This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
By Anna Bell
When you write in the first person you’ve really got to find a distinctive voice for your character. Their personality shines through as they narrate their story in a very different way to third person writing. But how do you know that it’s distinctive?
I’m currently working on the plans for my new book series and I’m trying to write the first chapter of book one to get an idea of what it’ll be like. I’ve experimented writing in both the third and first person, and I decided it worked best in the first person. So far, in my very short writing career, I’ve only written in the first person in my Don’t Tell series, and to write a new character in the first person seemed quite unnatural. I’ve been so used to writing from my old character Penny’s perspective, that it took me a good seven or eight attempts to find a different voice for the new character, Jenna.
When going through my line edit of the last Don’t Tell book, my editor had commented about a phrase being ‘un-Penny like’ and that was the first time that I really considered there were words and phrases that were distinctively her. I hadn’t consciously been choosing words, but of course I had been doing it subconsciously it when creating her voice. Since then, when writing my new chapter, I’ve had that in the forefront of my mind, and I’ve been trying to make my new character, thinking about what words and phrases would be Jenna-like.
It’s a challenge because I want Jenna to be instantly likeable as well as funny and I want readers to root for her, but that sounds exactly like my old character, Penny. In one attempt to make them sound different, I made Jenna quite witty and sarcastic, but I worried that readers might think she was a bit mean and not warm to her.
What’s really helped to nail my character’s voice, was to think about the differences between Penny and Jenna. Thinking how they’d react to different situations, what their goals are in life, what their personalities are like, and through identifying those differences I’ve begun to see them in my head as two separate people. From there, I’ve found it easier to imagine Jenna and how she might narrate what’s going on.
It’s hard enough trying to make characters from multiple novels distinctive, but it’s much harder when you try and and write in the first person from at least two characters in the same book. I was recently reading a Novelicious book review of a novel written from the two characters’ points of view, and the reviewer mentioned that the characters’ voices were so similar that they’d had difficulty realising which character they were reading about. I’ve found this before, too, when I was reading a novel from the male and female characters’ points of view. For me, the female character was very compatible with the male because she sounded exactly like him. It’s frustrating for the reader as it can make them lose the plot of who they’re reading about at that particular moment. It’s something that I’m in awe of when people get right, as I imagine it’s extremely difficult to pull off.
Has anyone got any top tips on how to find a character’s voice? Can you think of any good books that have really great examples of multiple points of view with distinctive voices?