ysabetwordsmith | Authorial Voice vs. Character Voice

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

Authorial Voice vs. Character Voice

I was intrigued by this exploration of authorial voice vs. character voice. These are two different yet related aspects of writing.

Authorial voice is what characterizes a particular person's writing overall. Frex, mine tends to use rich description and wide vocabulary, unless I have a reason not to do that in a certain story. Other writers excel at different things -- some are known for writing stories heavy in dialog, for instance.

Character voice is what distinguishes an individual person in a story. A young character will have simpler speech and knowledge than an older character. Prejudices and expectations also color word choices. A character's interests or expertise will affect what they notice, and thus, what they talk about or describe and how they do that.

Between the two are regional clusters of varying sizes. If you look at all the stuff I write in my main fantasy setting of Hallelaine, or my dark fantasy setting of Penumbra, or

ellenmillion's shared world setting of Torn World, then you can see how each of those has an overall flavor. Penumbra, for instance, has very stark writing almost devoid of description -- a departure from my usual mode. Then if you look closer, characters from the same area sound somewhat alike. In Torn World, there's a certain worldview and vocabulary shared by the Northerners contrasted with that shared by the Southerners. So my Northerners sound more like each other than like the Southerners, and vice versa; but together they are Torn World folks who have things in common with each other, as contrasted with my characters from some other world.

Authorial range varies too. I have an exceptionally wide range when it comes to writing about different people and places, in different voices and tones. Some of my characters are almost nothing like each other or myself. There are writers with wider ranges -- such as Harlan Ellison -- but not a lot. Most people specialize more. Some writers also have a unique voice that, while it manifests differently in their diverse settings, can be recognized as theirs even beyond the usual authorial choice issues. An icon of this phenomenon is Joss Whedon. Compare what his characters say in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly vs. what Joss says in interviews. He has an incredibly strong vocal stamp whose underlying patterns manifest in wildly different details across his different settings.

What have you noticed about these things?

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm working on a series of stories set in the UK right now. I'm not British but I have a lot of people reading these stories who are. I find that I'm constantly on alert when I write dialog because I don't want the cadence and vocabulary to be incorrect for the dialect. It's tough but sometimes I'm also using it to my advantage to make the conversations which should be stilted and uncomfortable even more so because I as the writer am stilted and uncomfortable within them.

I'm a character- and dialog-oriented writer, absolutely. On one hand I am so to the point where I sometimes worry about providing enough plot, but on the other, I'm pleased at the consistent feedback that my character voices are strong and feel "right" to the reader.

It depends on what kind of plots you like to use. If you favor character-development plots, then dialog-heavy writing is terrific. For action plots, you need plenty of description in short sentences.

Probably my favorite kind of story is where an individual character and a distinctive setting interact to create a plot that couldn't happen anywhere else. Those are tricky because you need enough description for the character and setting to be realized in the reader's mind, balanced against enough action to make the story exciting.

In my recent Torn World writing, I've done a lot of heavy-duty character development. Some of that is done with internal musings and descriptions of body language or social interactions. But some of it runs through intense dialog -- there are long sections of "Cutting Time" that are basically arguments between two or more people. Original scene notes for some of that were talking heads, so I actually went in later as the story developed and added a bit more description to improve the grounding. Torn World is also rich in "slice of life" stories that help us lay down a really solid foundation of the setting and characters. However, I also have some pieces in mind for Fala's story arc that will be more action-oriented, kind of wilderness-adventure stories. I have a story about Eshra, "On the Rocks," that plays out her close relationship with snow-unicorns contrasted against her very chopping social skills with humans. There the material-world actions build up a sense of risk, and the internal aspects reveal how Eshra feels about what is happening. You get to see how her emotions influence her actions, and vice versa.

When I go to write a story, I think about what tools I'll need for this particular one. I have a sense of its structure and where the balance falls. Some are mainly about feelings or personal epiphanies. Some are about external challenges. A story can have a fast or slow or varied pacing cadence. Thinking about what kind of story I want to tell ("How does Fala go from being a clingy girl to an independent woman?" is a story of emotional progression) will give me clues about how to tell it ("The plot should consist of events that change Fala's awareness of her feelings and her shifting role in the world.") so that I can choose the right tools for the job.

That is really clever.

Sometimes I write things based on my mood at the time, like violent stuff when I'm angry. A character who falls afoul of some injustice that I happen to loathe will benefit from my real-world resentment of such foolishness.

Agreed. I'm writing a rather emotionally tangled and broken character right now and part of the reason is that it resonates with where I am in my own life right now.

Part of my issue is that since I'm not visually oriented, I struggle when I have to describe physical action. It's not that I can't, but it's much more effort than finding character voices and motivations and emotional process, so when the story needs action I have to make a more conscious point of putting it there. At that point I recruit people to choreograph the scene for me so I can actually see it as I write it. It seems to work, because people speak well of how clearly they can visualize the scenes as written - but I can't, after enough time has gone by for me to forget and I'm just re-reading.

Sometimes, when I want my character voices to be distinct I pick friends of mine and assign their voices to characters.

Otherwise I have a few basics... but it's really hard not to slip into 'generic dialog' mode where everything could have been said by anyone because it's all... generic.

Also hard not to do nothing but write dialog and dialog and dialog with no descriptions of anything or anything happening. Okay, that sentence was horrible. Anyway, that's especially annoying because I can clearly see what's happening in my mind's eye, and what everything looks like, but when I try to describe anything it comes out awkward.

Writing a Magical School serial with three main protagonists and ~15 frequently recurring characters, "character" voice is something my co-author and I juggle a lot. "I love this phrase, but Jaya wouldn't say that; it's more like Shahin;" voice is one way we differentiate the characters.

Author voice is fun. Sometimes I'll pick up an author with a particularly strong and imitable voice when I want to shift my own voice for a bit - Jim Butcher when I want to write stronger, gruffer male characters, Terry Pratchett when I want to be more tongue-in cheek, for instance.

When I was doing Live-action RP frequently, I would sometimes challenge myself by writing things in other character's voices to see how close I could get. And the only fanfic I ever did was trying to closely match Laurel K. Hamilton's Anita Blake voice.

...I pick friends of mine and assign their voices to characters...

I've done that. More than I want to admit. Friends, ex-boyfriends, enemies, someone's really distinct character in a game... especially with male voices, which are harder for me than female.

I've worked through some unresolved issues by letting my characters deal with the same drama and giving then time and opportunity to find a way to resolve the problems.

One of my signature things is that I like to inject humor into even the most serious works when I can, because life just works like that sometimes, and because humor is how I cope with the world myself.

Also, all my characters have to have at least one thing in common with me, or else they never gain any depth, for some reason. Even villains. Sometimes it's something fairly simple, though. For example, in my Lyria stories there is a... well, not really a villain. Just someone Lyria doesn't like, and the feeling is mutual. His name is Jarnion. His alignment is Lawful Good, and Lyria being a True Neutral dark sorceress, he doesn't trust her. What I have in common with him so far is just being out of shape. There might be something else more subtle, I don't know. Oh, and he's intelligent. I daresay most of my characters are intelligent.

One possibility.. if you can't visualize, you might try posing yourself, to feel the sort of movements you're looking for. In other words, while you've gotten others to choreograph in front of you, why not be one of the actors now and then, so you can understand (for example) a character's inner flow as they move through the action, and can then describe that for the reader?

I also suspect that as you learn the choreography, you'll get in better touch with your body and visualization skills.

Looking at this from a reader's point of view rather than a writer's, I would say every writer has a particular "voice" that is extremely hard to "disguise" or change, even if they change the overall tone of the series or book.

So I would say there are character voices, book/series voices, and then author voices and each is its own layer.

>>One of my signature things is that I like to inject humor into even the most serious works when I can, because life just works like that sometimes, and because humor is how I cope with the world myself.<<

I don't necessarily put humor into all my stories, but I do in many. The flavor varies a lot though. Darker stories tend to have dry or graveyard humor. There's a scene in "Confliction" that's both wacky and poignant, where the main character is talking sincerely and soothingly ... to a doorknob.

>> Also, all my characters have to have at least one thing in common with me, or else they never gain any depth, for some reason. Even villains.<<

Mine usually have something in common with me, for the connection. But that can be all kinds of different things, some quite obscure.

>>Oh, and he's intelligent. I daresay most of my characters are intelligent.<<

Now that I think of it, yeah, so are mine. I strongly favor smart characters, and plenty of mine are downright brilliant. Stupid is a villain trait for me. I do have one utterly, epically stupid character from the Whispering Sands. I also have a couple of favorable characters who are mentally slow but have other commendable traits, one in Waterjewel and then Ularki in Torn World. Mostly I can't abide stupid people, so I don't enjoy reading or writing about them under most circumstances.

I've done that on occasion.

*chuckle* But the funniest example was when I got a bee in my hair, and a bunch of my characters spontaneously started yelling advice, ranging from the ludicrous to the one I actually used (combing out the bee, which worked). Times like that are why I would never trade away my mental tentmates.

I have a tendency, when reading or writing fiction, to have a dark humor streak where it comes to villains getting what's coming to them. In one of the Neanderthal Parallax books by Robert J. Sawyer, one of the main female characters gets raped by a coworker. She doesn't know who it was, but somehow the Neanderthal scientist who's her friend found out. The law couldn't help in that situation, apparently, so he took matters into his own hands... by castrating the rapist and raping him. I literally fell off the bed, I was laughing so hard.

I have a Lyria Spellspinner story wherein the life of her daughter is threatened, and Lyria just completly "loses her shit" as the saying goes, and temporarily goes into such a violent rage that over 500 men die as a result, and four men are left wishing they could die. That, and a few other bits here and there have set up a pattern in that character of having anger issues. She loses her temper, does something horrible, and feels intensely remorseful later.

>>Sometimes, when I want my character voices to be distinct I pick friends of mine and assign their voices to characters.<<

That's a really clever idea! Thanks for sharing. I rarely need that sort of thing myself -- a majority of my characters emerge quite distinctive -- but I bet lots of folks will find it useful. I do sometimes pick a regional, class, or other dialect/register to color a character's speech.

>>Otherwise I have a few basics... but it's really hard not to slip into 'generic dialog' mode where everything could have been said by anyone because it's all... generic.<<

I find that I am quite conscious of word choice. I often know that what I'd say and what a character would say are different. But part of it is just all the internal translation I do, going between one world and another.

>>Also hard not to do nothing but write dialog and dialog and dialog with no descriptions of anything or anything happening. Okay, that sentence was horrible. Anyway, that's especially annoying because I can clearly see what's happening in my mind's eye, and what everything looks like, but when I try to describe anything it comes out awkward.<<

Have you tried the exercise where you watch scenes in a movie or play, and then describe the action? That can really help develop description skills, especially as those interact with dialog.

That's quite a handicap for a writer. It sounds like you've found a serviceable solution, though.

>>I have a tendency, when reading or writing fiction, to have a dark humor streak where it comes to villains getting what's coming to them.<<

Oh yes! I have such a taste for poetic justice. I love it when the villain fails, not just because of the hero's skill and persistence, but due to the natural consequences of internal flaws. One of my favorite TV shows was "The Pretender" -- partly because of Jarod's brilliant knack for hoisting each show's villain with their own petard.

Oh Gods, "The Pretender." I loved that show, but I barely remember it because I was so young. I need to get some DVDs of that show.

Oddly, my characters almost never talk to me, although sometimes they insist on a line I think is wildly out of place.

I dunno, I feel left out :-D

Different writers interact with their characters in different ways. That's okay.

/nods/ I know. :-) Still, seems like I'm missing out.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Authorial Voice vs. Character Voice

no subject

no subject

Well...

Yes...

Re: Yes...

Re: Well...

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re: Yes...

no subject

Re: Well...

no subject

Thoughts

Re: Yes...

Re: Thoughts

Thoughts

Re: Well...

Re: Thoughts

Re: Thoughts

Re: Yes...

Re: Yes...

Re: Yes...