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    Character Voice:Creating Unique and Memorable Characters: Strategies for Success, #3
    Character Voice:Creating Unique and Memorable Characters: Strategies for Success, #3
    Character Voice:Creating Unique and Memorable Characters: Strategies for Success, #3
    Ebook99 pages55 minutes

    Character Voice:Creating Unique and Memorable Characters: Strategies for Success, #3

    By M. L. Buchman

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    About this ebook

    Character drives story—any story, any genre. Imagine 2001: A Space Odyssey without HAL, Tolkien without Gandalf, or Ian Fleming without James Bond. A great character can't save a bad book, but the best writing in the world won't survive a weak one.

    For over 25 years, M.L. has been studying Character Voice. This book collects what he has learned so far. A set of practical tools that work for any genre and any writing style. He also discusses how to evaluate which will work for you.

    Do these tools guarantee flawless characters? If only. Are they essential to create a character who will keep your readers awake all night? Absolutely! Every author uses them in some form. In this book M.L.  Buchman makes them understandable and accessible.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBuchman Bookworks, Inc.
    Release dateApr 7, 2019
    ISBN9781386944232
    Character Voice:Creating Unique and Memorable Characters: Strategies for Success, #3
    Author

    M. L. Buchman

    USA Today and Amazon #1 Bestseller M. L. "Matt" Buchman has 70+ action-adventure thriller and military romance novels, 100 short stories, and lotsa audiobooks. PW says: “Tom Clancy fans open to a strong female lead will clamor for more.” Booklist declared: “3X Top 10 of the Year.” A project manager with a geophysics degree, he’s designed and built houses, flown and jumped out of planes, solo-sailed a 50’ sailboat, and bicycled solo around the world…and he quilts.

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      Book preview

      Character Voice:Creating Unique and Memorable Characters - M. L. Buchman

      Character Voice

      Character Voice

      Creating Unique and Memorable Characters

      M. L. Buchman

      Buchmann Bookworks, Inc.

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      Contents

      1. In the Beginning

      2. Traditional Tools

      3. Diving Inward

      4. Language

      5. Viewing Their World

      6. Oh, no! More tools

      7. Creating Memorable Characters

      8. A Few Final Thoughts

      About the Author

      Also by M. L. Buchman

      1

      In the Beginning

      In the beginning was the character.

      I’m not trying to be sacrilegious at all. I’m talking about story. And I don’t care if your story is a romance, a thriller, or science fiction—character is the holy grail of story. Yes, even in personal memoir you are developing a character that is more (or sometimes less) like you. But even if it is the truest self you can write, it is still a character you are portraying upon the written page.

      Side Note: Science Fiction

      Some will argue that science fiction is setting first. Yes, without amazing settings, science fiction fails to entice. But without grab-you-by-the-throat characters, it’s never going to rise above the genre. Think about: The Terminator without The Terminator or Terminator II without Sarah Connor stepping to the fore, Alien without Ripley, Avatar without Neytiri, or The Martian without Mark Watney having to science the shit out of this. Not so much.

      Character trumps everything else in story. There are literary books where that masterful character is a dog, cat, or even a city. The movie of 2001: A Space Odyssey was barely rescued from being just another 1960s psychedelic drug experience by the character of HAL—the ultimate all-powerful computer with the evil eye, a childlike innocence, and a terrifyingly dead-flat monotone.

      The exact same logic can be applied to the plot in a thriller, the puzzle in a mystery, and so on. A powerful character is what lifts the story above the common morass.

      Now character voice is by no means the sole element of a great story or series. In his amazing book Writing the Blockbuster Novel, Albert Zuckerman identified seven elements that he felt were essential to a truly major novel. His list is:

      High stakes for the character

      Larger-than-life characters

      Powerful dramatic question

      High concept

      Multiple Points of View or POVs (almost always)

      Setting

      Family

      The first two and the last are firmly anchored in character (in fact they all are, but to understand that, I recommend reading his book). For the purposes of this book, all we need to know at this moment is that character is screamingly important and making that character distinct must be one of our primary duties as a writer.

      Voice

      Digging a little deeper for a moment, I want to define Character Voice. It isn’t just how a character speaks.

      It’s how they:

      Speak

      Respond

      Think

      Act

      React

      Fight

      Make love

      …and everything else.

      It’s how they move and look as well.

      Let me repeat that again: a character’s looks are part of what I define as the character’s overall voice. Voice, in the way I think of it and mean it in this book, is the character’s complete presentation upon the page (or stage or screen).

      All of these are shaped by their past, present, and hoped-for future. It can change based on their physicality or their family. Did they serve in a military unit, work at a law firm, ride a horse, or sail single-handed around the world? Are they white, Latino, from a small Pacific Island, quadriplegic, or deathly allergic to nuts? Are they five-foot-nothing tall but couldn’t give a damn or six-four and incredibly self-conscious of it? Every one of these elements will shape and alter that overall voice.

      Character Voice is the embodiment of everything we know about a character. Delving deeper into this is what this book is about.

      Sounds Like Me

      The challenge for a writer is to develop characters that don’t sound just like you (except in memoir…perhaps).

      Why? Isn’t that the writer’s voice that we’ve heard so much about?

      No.

      (Hope that’s clear enough.)

      Not even a little!

      (’Nuff said?)

      The writer’s voice is something that you can’t help. It’s part of who you are. Are you a meticulous grammarian, a natural joker, someone who loves a neat turn of phrase? Are metaphors a key tool in your trade? Or thriller pacing? Dark versus light? Sweet versus gritty? Techno versus ethereal?

      Those are all parts of your voice.

      Reread the first several lines of this section. Is that the way you would have written something even that straightforward? Not likely. That’s my voice. It may shift and vary depending on fiction vs. nonfiction, genre, or even the amount of tension at a moment in a story, but all that is the writer’s voice. My writer’s voice is already distinct. I can hone it—perhaps (and that’s a big perhaps)—by not messing with it. The more I can leave it alone, the more likely it is to be my true writer’s voice. Weird, but true (and not the subject of this book, so I’m dropping that here). I just wanted to be clear what I wasn’t talking about.

      What I learned as I wrote more and more stories was that I had to learn to make my characters’ voices distinct. If I didn’t, then they did all sound like me—meaning they all sounded the same. Not a good thing in a four-hundred-page, multiple-POV novel. My writer’s voice still comes through loud and clear, but it must be expressed through unique, engaging characters.

      The various characters still share my writer’s voice. They still are created from

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