The Writers' Greenhouse: Summer2023

Summer2023 posts

Showing posts with label Summer2023. Show all posts

Writing Skill: Voice Trait

This Writing Skill is Voice Trait, a lovely way to play with character voice. A character's voice comes from a wide range of things: their age, dialect, education, class, region, personality, etc. It's often easiest to go for the extremes – the "eeh bah gum, t'were a reet mess" or "I say, old chap, that's frightfully out of line", but that can also end up creating caricatures, rather than characters. Also, people of the same age / dialect / education / class / region still have their own distinct voices. So for this skill, we're going to focus purely on character traits. I suggest that for the other voice indicators (age / dialect / education / class / region) you stick to your own, or to the set you're most familiar with, so you can really concentrate on how their personality traits shape their voice.

For personality traits, grab the first choice from this handy rangen. You can use all three, or whichever feels most useful to you. I got "manipulative, inspirational and industrious". I think I could have a lot of fun with "inspirational" – which I'm reading in the sense of those endless online inspo memes, so my interpretation's probably quite influenced by the word "manipulative" as well!

Then for what to write about, we're going to keep this as plain as possible, so you can really concentrate on the voice itself. The character is explaining, in detail, one of these three things:

how to make a cup of tea
how to change a tyre
how to sew on a button

Choose whichever suits you best. I can already hear my character exclaiming "You've got this!" and "There are no mistakes, only opportunities to learn!" and "I like to imagine there's a sunset seascape behind my words, it gives me a lot more confidence to really own my truth." (Oops, I think I just punched them.)

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.

Writing skill: Same act, different reasons

This week's Writing Skill is Same Act, Different Reasons, playing with character actions and motivations – and how those motivations shape the action. This is a two-parter, so if you have twenty minutes to spare, start with Part One. If you can only snatch ten minutes from the Jaws of Time, skip merrily ahead to Part Two.

Part One: Listing motivations

List exercises are always brilliant for coming up with ideas, because they take the pressure off the individual idea. As a rule of thumb, whatever you're trying to think of, whenever you can't come up with one, come up with twenty! In this list, you're going to come up with motivations: all the different reasons a person might do a thing.

Either give yourself ten minutes for this or write the numbers 1–20 down the side of a page. Some people prefer a time limit; some people find time limits stress them out and prefer a quota. You choose whatever suits you best. Then write a list of motivations. For example,

for love
to show off
as revenge
to cover someone else's mistake
out of laziness

It's fine to write big general motivations, eg "for love", "for money". Then, if you can, break those down into more specific motivations, each its own item in the list. Eg "for money" could be...

to pay basic necessities
to help a struggling friend / family member
to repay a debt
to keep up social appearances
to fund a gambling habit
to give to a charity

and so on. The more motivations you write, the more possibilities you see!

Part Two: Same Act, Different Reasons

The central action is simple enough: your character is going to sing a song in front of people. That could be around a fire with friends, in a folk-song type pub, at a formal historical gathering (Austen / Poldark style), out busking, whatever appeals to you. You don't need to have an existing character for this; they can simply emerge out of the action and through the writing.

Yu're going to write the same central action twice over, with the same character, each time with a different motivation. If you did Part One, you'll have your own list of motivations to refer to. If you didn't, here are some suggestions:

for love
to show off
as revenge
to cover for someone else's mistake
out of laziness
to repay a debt
to keep up social appearances

Pick two motivations that contrast very strongly for you. If you're doing this as a ten-minuter, set yourself a timer, five minutes for each piece. And if you'd like an extra challenge, then don't give the character's internal thoughts to explain their motivation: only describe their and others' actions and reactions, to show the motivation.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.

Writing skill: Cosy Vignettes

This week's Writing Skill is Cosy Vignettes, exploring an aspect of detective fiction. Specifically, "cosy" detective fiction. In crime / detective fiction, "cosy" doesn't mean cottagey / snug /tea-cosy; it means the possible suspects are restricted to a very small group. Classic scenarios are that everyone's in one house together on a rainy night, or on an island, or on the same train. That said, they do tend to be cosier in the ordinary sense: the violence is usually off-stage and the story focuses on solving the crime, like a puzzle, rather than the gruesome crime itself. Most of Agatha Christie's stuff is cosies; so is Death in Paradise.

To explore this, you're going to have six characters: one murder victim and five possible suspects. (Your detective / amateur sleuth can waltz in later.) And for each suspect, you're going to write a character vignette, answering four key questions:

What was their relationship to the murder victim?
Why would they have motivation to kill them? (Everyone in the cosy needs an apparent motive, to keep them a suspect.)
What are they lying about? (Ask Dr House: everyone lies!)
What makes them different, as a character, from the other suspects? Think of a pronounced character trait and a strong visual hook.

If you'd like to keep it to ten minutes, I suggest you spend two minutes on each suspect. (Of course if you want to do 20 mins, you could make that four minutes each.) And to get your cast of characters, jump over to this quick character generator and tell it to generate six characters. The first is your murder victim; the other five are your suspects. Feel free to ignore anything in their profile that doesn't fit the genre, eg references to outer space, unicorns, superpowers, etc, and to change anything you like: the generator is just to give you a starting point.

Have fun!

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.

The Bloggery

Writing Skill: Voice Trait

Writing skill: Same act, different reasons

Part One: Listing motivations

Part Two: Same Act, Different Reasons

Writing skill: Cosy Vignettes

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