306 Find the Right Voice for Your Character (ENGLISH)

How do you find the right voice for a character? What characterizes “voice,” one that your readers can believe and feel is as true as if that fictional character were a real person from their everyday life? How can writers enrich their characters’ voices with details from their back stories, their beliefs, their way of being in the world? And how can your story’s setting serve to enrich your character’s voice and vice versa – how can your character’s voice lend itself to the setting in ways that enrich your readers’ sense of your story’s place in space and time in convincing ways? In this workshop, we will seek to hone the voice of one or two characters you may be working on through discussion of examples taken from published fiction, and real-time exercises designed for sharpening your use of voice in concert with setting to enrich your characterizations. Workshop participants will leave the session with new or sharpened tools to deploy as they review and revise their use of “voice” and characterization as they develop story arcs for short or longer fiction.

Instructor

Myriam J. A. Chancy