The Voice Dilemma

Our cluster group's assignment this week was to look at pieces (ours or others) and determine how the language informs the voice. Considering that voice is the one big thing my thesis is currently lacking, this seems all too appropriate (go Shel!).

When initially thinking about this, I was reminded of an instance in Beginning Fiction Workshop with Cristina Garcia a couple of years ago. Our in-class prompt was to write a scene using only dialogue to convey two completely different characters; we needed to differentiate between these two individuals using only their voices, which is WAY more challenging than at first it may seem. I don't think I quite understood the intent of the prompt; my approach was to distinguish between my two characters simply by giving one of them a lisp, so that when we went around the table and read our pieces aloud, it would be obvious to the class that two different people were present in my little scene. The result was that I became completely embarrassed, blushing furiously (something I did on a regular basis in Cristina's class, and which she has yet to let me live down!). But thinking about it afterward, I realized that I kinda missed the whole point that she was trying to make with this exercise.

When we discuss character voice, we mean more than just the sound of one's physical voice as they are talking (duh). I still get stuck on the character vs. narrator thing from time to time, which trips me up, but I know that voice, at least the kind that I need to find for my thesis, is the way that a character articulates his/her thoughts, the type of language they use, the diction and vernacular they may employ, basically, how their thoughts become words, and the way that these words convey those innermost thoughts and feelings. Since readers cannot see these characters for themselves, the characters need to have strong voices to support the personalities that we as authors give them. Voice is one of the only tools we have to really make a character's personality stand out.

In the case of my own thesis, I think what I am facing is a difficulty in separating myself the author/narrator from myself the character. I've talked about my dilemma in figuring out what age to make my character, and I think what I've done is avoided committing to a certain character age - and thus the mindset that goes along with that age - by reverting to my "journalist voice". I use big words and complex sentence structures when trying to write in the voice of a little kid, because I haven't quite decided whether I really want to be in the voice of that kid or in the voice of the adult looking back, so I try to hang out somewhere in between, which doesn't work. I need to pick a character and a voice and commit to it, and I need to remember that writing me as a character is no different than writing any other character when it comes to the rules of voice. However...

I've been bouncing around another idea in my head all week, and I need other opinions. When we sent out our pieces for critique among the groups last week, one of our classmates suggested that I might consider changing my piece to fiction, to make it more dynamic (and this could possibly help with my voice-creating issues). I haven't been able to stop thinking about that suggestion, because it made me wonder whether it would be possible to mesh the two distinct ideas I had at the beginning of the semester into one narrative.

What I mean is this: you will recall that I was debating between the nonfiction idea I've been working on, and the fiction idea based on a piece I started a few years ago in a YA class. This was the piece about adoption and the fantasy of being reunited with one's birthmother. Well, when my classmate suggested switching my piece to fiction I thought, what if I take the basic adoption premise, and use the Catalina idea I've been working with to move that narrative along. As in, the story is set in Catalina, and I use my experiences to shape my character's story. Gah, I'm having a difficult time explaining this. Basically what I'm getting at is that the adoption/reunion story could in theory be perpetuated by the Catalina narrative. The birthmother and daughter could have a mutual connection to Catalina Island (I've had this opening scene in my head all week where the birthmother as a teenager is sitting on the balcony of the condo in Catalina, on vacation with her family, and she has just found out by taking a test she bought at the beachfront drugstore that she is pregnant). I can see this being a prologue, and then the story jumps to the "present" as the narrative shifts to the daughter at, say, age 16, as she searches for her birthmother and Catalina Island is somehow what brings them together. I can totally see this daughter character as being like a fictional version of me, only in an imagined reality, and I feel like it would be much easier for me, since I have so much more experience writing fiction, to give her a distinct voice that way.

The only problem with this is that I have no idea where it's going, and I have only so much time to figure it out... but I can't get the idea out of my head. I can't help but think that there's something to it that merits acting on... I need other opinions. What are your thoughts???