The Weekend Writer: WriteOnCon On Voice

So did we all get a chance to stop by WriteOnCon this past week? Hmm? No? Well, I did, and I have my eye on a few events there that I still want to take a look at.

However, today I'm going to point you to something I've already seen at  WriteOnCon, What y'all saying, Bubba?--Creating Voice in Fiction by Joy Preble. We covered using voice to find story here in June. But you can never know too much, and Preble has some interesting things to say on this subject.

Voice And Worldview

Take a look at her third paragraph, for instance, which begins "What makes voice?" Everything she gives for an answer is correct, but I agree with her when she says that "Understanding and sticking to the character's worldview" is particularly important. She makes a good point later with “It doesn’t matter what typical sixteen year olds would say or not. The only thing that matters is what this particular sixteen-year-old character would say."

Writers only know characters well enough to create a way of speaking for them if they have created a worldview for them, if they know how characters understand and see the world. It becomes a circle, really. Characters speak a certain way because of their understanding of their world and their place in it. Their world and their place in it has an impact on them, and that's why they speak the way they do.

At some point in your writing, character and world become knitted together, everything becomes part of the whole.

Yeah. I know. Ommm.