Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
Employing mimicry
Convincing character voice
Speech, voice, and point of view
In this chapter
· Voices copying other voices
· Writing opposite voices
· Working with ironic voices
· Creating contentious voices
It’s one of those undefinable, hard-to-give-five-easy-steps sort of concepts in writing: voice. Not author voice, but character voice. You know, that thing everybody says they want in a book but no one can say exactly what it is. However, having just concluded a chapter on figures of speech, let’s wade through the ambiguity and tackle the evasive notion of character voice. Along the way, I share a few tips on the best ways to go about using it.
For many creative writers, voice is a given character’s worldview as expressed through his or her language. Think of it this way: everyone has a unique take on the world. Your experiences and inborn traits shape your perception of everything around you. Voice is how a character expresses his or her own unique view.
You can reveal character voice as you write through subtle things like word choice and sentence structure, although ultimately it’s about more than words and tone. True, those subtleties are important parts of it, and sometimes I do a full draft just tweaking those things for my characters’ voices. But equally important, if not more, is your character’s thought process. When something happens, how does your character process it? What do they think about it? What do they connect it to? Something in their past? Something else in the world around them? Someone in the world around them? This a tough concept because we’re talking about a character’s mind, which—if the character is lifelike and believable—needs to be as complex as your own.
DEFINITION
Character voice is the primary speech, thought patterns, and attitude of a figure in a piece of creative writing.
Because a character’s voice is shaped so much by his or her traits and history, it’s important to know those things about your character. This can involve different things for different writers. For some, it means creating an extensive character worksheet, while others spend a great deal of prewriting time trying to view the world from their character’s mind-set. It also means discovering your characters through your narrative, meaning you need to be willing to let their voice change in subsequent drafts.
You need to ask yourself the questions of Why? and How? with regard to your characters. Why is this character sarcastic/sweet/bubbly? How does her love of X, Y, or Z affect the way she sees the world? How do certain character traits (optimism/pessimism, dry sense of humor, impatience, etc.) come out in her voice? This helps you place a particular character’s voice into a more concrete and definable realm so you can stay consistent with the voice instead of running the risk of letting it run all over the place.
To facilitate the best ways to employ character voice, in this chapter, you consider how your writing can copy other voices, employ opposite voices from those of your characters, make use of ironic voices, and heat up your narrative with contentious voices. Together, these types of character voice give you plenty to choose from when it’s time to convey what the people who populate your writing world are thinking and saying.
Employing mimicry
Learning and copying from the works of others—that is, mimicry—is one of the best ways to establish character voice in your writing. Taking inspiration (and words) from the best who have gone before increases your chances of your own writing working out well. It’s a well-known cliché that “every poet is a thief,” but, like many clichés, it’s largely true. If you’ve ever wondered if your creative writing is too alike another author’s—whether that has been an unwitting accident or intentional—this section may help you figure that out.
DEFINITION
Mimicry is the activity or art of copying the thoughts and speech of other character voices in creative writing.
Consider for a moment why so many children (and not a few adults) want to be the superhero Batman. He has a cool voice, ingenious and unconventional weapons, and a great ride in the Bat-mobile. Also, unlike most other superheroes, he has an altogether human—albeit spectacularly trained—body. The dream of Batman and the desire to copy him stems from the fact that he’s human like you and me. The dream follows that, with the right amount of wealth and training, you, too, could be Batman and make noble sacrifices for the lesser humans around you.
Yet Batman has countless precursors, stretching back into antiquity. Consider the Greek warrior Achilles: although half-god, half-man, he possesses human vulnerability but also extraordinary equipment and finely honed skills. Like Batman, he is plagued by doubt, frailty, and mistakes, but in the end, he sacrifices himself for his countrymen.
Whether you realize it or not, your character voices will strongly resemble many who came before them. That’s in part what makes you want to copy from the works of other authors. When you’re aware of it, it constitutes both a safety net and a learning process—if you didn’t copy from someone else, how would you learn how to write? A legendary anecdote among southern writers is that an impoverished young aspiring author named Harry Crews copied many of William Faulkner’s novels (some more than once), word for word, by hand in an effort to educate himself. (He wound up penning nearly 20 books and enjoying a successful career.) Imitation, then, is often the first stage of a writer’s cycle but then you must learn when and how to break free and make your own character voices sound as distinctive as possible.
There are ways to copy respectfully. After all, copying someone else’s writing is a form of respect. As another cliché states, “Imitation is the highest form of flattery.” Yet when it comes to actually doing it, there are some important things to keep in mind. One of them is don’t copy anyone; copy everyone. As John Milton famously noted, “Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research.” If you want to learn how to write, read the works of many authors who resonate with you, and study all of them in equal parts. If you spend too much time with any one author, reaching into his or her inner voice and borrowing phrases from their vocabulary, you run the risk of walking a tightrope of copyright laws (that is, unless you’re Harry Crews).
Another way to imitate respectfully and responsibly is to keep a copy. If you copy anything from anyone, even if it’s just writing down a good catchphrase you heard on TV, be sure you keep a note of it. When you’re flipping through an old writing journal, it’s very easy to come across something scrawled in the corner and think of it as your own. However, if you could turn back the clock, quite often you’d find that it was actually someone else’s. That doesn’t prevent you from taking it for yourself and putting a new spin on it, modifying it to your own purposes, but you need to know it was someone else’s originally. You need to be aware of how much you’ve taken from others so you can judge if it’s too much.
So how much is too much? If your writing only takes ideas from a single author, if it contains the full character or plot scenario or location of another author’s, you’ve gone too far.
WRITING PROMPT
Select a favorite prose or poetic passage and, using content of your own, mimic it to the best of your ability. Then go back and attempt to determine at which point mimicry proved most helpful to your writing without coming across as simple copying.