SEARCHING FOR THE VOICE

We’ve all seen on the news at some point, people being interviewed about a particular situation or incident, where they explain their issues and discuss how they and people like them are searching for the chance to have their voice heard. This can very often mean that there are concepts or groups connected to a much larger subject that have been overlooked or even ignored, and those associated with those concepts or groups are fighting for their input not to be missed.

All important stuff, but a conversation for another day.

Today, the idea I want to poke with a stick is more literal in terms of dealing with the voice and is something which I fold into my characters when I write.

What makes a good voice?

So, first things first. Who’s spoken to me in the real world?

If you have, well done, good to have you along.

If you haven’t, what do you think I sound like?

Do I read like I have a deep voice? A squeaky voice? Quiet or loud? Soft or hard? What about my accent?

A few years ago, while trying to resolve a payroll system issue with someone from Head Office, when a conversation that had been going back and forward via instant messenger was stumbling just too much, I asked the other person to just give me a call and we could talk our way through it. When I answered, after a slight pause, her response was priceless.

“I didn’t expect you to sound like that.”

I asked why but it was just that I sounded different to what she’d been prepared for.

We create whole personas in our heads about what characters on the page are that seeing and hearing them differently can be jarring. Your favourite characters are, despite being shared with the whole world, very personal to us so if they don’t match up for whatever reason, it can be enough to drag us out of the story.

Writing characters for any story means that there’s going to be the need to have people interact so how they sound is vital. Imagine Darth Vader and the power that just his voice is able to convey. Dave Prowse was an amazing Darth Vader and was able to create nuance and emotion even under all of that armour but add James Earl Jones’ voice and you end up so very much further.

Now imagine Darth Vader sounded like Brick Top from Snatch.

A very different character indeed.

Voices are a vitally important aspect of how we can draw opinions of people but voices aren’t universally seen in the same way though.

Some hear a deep basso voice and find it compelling and powerful, but others find it sinister. A higher pitch voice could be less intimidating for many but it could also be perceived as weak. Add in different accents and things get even more confusing.

In the UK, a high level member of Parliament has received abuse on line due to her accent, with trolls claiming that she sounds ‘thick’ because of it so accents are things that are noticed but in that regard, just remember that Arnie wasn’t the one to do the German dub of The Terminator despite being able to speak the language. It was deemed that his accent was too rural and not in keeping with a killer robot from the future.

The right voice for a character can be a tough thing to find as an author because we can’t actually hear what these people are saying but when I write, I have these people speaking to me as I go. I try to make sure that if they do have things to say, I have the best chance of getting it on the page correctly so everyone can hear their voice.

Stay safe all.

REACH OUT

Here we all are boys and girls, 2019. A new year filled with any and all possibilities that we care to populate it with. From the depths of winter, we’re all climbing out and on towards the longer days of summer and each and every day gives us the chance to do anything we could imagine.

So the next question we ask of ourselves, are we taking all of the chances we could?

I watched a video clip today of an Arnold Schwarzenegger motivational speech and he was every inch the one man pep tsunami you’d expect him to be but he did talk about making the most of all of the time we have at our disposal rather than just letting life pass us by.

And that’s the wider point which moves this post away from it being simply about resolutions for the new year, most of which fall by the way by the end of January, and instead understand our longer term mentality to who we are.

Are you making the most of your life?

Are any of us?

How do you decide if the life you’re living is up to the standard?

And who decides that standard?

It’s a well known point that people are all different so with that in mind, how can you decide if one person is grasping the nettle of life and another is letting the chances pass them by, content rather just to stare out of the window and enjoy the whooshing sound they make as they rocket along?

Would that mean that we have no way to look at someone and decide for ourselves or that each person should really be looked a on a case by case basis?

Imagine a race between two people.

They’re both running the same distance, say the 100 metres, they’re both wearing the appropriate attire and have spent years training to be the best that they can possibly be to get to this point. They ready themselves, the starting pistol fires and off they blast, their arms and legs driving like pistons as they cover the ground, only for one person to finish at about the same time that the other has reached only 75 metres. By the time the second person crosses the line, the winner is almost in the showers!

Clearly the winner is the one who was better but that’ll never be the whole story. The winner finished well outside their own personal best and in the grand scheme of things, didn’t really set the world on fire whereas the loser, the one who finished WELL behind, delivered not only a seasons best time, but a personal best and indeed, a national record for their country over that distance.

The person who won did so while working well within their powers but the person who lost squeezed everything they could out of themselves when it mattered. The winner could realistically be told they could have delivered more but the loser gave everything they had, and exceeded the best levels of performance ever seen in their entire country.

We all need to push ourselves. We have to set ourselves goals to ensure we’re making the most of the time we have but that doesn’t mean that looking at your neighbour to see how you’re getting on is the way to go. One person’s staircase is another’s Everest. What we all have to be able to do at the end of each day, is look into the mirror and be happy that we gave our very best, and keep pushing forwards to whatever goals we decide to set for ourselves.

In for a penny …………………..