Jun 3, 2011

Wannabe Writers #52 (Dual Narratives)

Wannabe Writers is my Internet writing group. Anyone is welcome to join. It's a place to meet other writers, ask questions, and get feedback. Basically, my posts are about my current writing progress, my problems, and any questions I need help answering. If you've created a similar post of your own lately, feel free to link in the comments.

Where I am in the writing process: Unpublished! And still currently speed-writing the first draft of the novel I'm calling ELIXIR.  I reached 42K yesterday!  Yay, so I wrote 6K in the last week.  That's pretty much amazing for me.  :)  My goal is to finish by the end of June. 

My current problem(s):  The book that I'm working on is a dual narrative.  Guy/Girl alternating voices.  I pretty much love when authors do this and so I'm giving it a shot.  Simone Elkeles does this especially well.  And I think my girl voice is pretty strong, but I'm more worried about my boy voice.  I'm not a boy, so I'm hoping that Jack comes across sounding manly.  Haha.  Or at least notably different from Kylie (the girl).  Here's how I'm trying to do to differentiate between the two characters:  I have a set of common words each character uses.  The girl character discribes things in more detail, noticing stuff I don't think a boy would.  Only the girl character uses ly discriptions.  Ex: Kylie says seriously a lot!  Jack rarely uses the word and if I have to use it for him then instead of 'seriously' he would say 'in all seriousness'. 

My question(s) this week:  Can you give me more ways to differentiate between the two seperate voices?  How to write in a male voice?

2 comments:

Jenny said...

I'm sorry, I have no advice on this one. Writing from a guy's perspective is hard, and rarely done right in books being published these days. Well, if you ask me, any way. I think your idea of words they use, though, is a good one. Good luck and congrats on the 42K. Holy crap, girl!

Stephanie said...

6K!!! Wow, what a great week for you1

My first, unpublished novel is dual narrative. I had so much fun doing that. I never wanted to- I thought it would be too difficult, but as the story went on, I found the two voices were completely different; they spoke totally differently in my head. When I finished, I went over it many, many times, and one of those times was completely for voice, checking each word to make sure that it was something my character would say (and making sure it didn't sound too much like what the other character sounded like). Dual narrative is a LOT of fun. Not sure if I'll ever go that way again, but I really enjoyed it. :) My advice is to just listen to your characters. Know them well, know what makes them tick, and their voices will come. :)