Voice

Ever read something and know immediately who wrote it?

Most of us have a clear voice in our casual writing. Our blog posts and e-mails tend to reflect our speaking style. And yet when it comes to creative writing, many find it a struggle to develop a unique voice.

I've been using the internet since the very earliest days, before it was the WWW. Back then, we all knew each other. No, I'm serious.

It was Usenet, in 1989 or 90. I learned how distinct my voice was in my casual writing in the early days of online interaction when I tried to post anonymously to a group. I was trying to be anonymous (did I mention we all knew each other?,) and consciously changed my capitalization and punctuation style to hide who I was...and said a couple of snarky things about an acquaintance. When he confronted me, it was clear he didn't even realize I'd been trying to hide. This made me wonder what it was that constituted my voice.

(note: I've also since come to realize that our casual writing voice and our creative voice is not the same thing - the former comes more naturally, while the latter takes time to nurture)

Stephen King says that a writer must pen a million words before they develop their voice. (I always wonder - do re-writes count?) When I started asking people about my "voice" as a writer, several said that I had a strong one as a poet. Of course, poetry is distilled writing. Like greek yogurt, the watery stuff drained out and intensified. (Yes, it's a goofy metaphor, but it fits and I didn't sleep well last night.) Perhaps writing in that form honed my voice earlier. Then again, most critics consider a poet under 40 to be young. Of course, I'd been writing poetry regularly for about ten years, so maybe I had hit my million words.

Reading voraciously helped. Having read nearly all the works of Shakespeare (plays and sonnets) before I was 17. Most of the work of the Romantics, plus ee cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Not to mention fantasy novels. Scary stories. Mysteries. And by the time I was doing this investigation into voice (at age 19 or 20,) a great deal of postmodern literature and criticism. In fact, at that point I was so into Derrida and Foucault and Hakim Bey that I'm sure their influence came out even in my most casual writing.

That year, my third year of college, I was in a poetry workshop. Some of the young writers disdained reading other poets, for fear they would dilute or corrupt their own voice. One week, an outspoken champions of this idea objected to the reading assignments and passed around his work prefaced by a speech on the subject. I read his poem. Then I asked him if he'd read any novels lately. He said, of course. I then asked whether that might be Bret Easton Ellis he was reading. He seemed surprised - but his work sounded like a bad imitation of Ellis, broken into verse on the page.

What we read influences us. What we hear and see. There's no way around it. On Star Trek, when Data is trying to learn to play the violin, he struggles to find his voice as a musician. He consciously makes the choices we all make subconsciously - assembling his performance out of pieces of the masters' performances. Someone points out to him that this assemblage is his voice. That the particular combination in his knowledge base, and his choices about how to combine them became something new and unique. The best choice to make is to seek out an array of influences. To bombard ourselves with so many voices that no single one stands out when we sit to write.

So, other than reading a lot and writing a lot - what else can we do to develop and strengthen our voice? Some suggestions:

Trust your instincts. Your internal voice will come out in your creative writing, if you let it. (If it doesn't work, that's what rewrites are for.)

Enjoy what you're doing. If you allow your imagination to play with language, you will make more creative choices.

Know the rules. Having a strong grasp of the basics of grammar and storytelling will free you to stop thinking about those things, and focus your attention on the story, and the telling of it.

Go ahead and borrow. One of my favorite exercises for a developing writer, and one I still use when I'm studying someone, is to consciously imitate them. Try writing 5 pages in the style of Minghella, or Shane Black - and it will make you think about the choices they made, and what makes their style distinctive.

Listen. Your influences are all around you. Your family, friends and neighbors contribute to your voice as much as who you read and try to emulate.

Get rid of your favorite tricks. Like "murder your darlings," this points out the difference between what we think works for us and what does. If you have any consciously adopted stylistic tricks or flourishes, try writing without them. You may find (as I did with my anonymous Usenet post) that your voice shines through even more clearly.

Finally - after you've done all that: stop trying. Ultimately, your voice is you. How hard can that be to express?


Now, this is (primarily) a screenwriting blog. Screenplays are minimalist, blueprints. They're about story and character, not style. So is there even a place for voice in them? I'd say, yes. Absolutely. If you have any doubt - go back and read the work of three of your favorite screenwriters.

I'm Pissed at You

Mystery Man, I'm mad at you.
Not "golly, you rascal, you had me going gee gosh I'm so mad"
but white-hot furious.
I thought better of you.
I even said as much multiple times.
I said you wouldn't allow people who cared about you to grieve. That you would not be that cruel or careless. That you were a gentleman, and simply a good guy.

I was wrong.
I *grieved* for you, you son of a bitch.
I *cried* for days.
I was heartbroken.
And it was just some kind of stunt?

We all understand you needed to leave the Mystery Man persona behind, and would have understood retiring it. To tell people you were dead was a crappy way to do it.

I've lost respect for you.
I have added your accounts on facebook and twitter because I know I will forgive you (I'm very forgiving for a Scorpio) and don't want to lose track of you in the meantime.

___________

Creativity and Decisions

So, I have an idea. I think it's a really good idea. It falls into a sub-genre of thrillers I think of as daddy-daughter flicks, in which a father must rescue or revenge his little (often teenage) girl.

The problem I'm having is that I have an abundance of ideas about how to approach it.

I know who the main character is. I know who his antagonist and con-tagonists are. I know what the ending is, and I know everyone's motivations.

That still leaves me with a HUGE range of creative choices. I could write two or three complete screenplays based on these characters in this situation and have them be distinctly different.

The first dillemma: how much backstory do I front-load?
I could open with the scene of what happened to this man's daughter, showing just enough but leaving out some details that would be revealed later. The main character has suppressed parts of this event, but is also driven by it.
Or, flash back to it a few times as he encounters the individuals he's seeking revenge on, and as he remembers more. A little of this will happen regardless, because of the memory issue, but flashbacks are so tricky, perhaps they are best left alone. They seem natural to this storyline, but perhaps the audience will be more involved, and the structure will be simpler if I go with the first option.
Another approach: only hint at the event, dropping information through conversations and confrontations, without ever really showing it. I *could* even do this combined with the first option - showing very little in the opening scene, through the protag's faulty memory, and then hinting through the reactions of others that there was much more to the story

None of those are bad choices. Honestly, I love the third approach - not even showing the event, but teasing information about it through each scene, until we have a good idea - but never a 100% complete one...I'm just not sure my craft is strong enough to make that work on the page without being confusing. It's a problem I've had before.


The other major dramatic choice I'm making is between two basic approaches to the story. Make it a standard thriller-hunt type film like Taken? Or a mostly-single location psychological drama like The Negotiator and Albino Alligator?

The hunt has terrific possibilities for chase scenes, big set pieces, and lots of great cathartic torture them for info then blow them away moments. Basically, he knows where one of the people he's hunting for is, and uses them to get to the next one, leaving a trail of carnage and attracting the attention of the police. The pacing would be fast, and the story would be visceral.

The second option - have most of the people he's hunting gathered in one location, where he secures them and isolates them, then confronts each of them for information about the "truth" and the location/identity of the person who is really responsible for the bad thing that happened. Again, I lean toward this, but it's trickier to keep it interesting and tense.

Of course, I could actually write two screenplays...but since I've not written any (feature-length) scripts in a while, I think I'd better focus on just one!

Getting Back Into It

Finally read and reviewed another screenplay on Triggerstreet:
Read Here

Hey, it took me almost 6 years to get my life back on track after my husband died. This period of grief wasn't nearly so bad. I even started a new career... just let my writing go by the wayside and let all my friends fade from my life.

I'll be honest, I missed the former more than the latter. Nothing meant to slight any old friends - but the writing has always meant more to me. Friends have always been more separate, some of them genuinely adored, but not really taken in to my heart. People I actually felt close to very, very rare.

Freedom, Structure & Creativity

Recently, I stumbled on "another bored college student" blogging that she "really want(s) to write a screenplay," but she is

so used to free writing which is a better fit for novel writing. Screenplay writing is very specific and every scene needs to have a purpose and function to the pace and story as a whole. So by definition it's more of a formulaic writing than free flow writing. It sucks the creativity out of it.

There's the popular-with-youngsters idea that free writing is truly creative, because it's free. If I read a novel and there are chapters that don't serve the overall purpose in some way, I get frustrated. In poetry, each stanza (each word) should be relevant and appropriate. Free writing is useful only in diaries and exercises - not for anything intended to be communicated to others.

But more than that is the complaint I came across often among poets when I was studying writing in college: that form and structure, that limits in general, were antithetical to creativity. In fact, the opposite is true. Limits engender creativity.

Interesting and original art typically comes from the streets, the poor, the oppressed. The people who have the most limits. People whose time, resources, and even daily activities are the most circumscribed.

Interesting and original art creates it's own form, where a form did not exist.

In grad school, I found that wrestling an unformed thought into the bindings of a sonnet, villanelle, or pantoum forced me to exercise my mind in a way that free form poetry does not. Giving it those limits forced me to be more careful with my phrases, and allowed me to play the language against the structure in ways that created meaning that is not possible in free verse. The form allows you to draw attention to specific words by their placement, and to tie one word or stanza to another - through the form - and create layers of meaning. You build layers, like a good wall (or a cake!), and repetition gives it strength. Or like passes of ink over a silkscreen, the color intensifying each time it's pushed through the form.

If you really want to write a screenplay, you want to write something that is identifiable as a movie. Movies have certain specific limits, and the limits of narrative in that medium also create opportunities for creativity. Where else can you have image and reaction? Where you have the complexities of visual storytelling possible in painting paired with the dynamism of movement? Where you can contrast an image or action with sound and create meaning from that? And yet, yes, it has to have a story. It has to have a beginning, middle, and an end. It has to make sense to others. And there's no point in having scenes that, well, don't have a point.

If you really want to write a screenplay, you also have to want to write something that reads well on the page. That does not ramble, that does not turn inward, and that does not waste time on anything that is not the movie. That is tight, and neat, with lots of white space.

If you really want to write a screenplay, you want to write something that moves, on the page. That the reading of it takes you on the journey - whether it's a stroll, a dance, or a hard run. The structure of the segments and scenes, of the short dialogue and brief descriptions are kinetic. Good screenplays use the limits of the medium to create an experience on the page that moves.

Creativity does not end with formula and structure. Creativity rejoices - because like water flowing in a river, it only gets to sing when it passes over the stones.

Getting Organized

My goal for this year (I wouldn't call it a resolution) is to get organized. My room, my office, and my kitchen are a mess - lots of stuff, in piles, randomly stuck into drawers or cabinets and forgotten about or lost.

This is partly because I'm, well, lazy. But largely because I moved into this house while my mother was dying, and have only in the last few weeks really begun to feel back to myself. In fact, just yesterday, felt good, good in a way that made it clear how rarely I've felt more than OK in the past few years. I grieve for a long time.

I've read that when people whose space is organized are more organized and productive in their work, and that matches my own experience. It's not simply a matter of habits carrying over - it's the setting. Clutter is distracting. Makes for messy thinking. Also, for me, provides a constant nagging "I should be" that keeps me from diving in to projects I care about.

So, my goal is to spend my vacation organizing, finding places for my stuff, weeding out stuff I don't need, cleaning. Then to set about organizing my activities, finding room for my writing, exercise, play time with the dog, and going out to movies and dinner... and then to keep organized throughout the year.

NYC Midnight challenge round 3

Somehow, I managed to land in the middle of my group last round, and squeak by into the next one.

Of course, I thought it was going to be this coming weekend - and Yahoo glitched and held my mail from Thursday night through Saturday night... so I didn't even read that I had made it until Sunday am. I had to think of an idea at work, and come home and write it in a couple of hours.

Though, really, 2-3 hours seems to be par for this course. I always end up writing the script in about that time.

This one went more smoothly, as it was a more comfortable genre and setting for me: Fantasy in a Cemetery. The object was a first aid kit.

I uploaded to Google docs, since some folks find the Scrippets format hard to read for more than a few lines.

I had fun. Let me know what you think. Cemetery Lanterns