Crafting a Strong Character Voice || Part 5Exercise 1 –Take the above photo. Describe it with
Crafting a Strong Character Voice || Part 5Exercise 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 – Exercise 1 – The sleek sand was cold. My naked toes left imprints behind, my signature, the crescent stamps of my seal in wax. But then the water rolled and the wave broke on the shore, crashing against my ankles and melting my seal away.The dark blue water glimmered with specks of gold, and when the waves swelled, the sun made the algae glow. The speckle of shorebirds road the undulations like a seesaw. Up and Down. Up and down.The sound of churning waves and rushing wind had that feeling of omnipresence, of surrounding me. I could close my eyes and pretend I was standing on a tiny isle of rocks with an endless ocean lapping in every direction, instead of with the hundred foot cliff looming behind me. But the whistles and calls of shorebirds reminded me I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t the only pair of feet walking the wet sand.My hair tossed about my shoulders, tangling with a film of ocean spray as my feet carried me to the glistening rocks. Seagulls, picking at a lump of seaweed, hopped away, clearly unamused with my approach. Exercise 2 – I hadn’t realized how close I was to the water until the wave broke on the shore and crashed against my ankles. The sting of cold stole the air from my lungs, my flesh prickling with goose bumps. I didn’t know what I had expected. I’d lived my life right on the apex of the cliff behind me, but never once had I put my naked feet in the water. Not willingly.I watched the webs of foam slide away with the water. The ocean wound up a second time for another wave, the swell of water blazing green with sunlit algae. I stooped to let my fingers graze the second rush of water. The sand glimmered like gold around my fingertips as the water stole the foundation out right from beneath my feet, as if to try and carry me away with it.I backed out of the water. The whistles and calls of shorebirds reminded me I wasn’t alone. I shielded my eyes and squinted against the intense rays of sun, studying pelicans gathered atop a cluster of rocks in the distance, wings spread and feathers drying. I studied the seagulls bobbing in the water, riding the undulations like a seesaw. Up and down. And fearless.Why couldn’t the birds be afraid like the rest of us were? Probably because they had wings. They had the freedom to take off into the sky, whereas we had to escape underground.It didn’t really matter in the end, did it? The monsters hiding in the deep never came up for them.Only for us. 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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