Hi
folks,
Years
ago, I published my first writer’s craft book, FINDING YOUR VOICE with Writer’s
Digest Books. It enjoyed wonderful success and last year sold out all of the
print copies. My agent, Chip Macgregor was able to secure the ebook rights to it
and with his help I was able to put out an ebook version of it. We changed the
cover and everything else remained the same. And, it’s still selling like
crazy!
In
the last few days, Chip has graciously posted a couple of excerpts from it on
his blog and he got a lot of great comments on the posts. You can access them
here.
This link will take you to the most recent post and if you just scroll down,
you’ll find the two posts on Finding Your Voice.
I
thought it might be helpful today to include an exercise I used to give when I
was the visiting writer-in-residence at the University of Toledo. I stole it
from my buddy, Jane Bradley. (Keep in mind what they say: Good writers borrow—great
writers steal…)
The
impetus behind it is knowing that every single person and living thing sees the
same exact scene in a different way. Take a single city block. Say, a
residential street in a lower-class neighborhood. Take two different
individuals, one a welfare worker and the second an aluminum siding salesman.
The
welfare worker might notice the tricycle standing upended and with a missing
wheel in the front yard that needs mowing and weed removal, along with
the sack of empty beer bottles at the curb awaiting pickup, and think, “I need
to check with the people in this house to see if there’s any child abuse going
on.”
The
siding salesman might not even see or register the trike or the empties at the
curb, but might see the peeling paint of the house next to it and think, “Damn!
Here’s a guy who could use some new siding.” The things the welfare worker saw
might be invisible to him. He sees them perhaps, but he doesn’t see them.
These
are just two small examples of how different people look at the same exact
scene but each registers very different things.
It’s
this condition we all operate under that you can use to inform the characters
in the novel you’re writing. Let’s say you have a burglar in your story and you
have him walk down that same street. He might not notice the trike in front of
the one house nor the peeling paint job of its neighbor, but he might indeed
notice the widescreen TV he sees through the front window of the second house
and notice that the door is slightly ajar and the wood appears to be a bit
rotted. Easy access… Neither the welfare worker or the siding salesman noticed
what your burglar focused on. We all practice selective vision depending on who
we are, what our jobs are, and on a myriad of other factors.
And,
this is how you get into your character’s frame of mind. If you’re writing a
story and have a character who’s say a game warden, then climb in your car and
take a drive in the country. Get yourself inside what you perceive is a game
warden’s mind and try to notice the kinds of things such a person would notice.
Really look for the things a game warden might notice that you yourself
probably wouldn’t. Let’s say you drive by a woods and notice a pickup truck
parked in the open field next to it. If you were driving down that same road in
your normal frame of mind as a novelist or a housewife or a Laundromat owner or
whatever and whoever you are in “real life,” you might notice there’s a truck
there, but it would most likely be a blip in your minds’-eye and quickly be
gone without much or even any thought to it. But… in your game warden frame of
mind, you notice that it’s July and as far as you know there’s no hunting
season going on and you wonder if maybe that truck belongs to a deer poacher.
Now
you’re thinking like your character! This is the time to return home and begin
writing the scene from the game warden’s pov. You’ve just became that game
warden yourself and will write with the kind of verisimilitude a real game
warden might bring to the typewriter or computer.
See
how this works?
Here’s
the exercise I gave my students: I prepared a list of all kinds of characters
and made little slips of paper with each character on it. A typical list might
be: a nun, an armed robber, an astronaut, a six-year-old girl, a German
shepherd, a person from Ghana on their first day in the U.S., an Amish teenaged
girl who’d never been away from her farm before today, a sparrow, an alcoholic
with no money and no booze, a pimp and so on. You can put virtually anything
and any kind of character you wish on the list. I then ask the students to draw
out one of the slips and not tell any of their classmates what they drew. They’re
then asked to go out into the campus and note what they see but through the eyes of that character. When
they’re done, they’re to return to class and take ten minutes to write a brief
scene through that persona. Nowhere in it are they to reveal who or what they
are, other than through the artifacts they describe seeing.
When
they’re done, each student stands up and reads his or her scene. Then, the rest
of the class tries to guess who or what they are. It’s a very rare occasion
when the class doesn’t guess almost instantly who they are, even if their character
is really esoteric, like the Amish girl or the German shepherd. This is
absolutely one of the best exercises I’ve ever come upon for showing writers
how to get inside their fictional characters hearts and minds. It’s also
extremely instructive in illustrating how the same scene is seen very
differently by the various characters. Most just go out into the quad the
campus buildings are around so most are using the same exact scene. But, if
there are twenty people in class, we’re treated to twenty very different
descriptions of the same exact scene. I’m not big on most writing exercises,
but this is one that really works. Try it for your own novel or short story if
you’re writing a character that isn’t you. You’ll be amazed at how much more
accurate your depiction becomes once you’ve walked around your neighborhood or
taken a drive in your town looking at ordinary vistas you look at every day but
through the eyes of your particular character.
Plus,
it’s just plain fun to do! I guarantee you no one misses that class when they
know it’s coming up. They’ve heard too much about it from kids who took the
class previously.
This
exercise and other info on how to write in your own particular and unique voice
are within the pages of FINDING YOUR VOICE. Hope you glom onto a copy and more
than that, I hope you find it valuable in your own writing.
Blue
skies,
Les
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| My agent, Chip Macgregor in a photo showing all the power of Photoshop and how it can remove literally dozens and dozens of imperfections... |
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