How To Write Good: A Lightly Salted Guide to Stepping Up Your Wattpad Game.

Voices in Your Head

When you planned your novel, at what point did you consider who was telling your story and why?

If you're in the majority, you didn't. At all. You made this up on the fly based on personal preferences that are derived from other peoples' work, but how you tell your story is just as important as the story you're telling.

The voice offers perspective, which is not the same as POV (for the uninitiated, that's Point Of View), and that perspective will change how we read a situation and the meaning we derive from it.

There are three kinds of voice, no matter who's doing the telling: limited, objective, and omniscient, and if there's enough interest I can break these down further, but for now consider the following paragraph told in an omniscient, third-person voice.

     Rolland was a nano technician at Braincorp. He liked Aspen, the new girl in programming. She thought he was nice enough but too quiet. Rolland spent his free time alone at home. Aspen spent hers with friends. It wasn't very likely they would ever find each other.

This is technically sufficient. It's coming from somewhere outside the one experiencing the plot, some nameless entity who could be anyone that has observed these two intimately with equal interest.

Blah, blah, blah, who cares? The slice of story above doesn't actually tell me anything because it's too objective. I have no connection with either of these bozos. You'd get more tension sitting in a coffee shop counting the Caramel Frappuccino's, and I don't give a flying flip if they ever end up together.

We can do better. Let's revisit this by switching to a limited third-person perspective.

     Rolland was a nano technician at Braincorp. As he worked, his thoughts frequently turned to Aspen, the new girl in programming. They seemed to have a lot in common, and she was pretty, but Rolland didn't think he had a chance with her. She was one of the A-listers, got invited to the best parties, and her social calendar was always full. Rolland, on the other hand, spent his evenings with T.V. dinners and his XR Occulens, escaping into other realities or playing games with friends he'd never met.

Nothing happens here that didn't happen in the first version, but now we know Rolland is a boring loser who will never get the girl because he's already made up his mind that he'll fail. We see where he is and where he wants to be, and have some insight into his ability to get there. We have goals. We have foreshadowing. Instant drama.

What happens if we turn it around?

     Aspen met Rolland a few times when she had business in the nanotech division. He seemed nice enough, but they worked on different floors and rarely crossed paths. When they did, he'd smile and look away, which was a red flag in her book. Her job programming A.I.'s kept her busy, and she felt no motivation to manage other peoples' insecurities. When she was free from the shackles of the office chair, she preferred losing herself in loud music, sweaty dancing, and uncomplicated friends.

Same information, same story, new perspective. Aspen isn't too cool for school, she's just emotionally lazy. She noticed Rolland but can't be bothered to take action because it looks like he comes with baggage. The empathy generated by each of these paragraphs builds a completely different set of expectations, even though the actual events of the story may be identical. Which arc is the most interesting? Whose story are you telling? What audience are you trying to capture?

Incidentally, the opposite dynamic is just as important. If you choose the first perspective, Aspen enters the story as an unknown. We don't know what drives her, or what odd combination of events would be required to get her to notice Rolland. She's a catalyst for action - a goal with no map - and can be used as a motivating force to pull Rolland out of his introverted lifestyle. If you take up Aspen's story, Rolland is now the mystery. Why is he shy? How can we make him spark Aspen's interest? Does he have a habit or behavior or quality that begins to raise questions in her mind?

If you have 90 minutes you're looking to destroy, watch He Said, She Said. It explores this exact theme and also stars Kevin Bacon.

Moving swiftly back to narration, you can move even deeper within the mind of the characters by changing it to first person, but then we get into tense, and I want to save that for the next chapter.

This chapter isn't designed to sell you on a third person objective or limited voice, it's designed to demonstrate that VOICE MATTERS, that it affects what your readers can know and when they can know it. You should choose one that suits both your story and your ability.