VOICE
Introduce a memorable character with a unique world view and voice and attitude. Decide: What do you want to say? What
conversation are you having with your reader? With the world? What matters to you? What is your takeaway? Infuse your writing with part attitude and a dash of humor. Make your character’s voice one a reader
wants to lock in to over the next 200 pages. It’s not a big ask. Allow yourself to dance and play with your words and tone and mood just so and watch it happen.
WORLDVIEW
What does your character love, desire, believe, think and feels about her world? How does she react or take charge of or present then encountering situations within her scope of interests? When you craft voice, it’s essential that you also consider what happens in the world around her and how her belief systems work, and how she will behave when confronting situations within your novel. In Saint Training by Elizabeth Fixmer, her main character, Mary Claire grappled with her
mother’s beliefs, the issues that surrounded her: feminism, war, changes within the Catholic church, conscientious objectors, poverty, disability, and presidency. We get a much broader and in-depth view of what she believed and how she felt and interacted through worldview. She was a character who cared deeply about her parents and longed for her mother to be happy and fulfilled, but also wanted the best for all her siblings (and herself). She wasn’t going to sit on the sidelines, she took charge, by wanting to position herself to take over the job of Mother Superior (and actually, secretly wanting to be a Saint). She not only
moved through the plot, she took time to share her inner feelings and thoughts about what was going on around her.
In Saint Training by Elizabeth Fixmer, you find her main character, Mary Claire, writing an essay on religious vocations as well as letters to the Mother Superior. Consider how much this works into her novel Claire’s views of the world around her:
Priests got to say Mass, perform all the sacraments, touch the host...and they could become pope. The closest nuns could get to the altar was to clean the sacristy and wash and iron the priest’s vestments. They could never become cardinals or bishops or the pope.
Mary Claire reached for her last failed effort, which lay crumpled at the top of the waste basket. She smoothed it out and re-read it.
What does a vocation as a sister mean to me? Everything! Sisters are women who have devoted their lives to serving God through the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedi-ence. Sisters devote their lives to prayer and doing God’s work.
You get that tension here as Fixmer shares Mary Claire’s frustrations with completing the contest requirements while simultaneously disclosing a lot about the church structures and a hint to her views about them. The use of letters and essays, marks this as epistolary novel, but the devices serve to communicate worldview and improve interiority.
Do a quick check:
Are you fully utilizing the world your character lives in to better define her?
Are you making issues that exist matter and also work in as tension within your novel?
Are you making your reader aware of the many complexities of your main charac-ter’s life and world?
If so, great. Keep going.
If not, go back and weave this in. It will add that needed emotional depth to your story.
WORLDVIEW AS SIMILE
In the Newbery Medal novel Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins, an
exceptional voice that tipped scientific greeted readers:
Debbie and Chrisanne and their neighbor Tesey lay prostate on their chaise lounges…. Every half hour or so they turned ninety degrees, like chickens roasting on invisible rotisseries. They also adjusted their orientation to the sun as it moved across the sky to allow its ultraviolet rays to be inflicted most directly and effectively.
There’s a flavoring here that feeds in freshness. We see her unique worldview through her simile and relating of scientific views. This comes to the reader throughout the novel and stood out as different, in a good way.
Worldview:
Shapes character voice with culturally specific expressions: Nissa Bergen in the novel The Year of the Sawdust Man says, “Who’s going to give an owl’s hoot?”
Inspires individualized metaphors: Lyza of The Keening describes the sea with admiration, having grown up on the water. Kyna of Water Steps has a crippling fear of it after nearly drowning as a preschooler.
Establishes unique conflicts: A kid who lost his family in a tenement fire in NY is going to see the challenge of facing off with fence-
cutters entirely differently than a kid who spent most of his life on a farm.
As you create characters immerse yourself in their worldview and you’ll craft complex and compelling characters who seem real enough to walk off the page.
— • — • —
7
WORLD VIEW
How does your character think or feel about the world around her? How does her past inform her present reality and belief-systems? The character’s dialogue, behaviors, syntax, voice—everything will flow from key interests of your character. If a scientist or chemist, she will speak in those terms, much like you saw in the Newbery Novel Criss Cross. Friends would be her nucleus. The friends are the elements, those friends that have the same type of identical chemical properties. You all smash volleyball, dislike false friends, are not too into fashion but can rally behind any important green project others can think up—if all your friends are also in for the adventure.
DISTINCT VOICE
Voice is shared on its own in the final section of this book, so I don’t want to dwell on it here, but voice is character. So how your characters dialogue, the syntax of that sharing, the fragmenting, and this mash-up with internal thoughts. It’s about the inflections and content. Make certain you really separate your characters and make them all feel fresh and well-rounded.
DISCLOSING, WITHHOLDING
Think back to the good old days of Mark Twain’s America when dialect shared so much. While you are not doing this exactly, you are being true to the way an individual speaks if you want them to stand out as a unique and fresh individual character in your fiction project. Consider thinking about this and all its complications.
Think about not telling things but letting the quite speak. Share enough in order for the reader to complete the thought for himself. ‘Go for enough’ but also ‘withhold,’ in order to entice our reader’s curiosity . No information dumps allowed.
— • PACE YOUR PAGE PRO TIP • —
WORLDVIEW
In short, world view represents the interior possibilities and complications shown in a main cahracter that brinds his or her relationships and experiences and belief systems—even interests—to your story. You can expand and share so much more and add unbelievable depth by presenting worldview. Since you may gain so much from incorporating a character’s world view, Pace Your Plot
dedicates a whole chapter to this later on. For now, know that worldview will #Boom your writing.
VOICE
Voice marks the collective of attitude, syntax, diction, beliefs brought together to give the overall identifying flavor to your writing. It may incorporate mood, tone, point of view and world view. It is that author speak that allows you to identify a writer by the way he or she structures sentences and punches up text with fragments or short sentences. It’s all these things. So, while I want you to think on this now, please know you will see more about this in a later chapter dedicated to Voice.
If you move beyond young adult titles to explore the classics, we might take a peek at the opening of Grendel by John Gardener. Read by many British Literature students, this novel offers a great way to explore how personality, tone, and point of view impact story. Let me explain, after a quick read:
The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant. I blink. I stare in horror. “Scat!” I hiss. “Go back to your cave, go back to your cowshed—whatever.” He cocks his head like and elderly, slow-witted king, considers the angles, decides to ignore me. I stamp. I hammer the ground with my fists. I hurl a skull-size stone at him. He will not budge. I shake my two hairy fists at the sky and I let out a howl so unspeakable that the water at my feet turns sudden ice and even I myself am left uneasy.
But the ram stays; the season is upon us. And so begins the twelfth years of my idiotic war.
The pain of it! The stupidity!
Like this example, you need to think about personality, depth, and attitude. Think about mood, tone, attitude and even Grendel’s worldview. What is your main character’s disposition?
This remains a favorite study in my AP Dual Credit Senior English classes. First, students are asked to write a personal narrative and give students specific pacing tools to include: Word pause, dialogue, active verbs, two to three short sentences, and two random words, which you select together. They write this four-to-five-page first-person narrative (I, me, my), and you run it through The Pacing Word Workout (see Part Three).
Then I ask students to shift attitude and character and rewrite the second version of this story as a brand-new character, completely unlike themselves, but they are asked to maintain the same story arc, but now in third person, using he/she, and proper names.
What happens so often (I’m tempted to say “always” here) is that students come back with a much stronger version of their narratives. They get out of their own way. They interject fun and creativity, and poof! their work improves. For this version, I ask that they add even more pacing tools: a list, a three (a tricolon), and description.
So, of course, you collaborate on these and host a writer’s workshop on this variation as we continue reading and discussing the novel Grendel. What happens then is most exciting and I encourage you to try this with your own work.
Students write a third draft, the final paper. For this version, I ask them to Grendelize their third-person narratives. They take Grendel’s mood, tone, and world view and write, once again, the
same story.
What do you think were our results?
More than any other prior draft, students came to realize and understand how point of view, attitude, tone, mood, voice impacted a piece of writing. You will see so many brilliant essays to read and share in class. It will top the charts for students and provide the ultimate challenge and reward. Students really benefited from launching an active investigation of their own writing.
First person narrative
First-person, active verb, dialogue required, and three random words: wicked, surface, and lofty must be used.
One student, Calvin, wrote a first draft that was quite passive (some twenty-plus to-be verbs, 11 eleven on the first page alone) before the
workshop. Then he applied the terms of our workshopping edits based on plot pacing:
Warm, crisp notes drifted up the creaky, old stairway of Cor Mariae retirement center and mixed with the damp, musty air. Each step down brought brighter sounds to my ears and hope to my heart. Excitement filled me to the brim as I glanced around at the other young boys, who already eagerly sang along to the warm-ups….
As soon as I got within eyesight, Mr. Ross, the musical director, caught me in his wicked glare. With no interruption to the practice, I slowly approached my seat and shrunk from the intensity of his stare. He conveyed his policy on tardiness without alerting the other boys of his intension.
Third-person narrative
Students shifted their narrative to someone other than themselves (and were encouraged to present a personality and tone far different than their original). There They keep all previous challenges and add in a few more: two short, two-to-three-word sentences; a couple three series (tricolon) that run general, general, more specific, and I ask (and encourage) you to read your work aloud and every time you hit an inactive verb, you act as though it’s all caps in exclamation, so say it with emphasis. “WAS.” This helped them realize the “telling” they still needed to get rid of and become far more aware of their passive language. Consider assigning a song as homework on this day and
asked students to consider what words stood out to them, the power of the refrain, etc., as you continue your conversation and push toward quality edits:
Once in eyesight, Mr. Ross, the music director, caught John in his wicked glare. With no interruption to the practice, he slowly
approached his seat and shrunk from the intensity of the director’s stare. This stare conveyed his policy on tardiness without alerting the other boys. John observed this man that would be in charge of so much of his life for a year. A scruffy gray beard concealed a face capable of showing proud, approving smiles or withering scowls of frustration. His body remained as stiff and rigid as a board…
So, you see more active verbs and improving sentence structure, but experience what happens when you take your study of the novel Grendel
even more. Now move to change mood, tone, setting, and your main character to one that is more specific and you know so much about: Gendel, himself.
Third-person, Grendelized
Students needed to be certain their short sentences stayed in place and they also added a ‘henning,’ a standard in Grendel’s voice. You will see that in this sample with the henning: “barrel-gulpers.”
Water continued to drip from my fur as I emerged from the firesnakes’s pool and crept down the path to the Scydlings’ mead hall. Each step brought the straining hymns of Hrothgar’s glory to my ears and reminded me of the ignorance of mankind. These earthly barrel-gulpers bragged of their lord’s greatness, testifying that he would lead them to more wonderful victories and greater hoardss of treasure. All of the men sang with joyful, belting voices as I observed them through the hall window. This room always filled me with a sense of curiosity, and I resolved to uncover the mystery behind the Shaper and the queen during that night.
As I continued to peer through the window, I caught my first glance at the Shaper since last summer’s war. This old man still possessed a stern countenance and appeared to have changed very little. His eyes gloomed a milky white from his blindness, but his sweet voice could convey most emotions better than any facial expression. The Shaper…
This, believe it or not, is the same story. You see the similarities, but the Grendelized version really presents that kick-up-the-heels-kind-
of letting go an author brings to the writing now when it truly reigns supreme. Pushing, like this, truly allows writers to let go and add depth and a distinct personality to their manuscript. So, think about your own work and voice now.
Transfer this to your own writing. When you think more about the whole novel, the issues, the culture, the setting, and what the main character will brush up against, you are able to do more. Yet you write tighter, better, wider than ever. There’s a more immediate fullness to this Grendelized version that was not a part of the early drafts.
A personal quirk or odd pastime seasons and adds personality to the page. Turn to page one of Dress Codes for Small Towns by Courtney Stevens and read:
I’m waffling on my tombstone inscription today. Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ?
R.I.P.; She found trouble. Or, Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ? IN LOVING MEMORY: Trouble found her.
Watch her change her play on this information only six paragraphs later and you know this approach will salt and pepper your narrative to promise a nice blend of quirky spice and spunk.
You should know general thoughts, more radical thoughts, and beliefs about everything you are writing about. Know where you stand. Where your character stands—and why. Delve into into the nonfiction that will help your fiction lift off the page. Enter that larger
conversation. Spill some dirt and trouble. Don’t hold back on your ideas that support your character’s ideas.
DO YOUR RESEARCH
If you write about an addict, be sure to stand in an addict’s shoes. Study up on this to the nines. Intensely. Be all knowing. Do not go into your story without absorbing your whole being the lifestyle and depth of this dreadful disease:
Know what addicts face.
Know what is at risk.
Know what percentage of drugs that are pure, where they come from, how they get laced and re-laced and what the percentages are.
Know, for example, that K2 synthetic marijuana found in stores may be laced with rat poison.
Know that a year or so ago, Heroin sent users to the hospital due to a deadly strand, dubbed “alligator tar” which turned skin green until died and flaked off like alligator skin.
Know that, so often, death followed.
Just like you saw in the student essay eamples, you will find that authors who do this add more depth to their work and more details to story. You have so much more you can do to add tension, suspense, surprise to your narrative. So, go even further:
Know your numbers.
Know how kids get introduced.
Khow many die every day— by the hour, by the second.
Know the cost of a Narcan (Nelaloxone) kit, some seven- dollar injection, could have saved them.
Know what you need to impact your readers.
Know that this, in a big way, will add reach and interest and improve your pacing.
PERSONAL CONNECTION
Personalize your connection author-to-reader. Think about the power of suggestion. The power a single line may have on your pacing. In Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith, one line rouses a reader’s curiosity and holds weight.
It was exactly noon.
Ten hours in to the end of the world. Nobody knew anything about it.
This is the same kind of line that you often hear discussed at conference and writer’s workshops as a great opening for —it’s a great hook. Readers react and later learn that when a vile drops, it releases a six-foot praying mantis that could not be destroyed. Talk about tension! The author harnesses our attention with these details and helps us connect the dots as he begs the question: What comes next?
Know what creeps you out, what terrifies you, what gives you the chills. Then stir up these same feelings in your manuscript. Become more aware. Do your research—even for a fictional story. M.T. Anderson once said during a Hamline University MFA program lecture that he knows his characters enough to write a whole book on each (yes, even secondary characters) before he begins to write.
Know what creeps you, terrifies you, or gives you the chills.
The impact of death itself looms large in the writing of the Newbery Honor, Printz Honor, and Coretta Scott King Award-winner,
Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds. Tone, mood, and personality in this project unfolds at a swift pace in free verse and tells the story of a
brother who grabs a gun out of his dead brother’s drawer and has some seven elevator floors to contemplate his next move: Will he revenge his brother’s death?
I’M ONLY WILLIAM
to my mother
and my brother, Shawn,
whenever he was trying to be funny.
Now
I’m wishing I would’ve Laughed more
at his dumb jokes
because the day before yesterday, Shawn was shot
<page turn and placement: word appears mid page> dead.”
— WORKSHOP IT! —