Making characters come alive

I was once asked to explain voice, and I thought it was kind of like the Supreme Court's definition of obscenity: You know it when you see it. Voice is attitude. Voice is how characters come alive off the page. Voice is making characters' feelings so real that readers feel like they know them and understand them.

Knowing who characters are deep down and being able to show it through their voice is important to writers because when you throw your characters into whatever you've cooked up for them, you want readers to believe the characters do what they do, even if they disapprove of the characters' actions. It's even better if you can get readers to feel like they're wearing the characters' shoes, to essentially become them. One way to accomplish this, to make a character feel that real, is to use detail to pull readers in.

I attempted this in my newest short story, "Out of a Fog," published last week in issue ten of Black Cat Mystery Magazine. The story opens with a college senior who is blindsided by her boyfriend of three years when he breaks up with her. I wanted the reader to feel her pain and dismay, how she's shocked to her core when the relationship she'd built her world around is ended with such suddenness, like an unexpected death. Here's how the story opens:

My boyfriend dumped me a week before Thanksgiving. It felt like a Mack truck slammed into me, and after I skidded across the pavement, leaving behind torn flesh and what remained of my heart, it kept on coming, rolling right over me. First the front tires, huge and heavy, their treads filled with razor-sharp pebbles. Then the back ones, too, ensuring I was good and flattened.

I then take you right into the breakup, showing it happening, how the boyfriend tries to make things better but every word is a twist of the knife. And the main character is left at the end of the scene emotionally destroyed and capable of doing ... well, who knows what? Pushed to her limit, she now can do things that the reader would condemn but also understand at the same time. 

That was my goal at least, to make the character's anguish so real that readers get why she does what she does as the story progresses, despite knowing it's wrong. Did I succeed? That's for readers to decide. 

If you'd like to read the story (as well as ten other new stories, including ones from fellow SleuthSayers Janice Law, Steve Liskow, and Elizabeth Zelvin) you'll need to pick up issue ten of Black Cat Mystery Magazine. Click here to download it directly from the publisher in epub and Kindle formats. You can pick it up in paper and Kindle formats from Amazon by clicking here. The issue should also show up soon in other online bookshops. 

Thanks to editor Michael Bracken for publishing the story. And, authors, if you have other voice tips, feel free to mention them in the chat.