little humor.  I loved the 90s rendition of "Mission Impossible" when I was a kid.  I recently tried to watch it but couldn't make it very far.   Why?  Because the characters were too serious.  I don't do sitcoms.  I don't want a show or a book with a built-in laugh track, necessarily.  But I also don't want to watch an unremittingly grim slugfest.  "Dark Knight Rises" illustrates exactly how hard it is for many people to enjoy that.  More on this in a later blog.  

2. Writing out loud 

 Another factor in the life in my writing was the discovery I made last week, that the writing in isolation doesn't work for me.  You can just page to the previous post for that discovery.  If I can talk through the dialogue and the narrative, if I can read it out loud and hear the voices in it that aren't mine, my writing has started to come to life.  If it sounds like me, I still have work to be done. 

3. Character Planning:

Yet another factor is the careful crafting of characters in advance.  I have to know what kind of person this character is and often have someone I know to use as an emotional model in my head.  The character has to care about something or someone, which makes me care about them.  My blog about heart of the story is here.  

4. Read what You Want to Write:

A fourth factor is reading voices in fiction that come to life.  If you read oatmeal fiction, you write oatmeal fiction.  Oatmeal fiction is the kind that is sloppy and lazy, the kind that some writers tend to write early in their careers and some tend to write when they're constantly racing the clock, where all of the characters feel like stock and little effort seems to have been put in considering and crafting each line, each word.  When the book tends to feel more like a summary than a lively tale that comes alive in your head, it's oatmeal fiction.  Sometimes cold, lumpy oatmeal fiction.  

However, there are writers whose voice is fresh and fascinating.  Harry Potter books, especially the later ones, are like this for me.  The characters leap off the pages.  I can see them, hear them, and imagine myself sitting and chatting with them for hours.  These characters were meticulously planned out and often based on someone the writer knew to help the writer get the voice right.  The power of Rowling's fiction transformed the face of children's fiction, fiction in general, movies, and the world.  

The Percy Jackson is another popular example of a series wherein the writer's voice is fresh and unique.  It's clearly in the tradition established by the Harry Potter series but does not feel derivative since it draws from Greek mythology rather than fantasy fiction.  Every chapter title reveals, amuses, and keeps one guessing.  Percy's first person voice is snarky and full of personality.  And for me, a great charm is that he has both dyslexia and ADD.  He feels unique and real because he struggles with problems many readers may understand.  If one wants to hear what a lively, intriguing voice sounds like, skip the bland movies and go right for the book.  

The third of these writers that have blown me away with their unique voice is Shannon Hale with her Ever After High: Storybook of Legends trilogy, particularly the third one.  This series follows the fairly recent fad of following the adventures of high school-aged offspring of famous fictional characters, a la Monster High, but it is so much more.  The pages are full of wit and intriguing characters. In the third book, the narrator goes insane like the rest of the world.  The daughter of the Mad Hatter takes over as an unreliable and quirky narrator.  Later, the daughter of the Cheshire Cat joins the party as a narrator so unreliable, she's willing to make events up because what's actually happening isn't interesting to her.  For an example of unique voice, I highly recommend that book.  I didn't like how the text used the device of effectively erasing the story for characters involved, but the book is well worth reading.  

These writers employ humor, research, wild imaginations, and careful planning to create something new and compelling for readers.   Their characters are fully realized with quirks, flaws, sometimes trauma, and even occasionally disabilities (a topic I blogged about here).  Hearing the narrative and character voices of writers like these in my head helps my capture my own voice.  If I read oatmeal fiction, my writing may start to feel like oatmeal.  If I read lively, quirky fiction, my writing can pick up that flavor as well.  I can forgive a lot of issues if you have the voices down.  Clear voices share clear motivation, which helps push the plot.  I want to hear from the characters and know what they are doing and why.  This is what helps characters and the entire text come alive.   

5. Becoming the Character: 

Good writing is like method acting.  One doesn't just write about a character.  One becomes the character, hears the voices in one's head, speaks and writes with that voice.  I never know what my characters are going to say until they say it on the page.   But as hear their voices in my head, I become them for that short time.  

6. Writing Truth

As I’m writing, it feels real, exciting, funny, emotionally charged to me, and I tend to get a positive response from my readers.  I can cry over my own writing or laugh with my characters.  Good writing is unexpected, well-crafted, meaningful.  I find I write my best when I'm true to my heart and to my light within, when I write what I know to be true and real encoded in fiction. I share a version of my experience or the emotional realities of those I know through my stories.  When I write truth, my stories mean something, and my writing comes alive.  I feel guided, so I know it's not just me writing.   If it's meaningful to me, it will be meaningful to others as well.   

7. Polish: 

At the end of writing, do make sure to edit well.  Get readers to help you make sure your characters and story are complete and flow well.  Just now, I started looking into the editing software Autocrit.  The reviews are positive, and it looks like it may help me liven my writing by avoiding redundancies, filler words, adverbs, etc.  Whether you use a service or not, your lively writing will be easiest to read if well edited. But I save editing for later.  If I belabor one short fragment of the text as I write before moving on, I don't go anywhere.  

Your Turn: 

For a long time, I sought a voice.  Now, I've found that voice, and it comes from inside.  It makes writing fun and interesting for me and the reader.  For those still seeking, good luck finding yours.  

Everything's better out loud

Shaping Words: 

I find that when I write, brainstorm, edit, etc. in my head, quite often it sounds great in my head.  But then it can get muddled for anyone else or just not translate well.  I often find the most useful first step is to find a concept from somewhere outside of me.  I observe other people, read a story or idea in a book, ask a crazy question about how something is done, or whatever and then I start pondering how I can turn a kernel into a story concept.  That much, I've said before.  But if I stick to brainstorming in my head, often I don't get very far.  So I'll talk it through a story concept with a friend, family member, my cat, anybody at all.  Once I formulate it enough to put it into words, to say it out loud, it starts to shape itself into something more concrete.  Concepts and ideas start to make sense when I say them out loud.

Teamwork: 

What also helps is the other person often has ideas to improve my original concept.  Speaking to someone about my ideas can have a synergistic effect on those ideas.  They become more everything: more interesting, more profound, more coherent, more exciting.  Ideas that stay in my head or on the page can remain dead.  But speaking them out loud can bring them life.  Case in point, over the weekend, I was thinking about how I've started looking closer at the people around me for traits and personal struggles and realized that most people I know have some kind of disability or issue with which they struggle.  I'd started writing my first couple of books about people who just so happened to have some kind of disability since disabilities are so common in reality and so rare in fiction.    Here is my blog on the topic.  But as I talked about it out loud, it started to make more sense and become more of a philosophy and less of a nebulous idea.  Brainstorming out loud may not work for some people, but it works for me.

Even after I have my ideas and sit down and write, this conceptualizing out loud with other people as I go along continues to be useful.  I'm working on a middle grade series of books called Doomimals about kids and their pets fighting off armageddon at the paws of an evil army of animals.  My kids in that age group are critical in helping my story keep going.  I read them each chapter as I write it and ask them if it's entertaining, funny, and works for them.  They, in turn, keep their writers' nets out to look for ideas to help my story progress.  They are engaged and invested because I bring them in by reading and brainstorming out loud with them.  This helps me with audience awareness as well. I also ask if something makes sense to someone, and sometimes the very act of hearing it outside my own head even in my voice can tell me if it works or not.  This can also work for formulating the outline, the order of events, and just about everything else that goes into the writing process.

Editing: 

Most importantly, my voice is critical in the editing process.  I subscribe to the idea mentioned in the writers' movie Finding Forrester, that the first draft is to be written with the heart and the second with the head.  I don't generally mess with editing until the whole thing is done or I get bogged down and get nowhere.  I will probably blog about this later.  But it's been said repeatedly that reading the manuscript out loud helps one slow down and catch errors one may just gloss over in one's head.  I don't generally submit a blog until I've read it out loud at least once.  It's best to actually print out the manuscript to give one a whole new angle, a whole new way of looking at the text.

Conclusion: 

Basically, working through my writing process verbally improves my writing every step of the way.  If I'm stuck in my own head, I may find what I'm working on doesn't make sense to me or to others in the long run.  It also gets my creative juices flowing and helps me catch issues I wouldn't otherwise see.

Sensory Detail

Icing on the Cake:

In the last blog, I focused on the core of how to make a story, answering the question of so what?  In other blogs, I talked about the importance of characterization.  And these aspects are truly key to a great piece of writing.  But once you have these features down, other aspects of the story become important and can help develop the core meaning.  One of these is sensory detail, just the right amount of sensory detail.  Every word in writing should be intentional.  No word, if possible, should be wasted.  Once one has the basics down, one has the luxury of considering how to make the words and, thereby, the entire piece come alive.

When "Beautiful" is not Beautiful:

Some sensory detail makes the story vivid and meaningful.  One can write, "I smelled a flower."  There's nothing wrong with that.  But we don't see the flower nor do we smell it.  "Flower" is just a word.  Some people would want to rush in and add a descriptive word like, "I smelled a beautiful flower."  Yet you'll notice the description still stays flat on the page.  "Beautiful" means something different to everyone and in every situation.  In fact, in brain studies, they've seen how words reach different points in the brain, depending on the listener.  To one reader who has had strong emotional connections to that word, the word "beautiful" can trigger an emotional receptor.  To someone else, it simply hits the intellectual part of the brain.  One can't even guarantee it means what you want it to mean in the mind of your reader.

The Power of Specific Description: 

So let's get specific and add a visual adjective.  "I smelled a red flower."  Now, we're getting somewhere.  Red can have various connotations, depending on context.  If it's a story about love, red carries the suggestion of passion.  If it's a story about morbid topics, red carries the suggestion of blood and death.  If it's a story about anger, that anger can be emphasized by the red flower.

But this flower can become even more interesting if we give it a better description than just the generic word "flower."  Let's call it a rose.  Granted, a red rose is, by default, a cliche.  If it's a man offering a woman a single, red long-stemmed rose, we all know that this means the man romantically loves the woman.  But it still suggests to us a specific odor, color, meaning.  "I smelled a red rose" gives us a vivid image.  If we, then, put it in an intriguing context, we smell it and, more importantly, understand its symbolism.  If I write "I smelled a red rose, its thorns pricking my fingers," the reader gets more than odor and obvious symbolism but touch as well and something beyond that: we get questions.  The reader feels just a hint of intrigue.  Why does this person let the thorns prick her/him?  There's a sense of pain that perhaps suggests just a little beyond the physical.

Context:

The context becomes particularly important here.  Let's say a single, lonely woman grasps the rose that is still on the bush, desperate to feel something, anything, since she's numb from rejection.  She longs for the passion implied by the rose on the bush, but it's someone else's rose.  She can't have it.  She presses it to her nose until the thorn digs into her thumb.  That's an image that gets at the human condition, at the so what?  It's no longer quite cliched.  Or let's say a woman gives the man the rose.  What does it mean now?  She's in power in the relationship.  Does he accept her dominance?  Now, we've got the cultural expectations surrounding gender involved.  Let's say a woman comes along, grasps this rose, allowing the thorn to prick her, sniffs it deeply, and crushes it in her hands then drops it to the ground, stomping it with her high heel.  Now we see anger.  We see frustration.  The description becomes a key symbol, part of the action.  It's not there just to be pretty.  Even a cliched description ceases to be cliched with an intriguing context.

Example:
Here is an example from After the Dream, my first novel.  Julia is a physically and emotionally scarred woman who is overweight and underconfident.  This scene occurs sometime after the end of an abusive marriage of several years when she is giving dating another chance.  She has been set up on a blind date by her sister.  She's waiting in a restaurant for that date:

           I [...] shredded the edges of [a] violet rose, the signal [my sister] set up to show I was the one.  I wondered which picture she had shown him [...]
            Just then, Nathan, my date, entered.  It felt like time stood still.  [... He had b]rown, almost black hair.  Eyes the color of a wading pool.  Perfect cheekbones.  Olive skin.  Tall but not too tall.  It was like looking at a painting of my vision of perfection.  I wanted to hug my sister. 

            He stepped in and glanced down at the violet rose then looked at me and back at the rose.  His face assumed the expression [my young daughter] made in the presence of a spider, and he started to edge backward.  And then I wanted to slap my sister.  She must have shown him my college picture. [... H]e looked back at me.  His face scrunched up as if he smelled something foul.  “Um… never mind.  I … uh… I just remembered I need to go somewhere… else.” 

            “What’s wrong, Nate?” I asked, standing up.  “Are you sick?” [...]

            “Just… not my type,” he muttered then turned around and bolted for the door.  

            [... I] fled, the damaged violet rose sitting abandoned on the table. 

Here, the purple rose represents her identity, her sense of self.  At the beginning of the scene, she hopes the rose will come to represent the traditional meaning of love at first sight.  Instead, due to the man's violent reaction to her appearance, it becomes a symbol of her loneliness and the pain she experiences from the encounter.  The word "violet" comes to suggest violent as in his violent rejection of this woman.  The rose is not merely decorative.  Its description serves to enhance the emotional context of the situation.

Avoiding Purple:

Just as a caution, there is such a thing as too much sensory detail.  It's great and even a great idea to appeal as often as possible to all senses.  However, there is a limit.  When the description becomes purple prose, becomes so dense it slows down the narrative or poem, it drowns out everything else.  There is a balance.  For instance, I read a novel with a very simple plot that was bogged down on every side by unnecessarily dense description.  I ceased to care about either character or story when the location became the main character.  It's fine to write, "She smelled the red rose."  However, it may be a bit much to write, "The curly-haired blonde woman with a tight dress and hips that swished as she walked sauntered confidently over to the mahogany table, picked up the long, drooping stem of a richly crimson rose and allowed its intoxicatingly rich odor to envelop her."  What details are we supposed to notice as readers?  Do I care more about the woman and her hair and dress or the rose or the table?  It's impossible to tell.  The description takes over the sentence, drowning out all meaning.

Conclusion: 

Description, along with every other word in the text, should serve the purpose of driving the plot and enhancing the characters.  If the description detracts from either of those purposes, it should probably be cut.  It's up to the writer to decide a balance that brings out but does not drown the meaning.  Character and story are the keys.  Everything else should only serve to develop those central features.

So What?

The Heart of the Matter

I've read several stories recently that bring home one of the most important aspects of writing: answering the "So what?" question.  Readers have so much to do.  So why should they read your particular piece?  Where is its heart?  If the reader has to slog through multiple pages to get to a character or situation that is meaningful to them, chances are that even if they do finish THIS piece, they won't be back for more.

Caring

So how does one get to the heart, the meat, of the piece?  Here's the secret: make the reader care.  How?  By making the character care about a cause, a person, a pet, SOMETHING, anything.  On the first page, or as soon as possible, do something that brings home the humanity of your main character or even your villain.  The cheapest shot is to give him or her a puppy or a small child.  But this is only a cheap shot if the puppy or small child is simply tacked on.  If they're central to the story line, that's perfect.  If your character loves something, we readers are more likely to love your character.

But it's critical that we are SHOWN this love if you want us to feel it.  Don't tell us, "Susan loves her family."  Those remain words on the page.  But if we see Susan hugging her family, tears streaming down her cheeks [as long as it's not overdone or melodramatic] as she leaves the house to go to war [doesn't matter if she's going to war against a military enemy, a hostile supervisor at work, the zombie apocalypse, or death itself], we will feel it.

Which brings me another facet of making me care.  Help me see what is at stake in Susan's situation.  Something should be at risk.  It can be a romance, a job, her life, her family's lives, the world itself, something.  She needs to have a clear goal or desire, and that goal or desire needs to be in danger.  I think we have all read stories full of lush description and interesting dialogue that still fall flat because we don't care about the characters or their causes because THEY don't seem to really care about those around them or their causes.  They just go through the motions like puppets in a puppet show.  Convince me.  Show me.  Make me care.

For Example: 

Here is an example, starting with least compelling and going to most.  "Susan woke up, got ready for school, patted her dog, and left the house."  I don't care about Susan at this point.  I am not even sure why I'm bothering to read her story or why this bit is in here.  I put down the book.

So let's add some description to see if this helps.  "Susan woke up, stretched her thin, tanned arms, and pulled on her plushy blue sweater and skinny jeans.  She bounced into the bathroom and curled her golden hair then spritzed it with cherry-scented hair spray. She spread her bubblegum lip balm on her lips and flounced downstairs, patted her beloved dog, and ate a bowl of Golden Grahams with all the milk her bowl would hold.  Then she said, 'Bye' to her parents and sped to catch the bus."  Sure, some people will read past this to figure out why she seems so excited to go to school, but most will walk away.  It's not because the description didn't appeal to the senses.  We can taste her lip balm and cereal and smell her hairspray.  We feel her sweater.  We hear her bid her parents goodbye.  There is sensory detail here, but she doesn't seem to really care about anything or anyone.  The word "beloved" falls flat because we don't feel it.  There's nothing at stake.

So let's start again:

      Susan slammed the alarm, then noticed she'd hit snooze one time too many.  "Crap!  I can't miss the bus again! Mr. Bell will send me to detention for sure!"  She crawled out of bed, glad that she had fallen asleep in what she was wearing Sunday afternoon.  It was rumpled, but at least it wasn't pajamas.  She glanced in the mirror and saw her hair sticking up like porcupine quills.  She ran a brush through it then scooped it into a ponytail, trying to ignore the bits that stuck out. Those girls at the back of the bus would mock her no matter what, but it didn't help when she made it easy.  She spritzed it with the cheap, perfumy hairspray mom always bought.  It made her hair sticky but did nothing for the stray bits. "Whatever." Then she dashed downstairs, already deciding a growling stomach was better than a missed bus.

     Susan stopped short at the sight of her mom looking at her with red eyes and a tear-stained face. "We've put it off as long as we can.  Zipper can't eat anymore.  He's in too much pain.  We have to take him in today."

     "No!" Susan shouted.  "I've had him since I was little!  He was Daddy's last present to me!  You can't take him away!"  She threw her body across the prone form of her golden retriever, who whimpered under the pressure.  She inhaled his stale breath and matted, musty fur, praying it wouldn't be the last time.  "Please don't take him!"

     "Sweetie, I wish I could do something else, but I don't have a choice.  You'd better go, or the bus will leave without you.  I can't take you again.  I have to work for a couple of hours."

     "At least wait until I get home, so I can say goodbye!"  Susan dragged herself away from the dog and out the door.  She trudged toward the bus corner, only to find the bus pulling away from her stop.  Her heart sank, and a tear escaped.

There is some description here but not as much as in the last example.  However, most readers are likely to care about this last one more because A. there are several things at stake and B. Susan actually cares about something or someone.

Conclusion: 

If the main character has a heart, we feel it and care, especially if we can see something at stake and yearn to see what comes next.  Go back.  Look at what you're writing now, whether it be a short story, a poem, a non fiction piece, or a novel.  Reexamine what your character cares about.  Can the reader feel it?  Have other people read those critical first two to three pages and ask if they care about your character.  Because if these readers care, chances are others will as well.