Roadtrip to NaNo: How Motown Can Teach Your Characters To Sing

November is coming. To get ready, we’re taking a Road Trip to NaNoWriMo. On the way, we’ll hear from writers about how their cities can inspire your novel. Today, volunteer Municipal Liaison Owen in Detroit, Michigan, helps your characters sing:

Welcome to Detroit! While you’re here, make sure you visit the Motown Museum, in celebration of Detroit’s rich musical history. What better place than Detroit, the home of the Motown Sound, to learn how to make your characters sing?

I’m talking, of course, about voice.

It’s important for characters to have voices that are distinct and believable. The time to develop voice is after we’ve done some basic design work on our major characters: we have some idea of who they are and where they’ve come from. Now it’s time for them to come alive on the page.

Unique voices make characters real to the audience through dialogue and narration. One thing I’ve found helpful is putting two or more characters together and asking a question. Let them debate the answers. Script format can help make this quick, without any confusion about who is talking.

Then think about what makes Motown special: it’s the unique fusion of soul and pop. Use fusion when you’re writing your character’s voice. Flesh out their background. Where were their parents from? What TV shows did they watch when they were young; what music do they listen to? Who do they imitate? Voice is deeply personal and the influences on each of our voices are many and diverse. Motown was all about people finding their voices and when it burst onto the national and international scene, it changed everything.

Once you’ve got a voice that feels right to you, you’ve got the issue of calling it up quickly. It can be difficult to construct these voices, and get back into them quickly after we’ve paused to do something unimportant like eating or sleeping. During NaNoWriMo, we can’t always take a few hundred words per day getting back into our characters’ heads. We need quick tricks to regain their voices right away.

This is when I recommend images or collages. Sometimes, photographs can remind us of a person so completely that it’s like they’re in the room. Try keeping images around that are close to your characters’ appearance, or represent their interests and places that are important to them. You can also use catch phrases. No need to write them into the story, just go back and find a phrase (or even a paragraph) from your writing exercises that really captured that character’s voice. Rereading something like that can put you right back into that character’s head.

Your characters will seem more realistic if their speech is memorable. Practicing these voices will help you enter the world of your characters more quickly, and help them sing off the page!

Owen Bondono returns to Detroit as NaNoWriMo ML for the fifth time this year. He writes science fiction, magical realism, young adult, and combinations thereof. When he isn’t writing, he’s studying to become a middle school English teacher and working to inspire special education students in the city.

Photo by Flickr user lundgrenphotography.