As you learn more about writing, you find out there’s this thing called “voice.”
It’s essentially the personality of the main character/narrator coming through the words on the page, directly to the reader, making them sound as real as possible.
Voice can be tricky to pin down, but there’s one book that does an incredible job of capturing the protagonist’s voice from page one: An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green.
During the last stream, we took a look at the opening few pages to An Absolutely Remarkable Thing and examined it paragraph by paragraph.
As we read it and went over it, I asked the viewers to pay special attention to the voice of the main character. What does the author do to make her seem so genuine?
Here’s a sample of the annotating we did to the beginning.
These opening paragraphs are doing a ton of subtle work!
Here’s a quick summary of three ways to make sure your character has a strong voice:
- #1. Don’t be afraid to have them talk with the reader, just like a normal person.
- You don’t have to have them directly address the reader and “break the fourth wall,” but keeping a conversational tone can make the narrator feel more genuine.
- #2. Don’t be afraid to have their personality come through in how they talk
- Are they confident? Unsure? Awkward? Show us in not only the words they use, but how they speak as well.
- In An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, April constantly goes on tangents, negates things she’s previously said, and is very sarcastic — it all works to build her voice.
- #3. Don’t be afraid to go deep on the specifics
- Just mentioning that your character has a job, or even their specific job isn’t enough. Don’t just give us the surface level, go deep, then deeper still.
- In this book, we not only find out that April works as a graphic designer (surface), but then she goes into the miserable details of working at a startup (deep), and then that brings us into the juicy details of college and the loans that led her up to that point (deeper).
- Also, we don’t just find out about the sculpture (surface), April describes it as “New York awesome” (deep), and then talks about how people can become jaded to even the most amazing things (deeper).
We go into a lot more detail during the video, so if you’re interested in leveling up your own writing, and seeing a unique way to write a beginning to a story, then be sure to watch the full video below.
After that, we did this prompt as chosen by subscriber cozyrogers: Let’s write something in first person with an interesting voice. An image prompt from chat.
Chat voted that we write our first-person, voice-rich story about… this picture of lemons.
Here’s what we ended up with:
People always tell me I have a sour disposition. However, they are all idiots. Like la dee da, I’m sure you’d be a hell of a lot sweeter if you were a lemon on a rusty kitchen shelf just counting down the days until you were juiced, right?
No, you’d be sitting here, just like me, freezing your yellow rind off as you watch Larry, Louise and Laura all get grabbed and stabbed on the daily. You ever seen a grabby chef’s hand up close? Those hands that are five grimy sausages all connected by one sub-par brain with only three things on its mind: gotta squeeze that innocent fruit, gotta spritz up the water, gotta get good tips so I can pay rent for my one-room studio where I’ll die of a heart attack alone with Wheel of Fortune shining on my corpse.
All right, maybe I’m being a little mean. I’m sorry. My chef would just have the static on the TV serenading his own private funeral on his apartment carpet, since his cable service was disconnected months ago.
The only one who understands me is lime, my green sibling from another sapling, but we don’t get along. When it’s just the two of us he’s all about the citrus connection, but I’ve heard from the grape vine in the fridge that he grumbles about limes not getting squeezed into drinks nearly as often as we do.
Look buddy, if you want to be chopped and quartered and impaled on some cake-faced lady’s glass of pretend-expensive champagne, you can be my guest.
Oh, speaking of which, grimy-sausages is coiling his digits around me now. Guess it’s time to go to the great lemon tree in the sky. What will I become? Some zest on an overcooked steak? Some juice baked into lemon meringue cookies?
Of course not. Dirty-digits peels my rind off in a fancy curl, tosses my fleshy insides in the trash, and places me on a plate of stinky asparagus and fish. A garnish. That’s all I am. Just a crappy decoration to make even crappier food look edible.
Well, at least I pissed some lemon juice in wannabe-Ramsey’s eye when he stabbed me. So I got that going for me.
Life for a lemon can only go two ways: either you’re a grand garnish, or you’re pulp fruit-ction.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: Amazon