Crafting a Strong Character Voice || Part 1Exercise 1 –Take the above photo. Describe it with
Crafting a Strong Character Voice || Part 1Exercise 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.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 – There was nothing. In all directions, there was nothing. The dust in the air was like the ash off a burning corpse, reeking of death and decay. The flames of the sun seethed against the glaze of sweat along the back of my neck. I had to wipe my arm against my forehead so my eyes wouldn’t sting as I squinted across the barren land and its clusters of hills, interconnected like swollen veins across the back of a weathered hand.My boots scuffed the hard, dry earth as I took a few aimless steps forward. Across the golden valley, cresting the tallest of the hills, was a gathering of mist. Thin and gauzy. Burning away. Something might have been on the other side. An ocean, maybe. A city.I squeezed my eyes shut as the wind tossed a wave of dust into the air. In the distance, a dust devil picked up, a spiral of dirt, spinning and spinning as it scoured the earth in an erratic manner, almost as if it was alive. (The Game of Thrones “White Walkers” song played while I was writing this so, wow, extra creepy, send help.)Exercise 2 – I weaved my fingers together to form a visor above my eyes. The barren land stretched on into infinity, clustered with hills all interconnected like swollen veins across the back of an old, weathered hand, where the skin was fragile and wrought with the types of scars that told so many stories.The wind picked up, hollow like someone who had lost their voice. I breathed it in. My lungs expanded. The gathering sweat along the crown of my forehead cooled. No place I’d ever been to smelled like this, maybe except a cemetery, the silence of people who had breathed their last breath a long time ago.This wasn’t a bad place. This was a place that’d had bad things done to it. I knew the feeling, and maybe I understood this place a little better for it. Silence mistaken for acceptance. I inhaled the air of this place and it burned the way I did, deep inside, where no one was looking. 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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