Ways to Make Your Story Sing

So, as I've been revising this secret little story, I've been paying BIG attention to voice. As in, staying in it, making it good/real/rich, making it o-o-z-e personality. Tone. Mood.

I was watching a thriller the other day, and just before something bad happened, the music got all tinkly. And when the tension rose, the music got louder, fast.

How can we use music in our writing? How can we strengthen voice?

Well, I'm finding that little tricks can make an enormous difference.

Like. Punctuation! (Including parentheses. And ellipses...)

And sentence fluency.

And paragraph structure.

And it's so all about word choice.

All of these things--and showing, not telling, and using specific nouns and strong verbs--add to a story's personality/tone/mood.

Dashes. Drawls. Slang?

POOF! How about some onomatopoeia?

Or italics? Fragments? Pacing!

It's all up to you: the feel you want to create, the music you want to play.


(And by all means, help a sister out. If you have any good tips, please. Leave them right here.)

The Hardest Part?

I've been thinking a lot about voice lately. How to do it. How it varies, specifically. What makes each one special.

In one of my manuscripts, narrated by 16 year-old MC Kat, the voice is hollow. Sad. Kat's been bounced around from foster home to foster home and lands in The Middle of Nowhere, Oregon. Kat is sensitive, but strong. Young but growing wiser. Completely trustworthy. You could tell her anything and listen to her favorite band with her for hours.

In my other manuscript, Josh, a 17 year-old basketball blue chip from Sacramento, narrates the seedy side of sports. Josh is wise beyond his years, but is jaded and unreliable. It's not his fault, right? Because everyone has made him who he is. Because he has to survive his life somehow.

Two very different tales.

Two distinct voices.

Okay, I'm not a master of voice craft, for sure, but here's what I've come up with that might help you strengthen your MC's voice:

* Know your MC! I mean, really know them: their wants, hopes, and fears; when they're from and where they're going; their favorite shirt; what they drink and how they drink it; 20 adjectives that might describe them.

* Know the other characters. So the reader has no trouble understanding/believing why MC does and says the things she does.

* Know your audience: ages, interests, gender.

* Know how you want your story to "sound."

* Know setting. Does the MC stand out or fit in nicely? It's all part of the story.

* Stay in character with dialogue. Think word choice, sentence fluency, length, and structure.

* Think paragraph length and structure.

* Use flashbacks. What was significant in MC's past that relates to his/her story?

* Make the most of tone, cadence, punctuation. Match it all up with plot. Use other stylistic devices, too: rhythm, repetition, humor...

What else?

How do you define and use voice?

They Might Be Writers

Some actors get into their roles so deeply, they would have to be excellent writers of first-person fiction, don't you think?

At the top of my list:

Sean Penn

Tilda Swinton

Steve Buscemi

(And...um...Hugh Jackman?)

Who else? Who's on your list?

Do Not Believe What I Say

Even though I want you to.

I want you on my side.

But I'll say things that aren't true.

I'll do things I otherwise wouldn't do.

Because the alternative hurts.

Because I need an escape.

Because I want respect.

I want to be heard.

I want to matter.

You might see my flaws.

But you'll look past them.

You'll know it's self-preservation or nothing.

You'll know the reason.

Do not believe what I say.

But want to.

And accept me anyway.

*************************************************

"Who you were in Fight Club was not who you were in the rest of the world." (Fight Club)

*************************************************

This is what I've gathered from a little study on unreliable narrators. It's tricky, creating a somewhat believable but also doubtful character who says and does terrible things, but who we love regardless.

What I used: Fight Club, Shutter Island, Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Inexcusable. All male. Hmmm...

Can anyone think of a book/movie where the unreliable narrator is female?

From A Place Of...

...Suffering.

That's where Drain began last winter.

My daughter Daney, almost ten years old, was stuck in a cluster of grand mal seizures. She was tired. She was sore. She missed a lot of school.

It was terrible, watching this kind, bright, lovely girl suffer.

I worried how she'd get through it. I worried how I'd get through it.

Of course, I had stopped going to writing group. I had stopped writing.

Until Christy (who knows I'll try anything she tells me) challenged me to come up with a few new pages. Which, somehow, I did: a story I thought had nothing to do with anything. A story that ended up having everything to do with something--of seeing suffering, without being able to stop it.

That first draft, it was rough. I was writing it on two hours of sleep, between ambulance rides and hospital visits and EEGs. I was was writing it with Daney tucked into bed beside me.

The voice came out hollow, realistic but cautious, sad, and slow.

Exactly the way I felt during those dark winter months.

Part 2: The Other Stuff I Learned Lately

So, among finishing my revision and grading 60 5-page papers on terrorism, and oh, yeah, raising three kids (sorry, baby, now I get why you've been doing all the shopping/cooking/cleaning/laundry), I was recently a critiquer for a literary contest. I can't say which one, or where, or anything, but I can pass on what I learned from reading the first couple dozen pages of a mound of literary fiction entries.

Most of them were purpose-centered around the MC's journey of self-discovery.

Themes were mostly relationships or historical or spiritual.

Internal and external conflicts were tough to balance and maintain.

Often, secondary characters could've used much more rounding out.

Somehow, I could hear the masculine voice of the writer. These premises were either a war or a quest, and were action-packed. But they often lacked reaction and emotion.

Also, as the reader, I found myself looking for dialogue -- really craving it.

And setting was everything: I wanted to know the place and time exactly.

There. Reading all this other work really made me evaluate my own. It was insightful. If I can use it to make my work stronger, that's good. And if I helped other writers strengthen their work, even better!

What I Learned So Far At The Writing Conference

It's been 11 months, and I'm at the same conference in the same hotel. I had the same first dinner at Pasha Grill, only this time, author and wonderful human Mitali Perkins was there, too, and we were talking about gyros.

It's been 11 months since the last SCBWI Western Washington Conference, and paranormal is dominating, and voice is still the deciding factor in publication.

The same Starbucks coffee is dripping from the same endless vats, and Kim Baker is still running around, making sure the keynote speakers are all wired and starting on time.

It's mostly the same, here, after 11 months, but it's incredibly different, too.

Because last night, when I stepped onto the Redmond Town Center cobblestones, I realized how much of my life has changed.

After what was undoubtedly the toughest year of 39 for me, I learned more than I thought I would here--just by getting out of the same car: that I am enormously blessed that my husband really loves me, that our daughter might be sick, but that inside she's the same girl she's always been. I learned that if I never publish, there are four amazing people in a little gray cottage in Ashland who think I'm brilliant and talented and can fry up a serious pancake. I learned that, though I may be missing the three-book deal, I'm a survivor because I came through 333 days of a lot of crap, and I'm still breathing, at least, and maybe even smiling a little bit.

And after all that, I can definitely twist up my plot a little, as HarperCollins Editor Jordan Brown suggested today. I can put on my striped hat and let creativity free flow, like former Farrar Straus & Giroux editor Lisa Graff said. I can take big risks with character and plot, as Egmont Funny Girl Elizabeth "L-Bone" Law urged.

I can and I will do all of those things, but I'll hug my handsome husband more, too, and I'll tell my daughter how smart and strong and pretty she is, and I'll kick the soccer ball around with my boys, and I'll let my laundry pile up to the ceiling.

I'll be glad--I'll be grateful--that I have a gift--that no novel could possibly give me.

After the Intro

Well, I'm 9,000 words into revising, now! I'm on page 25, which doesn't seem very far, but I'm happy about where the book is going.

I overhauled the whole beginning.

"Did the agent ask you to do that?" my husband asked.

"No," I told him. But I can't redo the end without changing the intro.

And it's better: stronger, with more layers and conflict, and character development. More wanting. More mystery.

I even changed how the character dresses. And how she talks. She is softer, more fragile, mistrusting.

There's so much to do. I remember Editor Nancy Lamb saying at a conference: "If it doesn't move the plot forward, it goes."

And as I use description, setting, I'm wondering how much of that moves the plot forward.

My book, DRAIN, is a literary paranormal. A WHAT? I know, right? A literary paranormal? The seeing element is minimal, though, to my character's conflict. It interferes with what she wants, and how to get (or keep) it.

I'm a skinny writer. Not at all skinny in the physiological sense, but skinny in that my manuscripts flush out around 52,000 words.

For this voice, I'm sticking with something hollow. It's often sad and empty, like wind through a tunnel.

But today, I go back to school. For two Critical Thinking classes. And there's a stack of manuscripts I need to give feedback on in the next couple of weeks. And there's kids and laundry. But I'll get it done, DRAIN. I totally see the end, and I'm super excited to get there.

Doing the David Levithan Dance

It took some serious finagling, that's for sure.

To get to see my new fave, David Levithan, author of the deep and redeeming Love Is The Higher Law, I've had to cover two boys overnight, plus an entire class of writers.

But I did it.

I had to.

This guy has blown me away. I used this novella in my community college class, to show the integration of fiction into research, to prove that fiction is worthy of critical thought.

And speaking of "critical," Levithan's timeliness is. The novella debuted two weeks before the eight-year anniversary of the World Trade Center's collapse. It packs three teens' self-searches in a destroyed New York into a slim 163 pages, narrated by three voices.

I know. Crazy.

How does Levithan do it? Along with being clean and tight, the plot is simple: under 9/11 rubble, these kids struggle before finding community. And humanity. And hope.

Every word is chosen meticulously. Here's Claire: "I want to have faith in strangers. I want to have faith in what we're all going to do next. But I'm worried... Wouldn't it be wonderful if we really came together, if we found a common humanity? The hitch is that you can't find a common humanity just because you have a common enemy. You have to have a common humanity because you believe that it's true."

Who could not love the honesty, the wisdom there?

Oh, I hope Levithan reads that part in Portland tomorrow. That, and pages 105 and 106. And of course page 153.