Crafting a Strong Character Voice || Part 2Exercise 1 –Take the above photo. Describe it with
Crafting a Strong Character Voice || Part 2Exercise 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 wind sounded like water in the trees, a gentle breeze that toyed with the sweltering humidity. My nose stung with the dander of the forest and the rust from the abandoned vehicles. A line of abandoned vehicles, strangely. An old sedan, an older truck, a bigger truck, and onward as far as I could see into the overgrowth of the forest.My shoes weren’t meant for trekking the woods, and when I took my first step forward, the worn sole snapped twigs and crunched leftover autumn mulch. Birds flashed out from a wheel well, feathers vanishing into the trees before I even realized I’d simply seen birds. I pressed a palm to my chest. My heart bounced off the cage of my ribs.Another step set off an insect from the hood of the car beside me. I darted away from the buzz of something mean, maybe a hornet or a yellow jacket. Maybe something even meaner. But that was when I realized, as the white noise of the trees settled, that mean guy wasn’t the only mean guy.When it came to things with stingers, it wasn’t the sound that got my blood going. It was the vibrations of my eardrums, that thin membrane, reverberating with the thrum of a thousand beating wings around a hive.My lips parted and I ducked my head, index finger pushing my glasses up the sweaty bridge of my nose. The sun caught the light of dozens of hovering bodies, darting between the trees, shooting between the abandoned cars, and I realized that the old truck’s passenger window wasn’t sealed all the way. A perfect place for a nest. Exercise 2 – Nature was annoying. Twigs and leftover autumn mulch crunched as I took a step—and then my foot went through a hole. I grunted. Danced my way free. Shook my black-on-black high-top Converse of dust.What was that? A rabbit hole? Could have been a snake hole for all I knew, and I wouldn’t have blamed the snake for taking shelter in this oppressive humidity.Leaves rustled overhead, a pathetic breeze that carried the dander of the ridiculously dense forest and rust from the abandoned vehicles parked in a perfect line for who knew how long—a line that extended as far as I could see between trees and bushes. An old sedan, an older truck, a bigger truck, then who knew what else. Weird.A fly or something buzzed by my head. The damned flies were everywhere, fat and happy during this time of the year when a ton of rotting things must have been tucked away out of sight. The flies swarmed around me as if I were already a corpse, which was not appreciated. Deodorant was sort of useless in these temperatures, but—Wait.Wait, wait, wait.Those weren’t flies. Remember, these are purely examples (and edited late at night because called into work, so yikes) 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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