Character & voice

[truepenny]

Justine has a lovely post (I mistyped "lively," which is also apropos) on characterization. Mostly I want to say, What she said! particularly with regards to the part about no two writers being the same. If you're starting, try everything. If it doesn't work, you don't have to do it again.

I once bailed on a characterization workshop deliasherman was doing at WisCon because the first exercise was something along the lines of "pretend to be your character and let the person sitting next to you interview you." Seriously, I got up and fled the room as if Delia had said, "We're about to release the mutant zombie polar bears, and oh by the way they haven't been fed since noon on Tuesday." With the racing heart and the panic.

That technique obviously does not work for me--at least in part due to long-standing Fourth Wall Issues, as in, Please do not fuck with the fourth wall. I need it. and in part due to equally long-standing First Day Of Class Icebreaker Issues--but that doesn't mean it's a bad technique, any more than my complete and utter FAIL in the face of it means I'm a bad writer.

But I also thought I might chime in on the question about voice:

I was wondering whether there is anything in particular you do when developing the voice of your character (ie. the way they speak)? Is there anything you do to try and keep this as consistent as possible throughout the story?

Because that is a salient feature of my work, and it is something I work hard on (see for evidence this post about the evolution of Mildmay's voice). And it's also a question that's damnably hard to answer. Because I do not, in general, "hear" my characters in my head, but at the same time, I do.

Yes, clear as mud, Mole, thanks.

Let's try that again. My characters do not talk to me. (Possibly as part of those Fourth Wall Issues, I am highly suspicious of and actually kind of squicked by any rubric for talking about writing that either believes or pretends to believe that the characters have independent existences and/or autonomy. Unless you follow all the way to the logical conclusion à la The Dark Half or "Secret Window, Secret Garden," in which case you have a whole new crop of problems, and I only hope you survive them.) I do sometimes get a line of prose in my head that seems to have floated up full-formed from the underconscious, like the answers in a Magic-8 Ball, and those can often be attributed to a specific voice. But that's not the same thing, either. (Although even I succumb to the short hand of saying things like, "Booth gave me an opening sentence today.") So I don't hear them in the way I hear actual voices.

But at the same time, I do have to hear them. A lot of how prose works for me is rhythm. Each character's voice has (or should have, anyway) a distinctive rhythm; I struggled a lot with Mehitabel in The Mirador and Kay in Corambis, trying to find their rhythms. A sentence should sound different, depending on which character says it, even if you don't have the dramatic differences imposed by a class-based dialect like Mildmay's. There's also differences in what information a character will choose to convey, what aspects of a situation he or she notices. For instance:

It snowed last night, rather a lot, and in a bit I'm going to have to go out and shovel. If I were writing about it in Felix's voice, I might remark on how strange it makes the topography of the neighborhood, but mostly I'd be bitching about how much work it is, and how cold and wet, and why don't we make enough money to hire someone to do it? (Also, notice that sentence isn't in Felix's voice, because Felix wouldn't use the word "bitch".) If I were writing about it in Mildmay's voice, I'd definitely talk about how weird it makes everything look, but I'd also tell you about a story I heard once about a guy who got lost in a blizzard and was rescued by a polar bear who was really an explorer under an enchantment and how they got the enchantment broken. I probably wouldn't mention the work part of it at all, unless I'm noticing that Felix forgot to say thank you. Again. And if I'm writing in Booth's voice, I describe the harsh sound the shovel makes against the sidewalk and count with painful, meticulous honesty, how many times I fall into the snow. (In my own voice? I bitch about how out of shape I am and notice the paths the feralistas have made in the snow.)

So that's how it works for me. It's part word choice and part rhythm (Mildmay's sentences are shorter and choppier than Felix's or Booth's, and while Felix is fond of rhetoric, his sentences are never as convoluted and Victorian as Booth's are) and part which details you emphasize. The important thing, I think, is that it has to matter whose eyes we're seeing through: the reasons that it matters are where you'll find the voice.

Comments

[mithriltabby]

My favorite characters in role-playing games are the ones who develop enough that they surprise me; I don’t see them as having independent existence, but they are effectively a different process I can run on my own personal wetware. They don’t run unless I explicitly switch into their mindset, but when I do, they sometimes make different use of my cognitive resources and have insights and reactions that I wouldn’t.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Dude, I clicked over here to comment and thought, "wait, what? I've commented already?"

No, I haven't. But I applaud your taste in icons. ^_^

Edited to say that I agree, btw. Not all game characters come together in that fashion for me, but the ones that do feel rather like that.

[skull-bearer.livejournal.com]

I'm one of those people who chats to their characters on a daily basis, so when the teacher gave us the assignment of coming in dressed up as one of our characters, this wasn't the main problem. The problem was that I currently had two characters, an Auschwitz inmate, and an SS guard. How the hell was I going to pull that off? The teacher was not happy.

[themis.livejournal.com]

I actually get physically queasy when people talk about their characters as if they are independent and sentient beings. So I guess that it's lucky those conversations usually take place online.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'll use my LARPing icon instead of my general gaming one so my comments won't blur together with slothman's. :-)

the first exercise was something along the lines of "pretend to be your character and let the person sitting next to you interview you." Seriously, I got up and fled the room as if Delia had said, "We're about to release the mutant zombie polar bears, and oh by the way they haven't been fed since noon on Tuesday."

The problem I always have with this idea is, why in the name of all that's holy is my character sitting there being interviewed? Somebody once wanted to do a project on live-action gaming that involved some of the players coming and talking to people "in character," and I ran screaming from that one, too. Not because playing the character was a frightening idea, but because I simply cannot divorce my characters, be they from games or fiction, from their narrative context. The few times I've managed it, for promotional interviews, I've had to work out my own personal justification for why that conversation is happening to begin with -- and that was all done as text, not performance. I don't know if I could play any of my fiction characters live. Not without other people playing the rest of the story's cast, and then I'd be flipping out because THEY'RE DOIN IT RONG.

But -- and here's the thing I need to learn to port over -- I know that I've done a much better job distinguishing my character voices in games than in fiction. Ree was vulgar, she swore a lot, she knew what the fancy words meant but didn't see any reason to use them most of the time. Fionnuala would never let a bad word pass her lips, and she dealt with her congenital inability to tell the truth by speaking as if this were the best of all possible worlds. Sess used all the words Ree didn't and used them in vast, run-on quantities (which turns out to be remarkably hard to do on demand).

One of these days I'll adapt that performative knack into my fiction. Then I'll really be in business.

[hominysnark.livejournal.com]

"feralistas"

I am totally stealing this word.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Given my Fourth Wall Issues, I do not RPG, neither do I LARP. But I'm fascinated by them. So thank you!

And, yes, what you describe doing with your gaming characters sounds very much like the way I develop first person narrators.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh please do!

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

My characters talk to me, particularly if I ignore them for too long. But I am always aware that it is some imaginative portion of my brain providing the commentary. I have held imaginary conversations with (real) people in my brain for so very long a time that it just seems obvious and natural to do it with fictional characters as well. I'm providing both sides of the conversation in both cases and I know it. One of my lovers once told me I had the most iron grip on reality he had ever seen. He did not mean this as a compliment but I took it as one. Yeah, that realtionship ended badly. REALLY badly.

MKK

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

You're welcome.

Incidentally, I think the reason for the split in how I work with characters lies in the scope of things that are under my control: in a game, the only thing I'm in charge of is my character, and to a much lesser extent my (necessarily mutable) ideas of where I want her to go, development-wise. In a novel, I have to be thinking about the world and the plot and every other character in the story, so I can't devote the same amount of intensive effort to living in that single headspace.

It may also have to do with the physical performance, though. One of the things I love about LARPing is the aspect of embodiment; my character is not just words and actions but body language, gesture, clothing, posture, vocal pitch, and so on. I end up developing them from multiple angles at once.

But I'm not sure how to make use of that, other than to try and pretend to be my fiction characters in the privacy of my own home, and that just feels weird.

[mithriltabby]

Mine don’t have a problem with being run in the real world, but I’m pretty comfortable with the notion that I’m an illusion, and they pick that up easily enough from me, along with the rest of the context of everything going on around me. (Though the character who’s the son of a wildcat-phouka gets really amused at being surrounded by large quantities of iron without feeling like he’s stumbled into someone’s collection of decaying polecats.)

[charleeg.livejournal.com]

The well-developed voices of your characters is what made reading the Melusine etc. books so enjoyable for me. I 'heard' Mildmay as a gravelly baritone and Felix as a slightly nasal Uppah Class Brit. Once I began to hear them, I always knew who was speaking and it...fit. I don't mean just that aspect of the voice, but... oh damn. I'm not expressing myself entirely well, sorry. Anyway, *what you said* - really worked for me and I can't wait to read more.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I write a lot of scenes that end up either not in the book or being condensed into a line of exposition (there's an early draft of Mélusine in which Mildmay goes with Cardenio when Cardenio gets his ears pierced), and I think that one of the functions those "unnecessary" scenes fill is giving me space to play and figure out who these people are.

I also tend to plot by the gumbo method: throw everything in and let it cook down. Then, you know, you fish out the bay leaf before you call it soup. So I'm not trying to figure out everything at once in the first draft. But I fully admit that this is a HIGHLY FRUSTRATING way to write a book.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Felix isn't British, but he does sound like Jeremy Brett. You're spot on about Mildmay, though.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It didn't help that for the project in question, the game she was recruiting participants from was one about faeries who have to hide their existence from the mundane world lest disbelief harm or even kill them outright. (Changeling: The Dreaming.) So trying to play those characters in a context that would more or less involve them saying, "Hi! I'm a faerie!" was particularly brain-wrenching. But even without that, it would have been like one of those horribly awkward cocktail parties where you've got nothing in common with the other people and don't really want to be talking to them. I hate those things in real life; no way was I going to sign up for one in my spare time. :-)

[clhollandwriter]

I do the thing that makes everyone squick, and say things like a character is being difficult or being particularly obliging, but don't mean that I think they're real people. It's like you said, that the phrasing is a kind of shorthand, and what I really mean is that I can or can't get into the correct headspace to write them at that particular moment.

My personal opinion is that if a character "writes themselves" it means that your subconscious is doing its job, but that doesn't mean the character is right. Laurel K Hamilton said in an interview once that she let Anita Blake write herself, and look how that turned out.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

There really is a reason the conscious self is running the ship. Really.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

That's more or less what I'm doing with my current revision project -- going back and inventing extra scenes, most of them taking place before the story ever starts, to get a better handle on the characters. But I'm prone to RSI, so I generally don't type those things out; I only imagine them in my head. Which means I don't get down to the level of sentences and dialogue, for the most part. It develops character just fine, but not voice.

It's all the more frustrating because I know one of the major problems I need to solve with this revision is the beginning, and one of the flaws of the beginning is the lack of a distinctive voice. But I haven't yet been able to make it pull together.

[charleeg.livejournal.com]

Jeremy Brett - perfect! Knew he wasn't a Brit - just sounded like one in my head. It's the best voice for dagger-edged snark. ;-)

[callunav.livejournal.com]

At times, I have written whole scenes, or several whole scenes, with the explicit intention that they will not in any way be used in the story - things that happened before the story ever started, for instance, or would only have happened if he had gotten really drunk on a space station where she just happened to be staying and he knew where her room was - just to hear the characters better and get a clearer, deeper sense of what they're like and how they respond to things, because until I write it I usually don't know (although I can often be led into speculating, which is always a mistake on my part).

I was not aware of your Fourth Wall Terrors. Hunh. But anyhow, I resonate to the utility of "unused" scenes. And your speculation about the snow-shoveling narratives cracked me up because I instantly recognized that it was right.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I thought I was the only person in the world squicked by long interviews between writers and characters (especially when there is much mutual admiration going on.)

[clhollandwriter]

I hear both Felix and Mildmay as Brits, but that's because I have no experience of the kind of accent pov that you're writing from. They come across just fine that way too. :D

[clhollandwriter]

I've tried LARPing, plus both "tabletop" and online RPing, and they're definitely an interesting experience. Online has less issue with the Fourth Wall because it's a lot like being in an interactive (and extremely frustrating) book, whereas the other two can be extremely uncomfortable until (unless?) you work out how to separate your "in character" brain from your "out of character" brain.

One of the things I found about LARP was that I eventually learned not to see things. In the system I played in, people who were OOC put their hands in the air to show they weren't to be interacted with and the games masters wore yellow tabards. After a little while it was possible to simply tune them out. I might register they were there, but my character simply didn't see them. It was very odd.

[heathwitch.livejournal.com]

"We're about to release the mutant zombie polar bears, and oh by the way they haven't been fed since noon on Tuesday."

Poor Polar Bears. Here, have a cookie. *pets polar bears*

Seriously though -- this was very interesting to read, and it helped me understand voice a bit better, so thank you. And if it helps, I found that Mildmay and Felix's boices are (in particular) very distinctive. By the time I was half-way through Mélusine, I could hear them both very strongly in my mind. Even now, when something startles or surprises me, I can hear Mildmay very clearly -- so clearly that I sometimes repeat his "Well, fuck me sideways..." or even talk back... ;) I'll leave you to decide which response gets me the weird looks.