Finding A Character’s Voice

I have a neat little thing I’m doing in my wip (Book 5, Wing), which is introducing each chapter with a special scene, told in first person. A few of these scenes show a dramatic event in the character’s life. Others simply establish a mood or a central symbol. All introduce us to the interior life of the character, which is what I like about these scenes, and why they are important to the book.

The other thing that I like, but which is also sending me in circles about my own tail, is that there is no faking it in these scenes. Unlike the more standard, third person, plot driven scenes of the novel, characters cannot hide behind their current predicaments to disguise who they truly are. These scenes demand that I know the voice, the history and the deepest concerns of the characters.

This is a problem, because there are one or two I still don’t know.

There’s one in particular who is hard to catch. I’m rewriting his scene over and over again, in a different voice each time. Sometimes I play with the tense/person too. Does it sound “truer” to his character to speak in a languid drawl, in clipped staccato, in lazy profanity? I haven’t found the perfect tone yet.

To help me, I’ve also been shoveling through other people’s books on my shelf, and through public stories on the internet, and poetry, and even old volumes of Mark Twain, not so much for direct inspiration as much as to re-acquaint myself with a diversity of styles and think what defines them. I’m hoping that can help me clarify what defines my character. Hopefully, he won’t just come out sounding like Huck Finn. Especially since these days, even Huck Finn isn’t allowed to sound like Huck Finn. Do to protests, certain words in his vocabulary have had to be replaced by less obstropolous terms like “zombie.”

Huck Finn and Zombie Jim.