Crafting a Strong Character Voice || Part 3Exercise 1 –Take the above photo. Describe it with

Crafting a Strong Character Voice || Part 3Exercise 1 –Take the above photo. Describe it with your own style and your own literary flair. Bring the scene to life. Give it its own characterization. Capture a moment.Exercise 2 –Now, describe the scene from the eyes of one of your characters. Don’t be afraid to borrow those moments of gold you write in exercise 1, but make sure to stay absolutely true and honest to the voice of the character.Bonus –Describe the scene from the eyes of the protagonist.Goal –A big part of what makes a story stand out is character voice. Your own personal style changes as you do, and a character’s voice changes as the character does. When the two come together, there’s potential for literary magic, but bringing out and differentiating between different character voices takes lots of practice and even more reading.Write for yourself, but also take time to write with the intention of improving skills. There’s reading for pleasure, and then there’s reading like a writer. The same applies to writing: write for pleasure, then write to improve. Experiment in these exercises. Try things you haven’t tried before.Remember, the image is meant to generate ideas, so it’s intentionally vague. If you’re not used to writing about the subjects in the image, good. Write something you’ve never written before. Push yourself.Need some help? Check out the guide on character voice, or look at the Voice & Style Summer Camp exercises for additional tips!Share your pieces, however perfect or raw, with other KSWers by posting under the “ksw exercise” tag!Need an Example? Here’s a Poor One – Exercise 1 – The sun torched a white hole in the cloudless sky, reflecting off the old ranch home’s cracked beige paint—or, what was left of it. Underneath the deteriorating paint was only the original adobe brick, steadily caving to the will of time. How the wooden boards of the slanted roofs hadn’t caved in yet was beyond me, but the sun had bleached whatever color there might have been to a corpse gray.The dry ground and the parched patches of grass crunched beneath my shoes as I circled around what was left of the abandoned structure. There weren’t many windows, but each one was boarded up, the wood rotting and curling in on itself. Cracks as large as fault lines carved lightning bolts through the brick, thick enough for me to see glimpses of light on the other side.I stepped into what might have been a terrace, or a garden, or an orchard. There was no sign of any of that anymore, just more of the same dry ground. I wondered if children once played here. Maybe even grew up here. I searched for signs in the walls and blocked windows, any sign of the life that once lived here, but I found nothing.My fingertips brushed what was left of the broken wooden doorframe as I stepped into a dark room. An uncomfortably dark room. The air was so still that I felt each molecule of oxygen in the room stir when I took only a single breath. I squinted, taking in the empty room. The light from the doorway and the slits between the boards in the ceiling glittered off the particles in the air but when I braved another step forward, something caught my eye. A shadow against the filth of the concrete.My gaze followed the line of a pipe up through the ceiling, and I realized a stove must have sat here. Had the stove been taken when the people who had lived here left? Or had the stove been taken from them, along with any other sign of life here? Exercise 2 – I tilted my head. This place hardly looked like it’d be any source of protection, but with the sun sinking and the fingers of shadow stretching, there wasn’t much of a choice. We either stuffed ourselves in this old farmhouse—less emphasis on “farmhouse”, more emphasis on “old”—or we took refuge under a shrub.I tilted my head more. The beige paint was cracked, revealing the sneeze-colored brick underneath. How the wooden boards of the slanted roofs hadn’t caved in yet was beyond me, and there weren’t many windows, but each one was boarded up, the wood rotting and curling in on itself. Cracks as large as fault lines carved lightning bolts through the brick, thick enough for me to see glimpses of sunset on the other side. The whole of the abandoned building was pretty much the precise color and texture of a long expired corpse. Homey.Yeah. No. Maybe the shrub was more promising.Before calling over the others, it was probably wise to at least check the place out, make sure no serial killers or Santa Claus or Jesus was hiding in one of the five-star bedrooms, right?Right.I didn’t move. It was getting dark. And, well, I wasn’t afraid of the dark, but I was afraid of the dark, and peering across the walled-in terrace to the gaping black hole of a door, it looked damn dark in there.I broke into a sweat. Remember, these are purely examples (and edited lightly because motivation problems) and not a set of rules to tell anyone the right way to write – there’s no such thing. Take the examples as only one way to approach the exercises. Then, make your own. -- source link

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