How to Create a Strong Character Voice | Writing Tips

hey everyone it's shaylen and i'm here today with another video some of you might remember when about a year ago I made a video on voice and then I private it the video and I have been confusing people with that decision to private my video on voice everson I decided to private that video because there were just a few details that I didn't really agree with anymore and if I have learned one thing it's that people don't read pinned comments and there were also just a lot more things I wanted to talk about voice is like my favorite story element and I felt like there were a lot of things I didn't touch on in the video that I wanted to touch on let's talk about crafting a strong character for now voice isn't just your writing style but rather the combination of your writing style and the characters personality so you kind of have your natural writing style but every character you write is going to be different it's going to influence that voice in a different way now this applies to all point of views it's not just 1st person but third person as well second person even third person omniscient if you're creating an omniscient point of view where the narrator itself has a persona or if you're omniscient narrator gets a little voice here as it sneaks into people's heads in my original video I said that a reader would not be distracted if the level of articulation and intelligence and poetry was higher than would be likely for the character and I want to revise that and say it depends quite likely that if you're writing a character who isn't a writer and you yourself or a writer that you are going to have a more articulate way with words probably a more artful way with words then your character and in many instances this is totally fine and the reader will totally suspend their disbelief there are so many instances where the reader isn't gonna notice the fact that the character's voice might be much more artful than the character would be capable of when we think it's not just words you know we think with multiple senses and as a result translating that to just words I think can be allowed some embellishment in the words that are used in order to create the effect of thought because thought is more complex than just written words so now you have to basically have thought that turns into a word that turns back into thought and in order to do that the written word needs to be a bit more complex than just the words that you would use to think in your actual thought process because you're not just thinking in words however there will be cases where it is distracting and it really depends on the character a really great example of this is room by Emma Donoghue I actually haven't read the whole book but I've read parts of the book that book is told from the point of view of a five-year-old and it would be really disingenuous to just write that kind of in your normal style she really got into the voice of a five year old telling the story in first person presents from a five roles point of view is the point of view probably still a little more to Killip in an actual 5 world yeah but she really had to modify her voice to fit the intelligence and maturity level of her narrator so it's going to depend there are cases where you can get away with the artfulness of your voice not distracting from the realism of who this character is and there are cases where it will distract it's kind of something you have to decide for yourself based on the character in the situation the next tip I want to mention is actually a don't it's a question that I see raised quite a lot especially in the comments section on my pro series where I talk about line editing your prose and people ask me questions like is it okay to include things like weasel words which are you know redundant words if it enhances the voice and my answer would be in most cases no voice is found in your strong words not your weak words so if you're relying on what is really bad writing you know adding redundant words having weak sentence structure in order to create voice you're creating voice the wrong way there are so many other ways of creating voice and manipulating voice in order to see what the character voice enos is in the strong words you choose not the weak words you choose so instead of adding weak words which makes your writing weaker in order to create voice think about choosing better strong words there might be a case or two where you want to use a weak word for voice enos but it shouldn't be the general way you create voice like if you decide I'm gonna create voice by using a ton of filters weasel words and whatever other things that are kind of just weakening the prose that's kind of the weakest way to create voice because it's gonna make the reading experience less enjoyable it's going to make the prose she and difficult to read and it's not gonna make a voice that's lively it's gonna make a voice that's quite mushy and you want your voice to live in the story with the character's personality not drag it down so what are some ways to enhance voice in a stronger way so the first thing is what I talked about in the original video and it is patterning as with almost any element of writing plot character setting pretty much everything voice comes down to basically two choices what you say and how you say patterning is essentially that it is a pattern that you inject into your narrative it doesn't have to be omnipresent but it's kind of just that thing that is um it's a current you can think of it as an undercurrent that appears throughout your story there are two kinds of patterns that you might see there are content patterns and linguistic patterns so first I'm going to talk about content patterns so content patterns are the what you say this is going to include everything from the general content you're talking about but also how you talk about event it extends beyond just how you use poetic devices but I think that's the clearest way to articulate it I would look at my character and I would think about what's important to them and I would use that to inform my similes and other poetic devices if my character was a musician I might use a lot of music related terminology and analogy or if my character was a mathematician I might refer to math a lot once I had a character with a violence pattern she was a lot like a lot of the analogies were just really violent and shocking because that's who she was as a character now obviously if you were in a novel and you were writing a book about a sailor it's going to be kind of ridiculous if every single simile is related to nautical themed things this isn't something you have to go overboard with it's just a technique you can implement at times but there are also ways that you can stay close to your pattern without being exactly in it let's say I had a bird pattern and there were a lot of birds and it got to a point where there were way too many so I really had to switch up some of my poetic devices but I still wanted to stay in the theme I would kind of look at Birds and I would map out words I kind of think of it as taking a step horizontally so you're not like way off the chart you're just one step over so we could go more specific okay so we birds and then more specific that would be like types of birds and then you get into very specific things related to birds feathers talons nests probably more specific than this I just don't have enough bird knowledge to really embellish this right now or we could go farther the other way so what else would be related to a bird like a bat is related to a bird but it's you know getting farther from bird the air birds flying ok flying plane now we're into planes maybe we're gonna get into like planets and stuff we've moved away from birds but we haven't just gone anywhere off than that I think this is a really good technique for a short story when you're really trying to keep cohesion in language this isn't probably going to affect the entire diction of an entire novel because it's hard to say that contained within a novel it's just a good technique for pattern to keep in mind and in general you want to keep things tailored to your characters personality say you have this really great simile you want to use and it's like about a flower but then you realize your protagonist is like this really rugged badass assassin maybe who probably couldn't name a type of flower to save his life maybe you want to save that one and use something more appropriate to what the character would actually be thinking so the other type of pattern you can use is a linguistic pattern and this is the how you say it this could include things like slang use humor what kind and how much sarcasm formality or the level and type of poetic devices you use similarly this is also going to be found in sentence structure and how the sentences are punctuated maybe you have a lot of short sentences maybe you sometimes use fragments don't overuse them maybe your character uses a lot of parenthesis maybe your character often slips into second person speaks directly to the audience these are going to be linguistic patterns that we can see throughout another thing effects voice is tone so tone is the stories of you towards itself you know we have the story we have objectively what is happening then we have the tone that's cast over it by the narrator now if you have a really distant narrator this could be different from how the characters are feeling say you've really serious characters but you actually have a humorous tone because the narrator is kind of laughing at the seriousness of the characters but if it's in first person then it's going to be the narrator's attitude towards their own story how do they feel about their own story and this can also reflect in the narrator's feeling towards the reader now this gets into the framing of the story which can also really really affect the voice and I think is a really important thing to consider the framing story is basically the logical setup of your point of view how is the story being told from what point what is the direction of the story the first question here is who is telling the story is it a character in the story is it a narrator how close is the narrator to the character when and where is the story being told from if you are writing a past tense story in first person where is your character as a point they're telling the story are they 20 years down the line five minutes after the end how much time has elapsed since the end of the story and the telling of the story and then similarly to that why are they telling stories why has the character decided to tell this story at this point in time my character is telling the story from a point thirty years after the end of the story why are they telling it now why not tell it 10 years ago why not tell it right after it happened does your character know they have an audience who do you think the audience is how do they feel about the audience how is the story being told is it just being thought so the character is just thinking the story to themselves as it's happening or rethinking it later is the story being spoken verbally to who I mean written down if so in a private diary or in a letter to someone else another thing to consider and this goes a little back to the idea of linguistic patterning is your characters habits a really good way to get a sense of habits is to pay attention to people's actual speaking habits again this is quite relevant especially for first-person but you can also incorporate it into a third-person narrative if it's a really close third person I know for example I go on a lot of tangents I know kind of what my speaking habits are I know my friend speaking habits sometimes you can incorporate speaking type habits maybe not exactly maybe you know a little cleaner into your narrative so the final thing to consider is your characters reliability now I do want to mention if you were writing in first person your character is inherently unreliable all first-person narrators are unreliable close third-person narrators also probably unreliable the more distant you get the more reliable you get characters all have biases the closer your point of view the more subjective it is even if your character is a good natured trustworthy person they still have biases probably somewhat geared towards themselves and that will affect their storytelling but it's good to consider how reliable your character and in what ways what are they withholding what are they honest about and how do they feel about the fact they're telling your story are they telling the story because they need to get it off their chest because they want to confide in you the reader because they just want to retell it to themselves this will also be affected by the framing if the character knows they have an audience they will probably tell their story in a different way than if they don't think they have an audience if they think they don't have an audience it's going to be very unfiltered however if they are telling to an audience if they're there if they're aware of their audience a sense of confession so reliability isn't just determined by who the character is as a person but to a great extent how stories frame and as a result it can really really affect voice because it's going to affect their tone what they choose to tell how they choose to tell it so that's everything I wanted to say on voice thank you guys so much for watching if you have any questions you can always send me an ask on tumblr and I'll see you in another video [Music] [Music]

Channel: ShaelinWrites

Views: 34,697

Rating: 4.9722991 out of 5

Keywords: writer, writing, author, novelist, creative writing, writetube, writetuber, writing advice, how to write a book, how to write a novel, writing vlog, creative writing degree, books, nanowrimo, voice, how to create voice, how to create character voice, how to write character voice, how to write voice, tips for writing voice, character development, prose, tone, how to create tone, writing tips

Id: nKe4kYDD_ZU

Length: 12min 12sec (732 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 17 2018