Hello, writers. I’m hoping to stay awake to chat tonight, but am not feeling very well and might nod off.
Today I read something on twitter that struck me as a good idea. A writer wrote that when she has a question about her writing, she writes it down before she goes to sleep and asks her subconscious to work it out. Sort of a formalized version of “sleeping on it.”
I want to try that. So I thought about what question to ask.
One question I have is about the voice in my work in progress. My main character is a street kid. A street kid on magical streets, of course, but it does mean that his life experiences are different from mine. So I’m trying to get the voice from sounding like me (which is pretty much inevitable in the first draft) to sounding like him (now that I’m on the third draft).
I’ve already picked out some good made-up-cusswords. I need to work on his vocabulary; right now he’s sometimes thinking in metaphors that are outside his experience, plus he doesn’t seem quite angry enough given all the stuff that I’ve made happen to him.
It’s probably going to take a lot of walking and listening and waiting for his voice to start talking to me. But writing it down and sleeping on it might help.
Sometimes it can help just to write down your protagonist’s thoughts, without any particular reference to the story. What is your character seeing and thinking? That can be a good starting place for discovering voice.
Speaking of which.
Tuesday night I was stopped at a stoplight when a man in a motorized wheelchair came zooming down the cross-street. Hitched behind his wheelchair was a child’s wagon, the kind with wooden stake sides. Standing at attention in the wagon, staring straight ahead, was a large spotted dog.
It was a very solemn and regal dog. It was not wagging its tail because its dignity did not allow for such frivolity. It was more or less in the position of a cow on a float in a dairy parade, except that the cows tend to be made of fiberglass or papier mache and this dog was made of dog.
Tonight’s challenge:
Write 100 words in that dog’s voice.
(In English, not in woof-woof.)
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