Voices in the Head

Why do the voices in my head never tell me to go to Hawaii?

Nooooo, they tell me to sit in the study and make up stories about people who don’t exist.

I spent the first part of yesterday editing 25k of the novel – admittedly a large chunk of that time was spent on swearing as I picked up inconsistencies in plot and working out where it was I’d been writing ‘around’ the story instead of actually writing the story. *sigh*

After 5hrs of that I needed a break, so I went back to the Sourdough Cycle and started re-working the stories there, linking them so that character(s) who appear in one story reappear in at least one other story in the collection. I realised that all ten of the tales are told in first person even though each narrator is a different character. This begged the question: how do you make all those voices sound sufficiently different? How do you make them sound as though they’re discrete individuals, fully-rounded humans and not a job lot?

I don’t know. :-). What I’m working on is having a lot of conversations with the voices in my head, asking who are you? and listening to the answers. Hopefully I’m using that to inform who these characters are – and hopefully making them sound like real people and not just avatars of Angela.

Anyway, back to the writing. Cover me, I’m going in.