Think, Feel, Speak

I’ve always been interested in the way people write and how their voice differs from project to project as well as how their voice in writing differs from their voice in conversation. I have been told that the way I write does not match my personality. I have also noticed friends writing not matching up with what I know of their personalities. I speak in a fast and loose manner. I don’t really analyze what I say before I say it, and very rarely do I display strong conviction in my rhetoric. However, this is different in the way that I write. In fact, my writing is more comparable to the way that I think than the way that I speak. After having a few deep conversations with friends who also write regularly, I realized that some of them write the way that they think, like me, and some of them write the way that they feel.
Though all of this seems to be pretty common sense, and the knowledge of these differences don’t really have any effect on how I compose my story (as I am comfortable writing the way I write), it does have a very good use. When I first started writing fiction, my characters all seemed to be overly similar. They all spoke the same, acted the same, and progressed along the same lines. Even if I gave different characteristics to the characters, they still seemed alike. This made me think of my own writing as boring. Now, after having realized there were three ways to write, I write each character in a different method. Depending on what I want the character to be like, I will write them in a different way (how I think, feel, or speak). I’ve found that doing this not only makes the characters independent and interesting, but also allows greater relationship conflicts between them.

D. Ryan