Posts tagged voice
One thing that often annoys me in historical fiction or fantasy books is the dissonance between the writing style and the events and historical period described in the book. The writing is usually ...
A relative (who is no longer living) wrote a number of autobiographical pieces which I would like to publish in a book. I would like to include four or five chapters written by myself, that would s...
To help create descriptive differences in the way my characters talk I am looking for a list of how each language sounds. For example the German language has lots of clusters of consonants, and co...
I have read that a lot of passive voice deadens the story to 2 dimensional even if you are just trying to show something that takes time when you use the passive voice. I quite often use passive v...
Before I launch into this, I've perused these threads and they don't quite answer the specific question I have in mind: When to keep the passive voice and when to remove it When *should* I use pa...
Example: A fighter is someone who fights for the pleasure of the spectator, against his or her own safety. How can I clearly show that his or her refers to the fighter and not the master?
I'm currently writing a novel with 3-4 character POVs in it - two male, two female. Each have different upbringings, different cultural backgrounds, different professions, different motivators and ...
I am choosing between two sentences: We display the values of X in Table 1. The values of X are displayed in Table 1. The first is more action-oriented, the second is more passive but focuses o...
I am someone with no formal writing background, who has come to love writing for the fantasy adventure role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (fifth edition) during my free time. I am currently ru...
What sites, libraries, or other organizations have strong, easy-to-browse collections of letters, diaries, and other primary sources that are great for authors doing research for historical fiction...
I'm Jewish. My middle-grade fantasy novel is very Jewish. Most of my characters are either Jews or converts/future converts or people with at least one Jewish grandparent. But some are not. My ...
What should a character interview contain to be successful where the goals are: characters with strong voice who are established with a distinct 'personhood' (?) and are generally interesting to fo...
In my novel, my protagonist joins a team with four other characters to go on a quest. Each character in the team is supposed to contribute to the journey in someway and all are mentioned in a proph...
I have a piece of dialogue which sounds great in my head, and the way the character says it is important, but it never looks right when I type it out. At first I tried this: “Looking and lookin...
I like to read across a variety of authors, genres, and publication dates. Whenever I sit down to write something of my own immediately after marathoning a book or series, I tend to unconsciously u...
I always hear people say, "Write in the active voice," so I decided to eliminate passive voice from my writing (as much as possible). It made my writing stronger, but I wonder: Does writing too muc...
An opinion exists that overusing of the passive voice can make writing harder for reading and understanding. Is it true for all kinds of writing? How to follow this advice without overemphasizing ...
Any book recommendations that teach you how to make sure each character sounds different in dialogue and is recognizable even without dialogue tags? Any book tips to learn more about character deve...
My protagonist uses a lot of extensive vocabulary and is quite verbose. The novel I am writing is a first-person narrative, and my protagonist is the narrator of the novel. An extensive vocabulary...
I'm writing a report for a piece of University coursework, but I understand that I should avoid referring to myself as "me" or "I". I've seen an example piece in which the author occasionally refer...
I'm having a very hard time finding a list and examples of stylistic subgenre conventions. To be specific: how genre writing impacts things like sentence length, dialogue, the tone of adjectives, ...
There are some works that have a certain kind of voice, which is due to their rhythm. But is this due only to word order and like things, or do their authors actually choose synonyms to achieve rhy...
Of course, there aren't any rules in writing. But when something is used in exaggeration (or even Isn't used at all!) without prudence, it can ruins everything. A voice is like a guide to see the ...
I have roughly 30 speaking characters; about ten speak often enough that their voices should be well defined. I have compiled, from web sources, various considerations when building distinct charac...
This is not a question about slang, but about swearing and word creation. I have a character who uses swear words, and this is part of his voice. I do not use real swear words. I want the sense of...
I'm writing a sci-fi script for a T.V. pilot (my first) in which there is, initially, an AI (that runs a spaceship) with no avatar (that comes later). It is not a narration when that "character" sp...
I've just approved my typeset manuscript and re-reading the book, I'm aware that it sounds very far away from my internal voice. Whilst it has all of the elements in practice, the colour and fluenc...
As a novelist my preference is for what I call an 'active narrator'. The terminology confuses most as they think I'm talking about sentence construction and the benefits of 'active' or over 'passiv...
In a situation where a POV character isn't lucid enough to see or interpret what's going on around them, I find myself constantly describing things either in passive voice, or by using the word 'so...
I'm in the process of planning a story right now, without the intention of sharing it it with others, but I would like it to be comprehensible if I do. It's set in the 1880s and is formatted like a...
I was critiquing a friend's novel and I noticed that all the characters seem to have the voice of my friend. Speech fillers, vocabulary, sentence structure all seems the same throughout. How c...
So, in my story, a main character gets sick with a virus. (Not a real one). I alternate POV's, and she is one of my favorite to write. I'm pretty sure her mindset would change slightly. But how? Pl...
I'm writing up a new story (which I've asked for help on in a few other places) which is a little outside my forte. The majority of my current work is saturday-morning cartoon stuff, light fantasy ...
I'm in the early stages of a story with a large number of characters, a complex backstory and a long history. This is mostly because I crafted the world myself for months before deciding to write i...
We are working on a technical documentation project which includes the rewriting, modernization, restructuring, enrichment of the content. I'm doing the content rewriting and translation parts of t...