It's All About Writing | Wajid Nabi

Welcome

"This is an extra post for writers"




It’s all about...
Designing your character’s narrative voice.
When writing a novel in first-person, one challenge you will face is designing your character’s narrative voice, especially if writing from multiple points of view.
To help myself remain consistent, I select at least one attribute from four categories to dictate how I write as a specific character. Those categories are: pacing, vocabulary, tone and focus.

Pacing: The structure of your sentences. This may change depending on your character’s age, class or education level. Length of sentences can also lead your characters to appear more relaxed or energetic.
Long, eloquent sentences filled with description.
Short, concise sentences—straight and to the point, lackning in complexity.
Average, a mixture of long and short.

Vocabulary: The types of words your character uses. This can be based on where they are from, their education level, their class, their age, and even the time period.
Use of colloquialisms (slang).
Use of alternative languages.
Archaic vs. Modern vocabulary.
Swearing (F*ck!) VS. No swearing (Darn it!) vs. Humorous swearing (Fudgecicles!).
Common vs. Uncommon vocabulary.

Emotion: How your character thinks about past/present/future events, themselves, and others. It may be that ones of these emotions only takes hold in your character during certain situations (eg, when they’re hungry, in danger, in love…).
Optimistic vs. Pessimistic.
Bitter/Grumpy.
Sassy/Sarcastic (dry/dark humour).
Unconfident (always second guessing themselves or others).
Funny (Cracks jokes both internally and out loud).
Conflicted/Indecisive.
Anxious (always worried about repercussions/consequences).
Logical (not often emotional, thinks strategically).
Reflective (nostalgic/likely to get lose in memories).

Focus: What your character looks at and thinks about. You can’t focus on absolutely every aspect of every scene in a novel, therefore you need to choose what your character is most likely to focus on, which will in turn reflect an aspect of their personality.
Large focus on surroundings (artistic/appreciative/careful).
Large focus on objects (materialistic).
Large focus on other people (selfless/caring/motherly/wary).
Large focus on themselves (narcissistic/troubled/selfish).

In the end, you should end up with at least four bullet points to describe your character’s voice. You could even make two lists; one for how they sound at the beginning, and one for how they sound after their growth. My current WIP is written from 3 points of view, and I use this method to help make sure their voices are not only consistent, but also distinct.

I hope this is as helpful for some of you