1_million_words | Tuesday Tips: Narrative Voice

Tuesday Tips: Just like Torrid Tuesdays except… not sexy.

Lol. Not a very effective branding statement, but facts are facts. And, sigh, sorry.... I really am a day late posting this based on the global nature of our comm. I will strive to get my act together next week. Still, I wanted to share this, so.....

Tonight's link, as always, comes from goneahead who is kind enough to provide some really awesome resources for us. The one I picked from the bunch for tonight: Tips for understanding your narrative voice and using it well.

Narrative voice is about the tone of your writing - the style in which you write, and the way your characters speak. It varies not only from writer to writer, but from story to story. Some examples of writers with super-glue strength narrative voices: Shakespeare, Hemingway, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and E.A. Poe. You know their stories in part by their style, their way with words. Their voice.

Of course, with fan fiction we hope that the characters we're writing sound not like us or like our original characters, but like 'themselves.' I'd say that's probably the first goal we have when we're choosing the specific words we'll use in a story. That's narrative voice, too.

And what I've noticed in my (few) years of reading fan fiction is that it's not only about capturing the character in the act of speaking- sometimes it's also about writing the non-dialogue portions of the story in the appropriate style and tone, in a way that echoes the voice of a particular character or a franchise; almost as if the non-dialogue portion of the story is us reading the characters' minds. That's the trick I'm trying (with oh so mixed results) to work on these days.

To take it from the abstract to the specific, here's a line from my favorite thing all week, the story kaige68 wrote for Torrid Tuesdays. The story is, I'd say, mostly in Danny's POV without knocking us over the head with that fact. The line I'm holding up high is….

The truth was that Danny was absolutely willing. Absolutely. Willing. It just occurred to him to wonder how the particular scenario had come about.

Danny's not speaking. But yeah, we sure are hearing him. Awesome sauce!

Here's the link promised above, with much more (better put than in my rambling) about using your narrative voice.