The right kind of voice

Since I’ve started writing Het Eiland in de Mist in November, I am nearing the end, but I haven’t finished yet. Instead, I came to a spluttering halt, observed the work in progress like a person walking around a house in scaffolds, and then decided to cut away most of the first scenes. On top of that, I felt that I needed to change from a third person narrative into a first person perspective; somewhat later I decided to also change everything to present tense. Big, big overhaul.

The reason for all this trouble was that I just couldn’t get the narrative right. It was, in turns, too stiff, too distant, too plain, and didn’t seem like the voice of a 16 year old. It turned out to be pretty hard to figure out how Nimue actually talks. I wanted it to be fresh and mature enough, but it just never felt quite right.

In retrospect I think that it was because I couldn’t decide how dark I actually wanted the story to be. As a result, I kept holding back because I thought that maybe certain things were not appropriate for young adults. Eventually I realized that I was making things harder for myself and more boring for the reader. After all, the YA literature out there can handle dark themes and edgy language, no problem! So why couldn’t I write it? Why was I stumbling over all my words, my sentences? Why was I doubting everything I wrote down? Was it too fancy, too matter-of-factly? Did I even know what I wanted it to be?

I figured maybe it was simply that I had forgotten what the voice of a young adult really sounds like. I have been sixteen of course, but oddly enough it’s hard to recall what I would talk like back then, or how I would think. Knowing very little teenagers, my best bet was simply to search for things I wrote back then. Good thing that I used to have a livejournal. My first entries are from 2003, making me around fifteen.

I scavenged the archive. Most of it was pretty silly; certainly not how I think Nimue would talk. But I did find some bits and pieces that possessed the right kind of grit, especially when I was touching on darker subjects in my own life. So that is what I want, and what I need, for Nimue: a voice that is real, raw and intimate.

After a few attempts to rework the initial first scenes, I finally gave up and decided that the plot wasn’t going to work that way, however much I kept altering it. Sometimes it’s just best to hit delete and start over from scratch. What I wrote instead is so much better for the story on so many levels, that Nimue’s voice feels much less like extracting blood from stones and much more like a natural thing.

How is this for you guys? When you’re writing, do you always get the voice right at once, or is it hard?  If so, how do you work on it?