Voice

I’m really not happy with my voice. I don’t feel it’s engaging or colourful. It’s stilted, dry, terse, functional, monochrome, flat, toneless, dull, boring. I wish I could write about TC as well as I can criticise myself. It would be a masterpiece.

Reading Frank & Wall’s ‘Finding Your Writer’s Voice’ (St Martin’s Griffin1994) I stumble across the words ‘by following the voice and surrendering to it…’

Following? Surrendering! First you have to hear it. I can’t hear it, this voice that’s supposed to be inside me.

I hear John Lennon telling me to ‘turn off your mind, relax, float down stream’ and ’surrender to the voice’. It’s been a long time since I was in that sort of state, way back in the sixties. I gradually realise that I need to be father to myself. I have to believe that there is a child inside my, a real voice, a person capable of expressing himself with passion and conviction, with spontaneity and ‘urgency’ (Frank & Wall’s term). I have to give birth to this child, the communicator inside me who was never allowed to grow and develop when I was a physical child. Emotionally I’m still a child, and I need to give that child space to express and learn how to speak. I need to listen to the voice. I need to stop trying to tell the story, but to wait and give the story time to tell itself. I need to give the characters space, time, love. They are my children, and they need love and care, not constant demands to perform.

So much for what I need. What I actually DO is a different question.

 

Character’s voice to Narrator’s

Writing the new chapter 34, where Catriona finds the tunnel, I wrote it first in Catty’s voice, fast and fluid with lots of ands and no full stops and then gradually converted it into narrative description. This wasn’t planned, it just seemed that I could get more drama out of the description than Catty would be able to give by rushing through. But it seemed a natural way of writing and was how I saw it as I tried to live it through her eyes. I’ve never written anything this way before.

I used TextAloud’s editor to edit the text since PowerWriter insists on putting capital letters at the start of sentences which I didn’t want but mainly because I get tired of highlighting text and pressing CTRL-F10 which is my shortcut for reading aloud.

I cut up Catty’s monologue into phrases and re-arranged them into a slightly different sequence and grouping them into sentences. This also forced me to think through the moment-by-moment description which is so vital in bringing a piece of action to life but which the character would never give when recounting her own story. This is quite hard to write, since you need to see the situation vividly, most of which I’ve got to invent. It’s also not a skill I feel very confident at. I’m forever tinkering with the text, re-arranging bits. I don’t hear the text in my head and then write it down like, for example, Edward Gibbon used to to. Instead I tinker and then have TextAloud read it to me and decide I don’t like it and fiddle some more. Very laborious and time consuming, but hopefully I’ll get more efficient as I gain in practice. I hope so!

So this movement, from character’s to narrator’s voice, seems like a good method of text development. Wonder if I’ll ever use it again?

 

What does Catriona call Alex?

A symptom of not knowing my characters well enough is that I don’t know what pet name Catriona uses for Alex. She sees him tied up in the Cafeteria and flies up to try to untie him. What does she call him? I asked poppinfresh what she thought and she first suggested “wee fart” (which worried me as it would mean a complete re-write of the character) and then “pet” which is MUCH better.