Episode Five: Voice

And I feel like there's two different ways that we talk about voice.

There's like the writer's voice, your writer's voice, and then also creating different character voices.

And, you know, if you have like a really, you know, if you're writing in the first person or you just have like a character with a unique sounding voice, how different ways to like things to think about in different ways that we approach that.

And this was sort of inspired by an editor's panel.

That I saw and it was an awesome conversation.

It was between three Canadian small, mid-sized indie press editors talking and somebody asked, like, what is voice? And it is kind of, I think, like a nebulous conversation.

A nebulous concept.

So we sat down and we were like, character voice and then your voice.

And I think maybe the more practical one is like, how do you approach creating a character's voice? And so I'll throw that over to you, Bri.

Is there any, like, how do you kind of come up with a character's voice and like what it sounds like?

Yeah, I think this is one of those things that I struggle with, especially in my historicals where the characters are very distinct.

So like in thrillers, They're kind of set in the United States.

You have people who are kind of growing up in the same area, time zone, time zone era.

Even when you have kind of a 10 year gap between events happening, they're still going to kind of have very they're not going to be as distinct where I will say this was kind of one of the bigger notes that I got back for the my boxcar librarian which is my third historical it's set in montana and so i had a character who was from rural texas and i had a wealthy missoulian and i had a um the coal miners daughter and they all kind of sounded the same in the first draft and i think that stands out more because they had such disparate backgrounds they would have had such different education levels and even though their dialogue sounded differently and they had they i was able to write their dialogue differently the characters themselves on the page like their internal their interiority on the page was too similar and so I had to go about really making sure to differentiate them.

And I think to do that, you can do things like if you have a writer character, what kind of things do they notice around them? They're going to think in a different way than someone who is a more of a jock character or more physical thinking.

And so they're going to root their observations in different things.

And so you can start building on little things like that.

In this Casablanca project, I have a translator as one of the main characters, and she is constantly thinking about words.

and language and as she's talking and I'm able to pull in kind of all of these different cool idioms from different languages and really build that into her interiority.

And so there's a really strong sense that she is a translator.

And then the another character is this 19 year old 20 year old bookseller and she's very romantic and she romanticizes everything and she loves reading adventure books and romantic adventure books and And she views the world that way.

And so she's at war, but all of it, I'm making all of it very surface level to her.

Everything is very exciting and everything's very, you know, adventurous like these novels.

And she was viewing everything through rose colored glasses.

And so again, I'm just really trying in this particular book to address some of those concerns that were in my earlier book as a way to like push myself craft wise.