At the cost of destroying them.

Finding your voice is one topic I've covered at length in various other posts, but in the event that there is one of you whom has not found his voice, I will do a recap:

Your voice is not Jenny Freitag's voice. (unless you're Jenny)
Your voice is not Sarah Sundin's voice. (unless you're Sarah)
Your voice is not Kathryn Stockett's or C.S. Lewis's  or  anyone else's voice but your own.
This might seem a bit of an ambiguous explanation, but the the truth is, your voice is the flavor of your writing, and the only way to find it is by blocking out the recipe of everyone else's brew and taste-testing your own.

But finding your characters' voices....ah. That's a different breed altogether. See, to effectively write a book, there must be the author's trademark voice murmuring beneath the surface, but if you ever hope to let the world fall in love with your book-people, you must let them speak. As such, their voices will vary widely, and it's the most amazing thing to sit down with a book and encounter several different voices in the pages as the viewpoint switches from character to character. I'm not talking about literal "voices" as in specific accents, speech impediments, etc. I'm talking about a more...well, for lack of a better term, a more spiritual voice. The mental voice. The world-view voice. Who is your character and how do they perceive the world? What brought them to this stage in their lives? What effected them to the point that they behave in this manner and none other?
A crime some authors commit is to make their characters come alive only when they open their mouths or when we can read their thoughts. A blessing other authors bestow is having the character's personality transcend even into the narrative. Keeping my preferences on this subject in mind, here are a few examples of narrative from several of my stories, and a brief sketch of the scenario:

The Glass Half-Full and A Lemon-Wedge: an optimist and pessimist collide in the city and discover their lives are a bit more entwined than they'd expected.This bit is from the Lemon Wedge's narrative at the very beginning of this story:

A small town is near about the hardest place to hide anything, but a big town is ten times worse. I know, because I tried to hide the fact that I didn’t know what the heck I was doing, and The Glass Half Full found me out exactly three hours before I admitted it myself.

“Miss Garibaldi,” he said, and actually took off his glasses to say it (which is rather an uncommon thing)”I don’t believe you know what you’re doing.”

From now on I’ll refer to him as T.G. (The Glass) because everyone knows that trees are dying and if there aren’t trees there won’t be oxygen, and because I am dictating this to a secretary with stubby fingers and a wilted collar and he’s breathing like a racehorse with the blows, I would rather not waste extra words on the already diminishing atmosphere.

As you can see, this character is stressed, high-strung, and flips out about anything and everything she can get her claws into. Notice the fact that the Lemon Wedge uses run-on-sentences. Her life is out of control and she's at the point where venting is her coping system.

The Green Branding: my new historical fiction project. A shy, unready girl of the Colonial era is called upon to save her county from the marauding terrors of Banastre Tarleton and his men.

She seldom thought about Nathaniel’s leg since he’d lost it the year the War began. It had been four years since, and their beautiful corner of Virginia--the Isle of Wight--had changed little. The young men had disappeared by twos and threes, but then, Mary had never been bold enough to take much notice of gentlemen. Perhaps that was the reason she was nineteen and still unwed. So many girls fretted night and day that all the lads were gone to war and would likely be killed, and then there should be no men to marry. Sometimes Mary found it easy to forget there was such a thing as a War of Independence.

Easy, at least, in the daytime. It was the nightmare that plagued her and made her shun the River.

The same dream.

The same face floating  in the weeds.

The same sense of shame when she admitted the war inspired her with nothing but a wish to flee the county and fly somewhere far away where the only neighbors were red-winged blackbirds, and she was alone with none but Nathaniel for company.

Mary is an admitted coward and shrinks from Society. This will, of course, be one of the things that makes the task required of her so difficult. Her mental process is clouded and drear because she is living under the sense of a calling she refuses to fulfill. Recurring dreams in which she feels herself summoned to some fearful task...the knowledge that there might approach a time that demands her to break out of her comfortable shell of self-sufficiency and do something heroic for everyone else...

Fly Away Home: (yes, you knew Callie would appear, didn't you?) A buried past is not always a dead past. Callie Harper is set on a career of glamour and glitz. Will she sacrifice everything--even the reputation of her only friend--to attain it? A historical romance set in 1950's NYC.

      But even raspberry creams could not minister to a mind diseased. I swallowed my half only because I hated to waste perfectly good chocolate, and curled up in a tight ball in the chair. Life was miserable. I was miserable—more so, because I had come to a decision. I would have to go apologize to Mr. Wade Barnett. I wondered how humble pie tasted? But it wasn’t the humility that hurt the most—it was the fact that I was in the wrong. I had always prided myself on having the upper-hand of my emotions in every situation. Not so today. And I had hurt the only man I’d ever met who remotely seemed to care about me. Just peachy. I was certainly not a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize the rate I was going.

Callie's voice is jaded, but with unexpected springs of humor and whimsy that haven't entirely died under the pressure of professional life as a "liberated, modern woman." As she works alongside Wade Barnett, her voice softens--this was one of my favorite parts in writing Fly Away Home... getting to show the cultivation of a character's perceptions as her life changed.

This is the great beauty of being an author--and, of course, the great responsibility of it:

"Nevertheless, the free will of a genuinely created character has a certain reality, which the writer will defy at his peril. It does sometimes happen that the plot requires from its characters certain behavior which, when it comes to the point, no ingenuity on the author's part can force them into, except at the cost of destroying them."

-Dorothy Sayers The Mind of the Maker

The quote was, of course, talking more about events and scenarios into which the author tries to force the characters, but the same thing can be said of creating your character's voice. In a way the character creates his own voice. Or--to be clearer--the character's voice grows along with his personality. Just as the events of your life and your upbringing have effected the your perception of things today, so also runs the course of your characters' lives, and their mental state. You can't force a certain voice onto a character any more than you could force yourself to think like another person. Let the voice come naturally--it will. As you write you will become familiar with the people in your stories, and will be able to hear and write their own keen twist on life. It is such a fun thing, and one of the best moments for me in the whole writing process: when I have realized at last the way this or that person ticks, and how to incorporate that into the narrative.

Do your characters have distinct voices? Whom was the most fun to write?

The Man With The Gun...a powerful weapon

A famous man, sometime, somewhere said that when your plot is dragging, bring in a man with a gun.
Some authors take this literally. A man and a gun. Bing-Bang-Boom, you're dead. That can be extremely effective in the right place. But the man-with-the-gun syndrome can be used figuratively, and to great effect in other places. I can think of two right off the top of my head:

• Description
• And Humor

In the description category, the-man-with-the-gun would be presented in an entirely unexpected comparison. If you were trying to describe golden hair, you might not even use the word "golden", or the word "sunshine", or the word "silk" or anything else that is at all common. You might say something like... "her hair was bright as a canary's wing" or "the color of a mirror-flat lake when the sun sets it on fire." Something that your reader is not expecting and probably would never think of if you didn't guide her.
Now for humorous man-with-the-gun. I love using it in this category. I like drawing the reader in and suddenly banging them over the head with a surprise that leaves them laughing and a little dizzy. It's the naughty child in me, I suppose. :P Here are a couple examples from my recent project:

        "Darby frowned and plugged his other ear, so as to hear better. Still, he could catch nothing but an occasional word.
      "From the ad...children...second Tuesday...credentials...blueberries."
       Blueberries? Darby growled in disgust. It gave more irritation than satisfaction, hearing these gnats of conversation."

        "The children and the newcomer faced each other, and for the first time in their brief acquaintance, they got a good look at one another. No words were spoken, but volumes were said, and the Feeling grew larger and stronger until Adelaide blushed, and Bertram quivered. Charlotte chomped the end of her pigtail, Darby plucked his rubber-bands like the strings of a lyre, and Eugenie and Fergus played hot-potato with a black-beetle that had somehow found its way into their possession."

"The littlest twins clambered onto the bed beside her, and showed their prettiest dimples when she did not push them away as Mum did, but gathered them into her lap and actually gave them her locket to play with. It was a beautiful locket—golden and etched with fantastical swirls like the writing on the cover of a story-book—and Eugenie put it into her mouth directly."

I got into the habit of doing it by getting so tickled when I would read such a thing in a book that I would laugh out loud and find my sisters staring at me strangely. I learn well by example, and pick up bits and pieces of other authors' brilliancy. :) So bring in your man-with-a-gun, either figuratively or literally, and try it out when your writing is feeling stale. It's *so* much fun!

Dialog--the spice to your story

In my newly restored passion for being a truly great writer, or perhaps more honestly, in my newly restored passion for reading great writers, I've come across a weakness of mine that I plan to mend. That weakness?

Dialog.

My dialog is not the worst that I've come across by any means, but it lacks meatiness. I spend more time in simple dialog without making much of it pack a punch. My characters tend to speak (at the most) three sentences at once. Granted, the sentences they do speak sound realistic and like real dialog, but there is a median ground between realism and monologue.

The book I am reading right now, The Gates of Zion by Brodie Thoene, is full of amazing dialog. His character's words count for something. They are not senseless babble or one-word replies. The dialog is loaded with insight, wit, emotion, and greatness. And the people generally speak more than a couple sentences. ;)

Dialog is such a fertile ground for telling a story. Giving your characters the chance to tell the story rather than you telling it yourself is effective indeed. And I want to remedy my simple little conversations and make them a bit more powerful. That is not to say I want my villain to go off on a three-page rant or my quiet little-girl character to suddenly become a great orator. But there are ways and means.

Ways and means?

Aye, ways and means. 

[Pardon my lapse into North and South there. :] I think of good dialog as having lots of conflict or emotion in it. Perhaps there are moments when you can have both. A good, riveting conversation will be like a fencing match--little thrusts and parries and poking-each-other-in-the-back. To and fros, ups and downs, steel clanking upon steel...that sort of thing. Thus far my characters' words have been effective, somewhat, but rather of the tea-party species instead of the dueling style. Now of course you don't want every conversation to be an argument, nor the quiet, sweet moments to have to have a diabolical plot and reason behind them. Let me give you a quick example of the same setting, one with polite exchanges, the other with conflict.

Let's see...the setting will be a young man trying to send a mysterious letter at a small-town post-office. The mail-girl is unduly curious and it's irritating him.

"I'd like two stamps please."

"Right. That'll be twenty-four cents." The mail-girl leaned against the counter and held her hand out, palm-up.

He fished around in the depths of his suit-pocket and brought out a dusty quarter. "Here. Keep the change."

"Thanks." The quarter landed with a glittering rattle in the cash-register. The mail-girl took a penny out and weighed it in your hand. "Who's it to?" She indicated the letter in the young man's hand and smiled, curious.

"My grandmother."

"She lives in Germany? Wow. That's a long way. Funny. You don't look German." She squinched up her nose and tilted her head, taking in every dark feature of the man before her. "You look Italian to me. Are you sure the letter's for your grandmother? I'd bet this penny it's your girl-friend." She laughed archly and tossed the penny in the air.

"Listen, missy. I haven't got all day. I'll just send this myself if you please." The young man swept out of the post office and dropped the letter in the mailbox, careful to hurl it into the very depths of the blue-tin box.

Right. So that's the polite conversation there. Just the bare minimums to show the guy was getting irritated. Here's how I'd rather write my dialog:

"Two stamps. And hurry--I've got a train to catch." The young man scanned the room with his burning, dark-eyed gaze, as if searching for something.

The mail-girl pursed her lips and raised an eyebrow. "Right. That'll be twenty-four cents.

"Don't know why postage has gotta' cost so much these days," he mumbled, fumbling in his pocket for change. He brought out a quarter. "Here, keep the change. Who knows? Might be a lucky penny...though in that case I could use the luck."

"Oh? Who's your letter to? Bet it's your girl-friend." The mail-girl leaned over the counter and peered at the address.

He pointedly covered the direction with his hand and licked the stamps, keeping his eyes fastened on the envelope. "It's to my grandmother for your information. Don't know what business it is of yours, though."

She crossed her arms and drummed her fingertips along them. "Huh."

He glanced up and rolled his eyes at her offended interest. "Listen, honey. It's to my ailing grandmother...in Germany. 'Kay? She's sick."

The girl's eyes brightened. "Funny. You don't look German...your nose is too big and your eyes are too dark."

"Hey, tootsie, this isn't a beauty pageant. Can't blame my parents for my looks."

She continued, undaunted. "You look Italian to me. Are you Italian?"

"Maybe that's why I love spaghetti." He clenched his jaw and licked the last stamp, then whirled around. "Listen, missy. I haven't got all day. I'll send this later."

See the difference? I personally would rather read the second example in a book. :) Any great tips for writing dialog? Let me know! ~Rachel