How (and why) I hold voice auditions for my main characters
It is a maddening way to go about writing fiction, but there's a method to the madness.
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Let me preface this by telling you that my approach to writing (and revising, and probably even reading) is heavily informed by my two decades plus as a copywriter. With the exception of like one year when I worked in-house at a cosmetics company, I’ve always been freelance, which means I work on many different projects instead of only one account. During my busiest periods, I might work on menacing language for a pharmaceutical launch in the morning before transitioning to a breezy but confident voice for sanitary products and then ending my work day with upwardly mobile language for a line of luxury male razors. For my entire professional life, I have been paid for my abilities to write like different people. Which makes fiction writing hell.
Why? Because there are so many characters to choose from, so many tones of voice to choose from, so many influences and references and target audiences to hit. It’s very (very) hard for me to turn off my inner copywriter and isolate the voice that will work best for a fiction manuscript. Which is why I audition my main characters whenever I’m starting a new book.
The way it works is this: Once I’ve identified a premise for a novel, I write 2-3 pages in different character voices to test out not only which character has the chops to be the narrator, but also what tone and sensibility the book should be written from.
I’m going to show you what this looks like for the novel I’ve been toiling over for the last year. Because I am superstitious and still actively working on this project, I’m going to call this “Project 2022” instead of using its working title, which has changed like sixteen times.
I’ll share an excerpt from four different auditions for Project 2022 and then spell out my thoughts (as casting director ;) on whether this character had what it took to be my book’s hero.
In terms of the premise, all you need to know is that this novel takes place in suburban Connecticut and is about performative feminism, and was supposed to have a murder mystery element to it.
Audition 1: Margaret Harrington-West
The question: What would the novel read like if I wrote it from the POV of the book’s most unlikeable character, the town snoot?
Margaret Harrington-West woke up beneath her lightweight floral comforter feeling in her bones that it would be a banner Button Hollow day. Six days into May and already she could tell that the summer season would be a ripe one: in April it had rained, and so far the May skies were high and sweet; her car windshield was pollen-dusted, the sun in the morning was liquid, not harsh. Her knees still had life in them: she could feel them yearning to push out of the bedclothes, rising toward the early sun like roots.
At the foot of her bed, her ancient Irish Wolfhound, Gunner lay snoring into his paws. She wasn’t supposed to let him sleep there; not because of the damage he was doing to her bedding or because of the distinctive rankness his dogness was lending to her bedchambers, but rather because he had a tendency to cut off her circulation with his weight; shifting from his allotted space on the southeastern corner of her mattress to, in the middle of the night, her shins, a shift she’d both come to welcome and to sleep through, but was proving detrimental to her aging lower legs, which were greeting their sixth decade on this earth in a mottled form. The varicose veins she didn’t care about, it wasn’t like she was setting out in skirts, but the possibility of blood clots that her doctor warned her of, that, she didn’t like. She nudged Gunner with her right foot, more to discern whether there was still blood following to her appendages than to actually wake him: at nine years old, he was in the same creaky shape as her. His snoring halted, than recommenced. She was able to move her toes. Bonny news: there’d be time in the garden for her, today.
The verdict: This character works well when she’s a stock character. I need her to be the town busybody, I don’t need her to be fully fleshed out. Accordingly, that makes her the wrong choice for my book’s hero. Sorry, MHW!
Audition 2: J.C. Gedman
The question: What would the book read like if it was written by an outsider with social anxiety forced to leave her hippy dippy enclave in Arizona for financial reasons to cohabit with her estranged and wealthy older sister in a gated Connecticut neighborhood?