Crafting a Strong Character Voice || Part 6Exercise 1 –Take the above photo. Describe it with
Crafting a Strong Character Voice || Part 6Exercise 1 –Take the above photo. Describe it with your own style and your own literary flair. Bring the scene to life. Give it its own characterization. Capture a moment.Exercise 2 –Now, describe the scene from the eyes of one of your characters. Don’t be afraid to borrow those moments of gold you write in exercise 1, but make sure to stay absolutely true and honest to the voice of the character.Bonus –Describe the scene from the eyes of the protagonist.Goal –A big part of what makes a story stand out is character voice. Your own personal style changes as you do, and a character’s voice changes as the character does. When the two come together, there’s potential for literary magic, but bringing out and differentiating between different character voices takes lots of practice and even more reading.Write for yourself, but also take time to write with the intention of improving skills. There’s reading for pleasure, and then there’s reading like a writer. The same applies to writing: write for pleasure, then write to improve. Experiment in these exercises. Try things you haven’t tried before.Remember, the image is meant to generate ideas, so it’s intentionally vague. If you’re not used to writing about the subjects in the image, good. Write something you’ve never written before. Push yourself.Need some help? Check out the guide on character voice, or look at the Voice & Style Summer Camp exercises for additional tips!Share your pieces, however perfect or raw, with other KSWers by posting under the “ksw exercise” tag!Need an Example? Here’s a Poor One PLUS BONUS – Exercise 1 – The shadows turned to phantoms across the street as the sun eased toward the distant hills of the horizon—phantoms that were long and dark like tall figures with hoods pulled over their heads.It was cold without being cold. Bitter wind but warm asphalt beneath my feet, the pavement cracked and broken from tires and torched from sweltering summers. Craters and webs of cracks reminded me of the surface of the moon, broken and lifeless. There were no footprints here, only tire tracks. Big tires. Small tires. Questionable tires.I lifted my hands and shielded my eyes to watch the sun melt the horizon, blistering the blue of the sky to a pale shade of white fire. As the sun sank beyond the hills, creeping slower than a predator through grasslands, an army of phantoms stretched for me, shadows with faces covered by their hoods. Every time I blinked, they were closer. Exercise 2 – The rubber tread of my boots scuffed a two-lane street that hardly passed for a street. Broken with craters and rippled from truck and tractor wheels, the sun-bleached street looked closer to the surface of the moon—or at least the part on Google directions that said, “Turn off the paved road.”I faced west and squinted as the sun melted the horizon, burning into the distant hills like wax, blistering the blue of the sky to a pale shade of white fire. The wind tossed my brown hair over my shoulders, the air cool with a whisper of crispness, competing with the leftover heat of the day still wafting off the street beneath me.I closed my eyes, tipped my head back, and breathed it all in. I’d seen so many sunsets, but never two of the same. They were always different. Bonus – The wind broke in waves across the shore of my face, chasing the last of the day’s heat into the ground and tossing my dark hair across my chest. Behind me, the sun counted its last seconds on this side of the world. Dusk bloomed. Beautiful.The paint of the lane divider beneath my naked feat had become faint, less and less visible to the average eye as the day faded. There were no lights here. No homes or sanctuaries. Only endless fields and grids of two-lane asphalt passages stretching on into a brief infinity. There was nothing. No one.The shadows of the hills far behind me stretched toward my heels—shadows that were like phantoms. Tall, slender figures growing taller, dressed in black cloaks with hoods pulled over their faces. But I was no different than one of those hidden faces.Sunsets had different meanings for different peoples, after all. Remember, these are purely examples and not a set of rules to tell anyone the right way to write – there’s no such thing. Take the examples as only one way to approach the exercises. Then, make your own. -- source link
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