Character Voice

So I was caught up last night, looking for any hint that I might find the announced birth date of a character, for which I am including in a fanfiction I have been writing. And of course I could find nothing. So I get the fun of  picking a day which can serve as the characters birthday. That doesn't bother me too much. What gets me is that the more I search, the more I find that takes my attention away from the main purpose of my search. I ended up delving into spoilers on the Buffy comic, season 9 that was a little surprising.

I think the reason that this affected me so much was that I had a moment of clarity on another fiction in which I found a character's voice. Normally, you'd think this would hopefully be the case all the time that you are writing. But what a lot of people don't realize is that it just doesn't always happen. There becomes almost a stereotypical quality to certain characters among more well known fandoms. A joke gets made once that seems to appear in every fiction you see. Or certain words get used and they are overused. Especially if it's a short lived fandom in which the show it originated from only lasted two years or less. It doesn't give authors as much to work with like, for example, the Star Trek genre. With Star Trek, you've got the original show, the movies it spawned, the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise and lately the reboot of the movie that brings the entire world into a new timeline because of events in the movie. There are also all of the races introduced that a writer can focus solely on. It's a rich tapestry to draw from. Compare that to a more mundane world in which the characters are human, from earth, live in the same world we do and well... only so many bad things can happen, only so many hurdles to be overcome and then things become trite, overused plot devices that people get tired of.

So to me, trying to write a fiction or a crossover, finding a character's actual voice, as if you were actually hearing the character, as portrayed on the show, speaking the lines you've just written is a golden moment. I was thinking last night, as I couldn't sleep, just how difficult it truly is. In some fictions, you have writers that just want to tell the story they have. They may not care about plot or character development. They may not care about the character staying true to character. And some authors do. Some care passionately about it. I'm not quite middle of the road. To me, if a character is not familiar, I say so and try to write as little as possible so as not to screw the character up. If a character exhibits OOC traits, I better have a darn good reason for it being that way.

But at the same time, I recognized the validity of some of these seemingly out of character moments. Trying to find the character's voice, ideally one would delve into the history of the character and the moment. These are two very important things. But there is also the environment. The example that was going through my mind, was an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One that if you are familiar with the show, you'd be extremely familiar with. "The Body" in season five. I have watched this episode about a dozen times. I always find something in it. I've also watched it several times with Joss Whedon's commentary about it. The first time I saw it, I was quite a bit older than the main character, though not near as old as her mother. But I could still identify, because I am a daughter, whose mother was facing a life threatening situation that I could do nothing about.

There is a moment in the scene when the paramedics arrive, just before they come into the house, where Buffy fixes her mother's skirt. I didn't give it much thought because it made sense to me on an intrinsic level. It was always there, along with all the other little moments that seemed incongruous but meant something to someone. It wasn't until the first time I watched it with commentary that I realized what a big deal that moment was to me. Joss Whedon explained that it was a moment (paraphrasing now) where Buffy fixed her mother's skirt, because she didn't want the paramedics knowing that she had screwed up. (the major screw up in my mind was that she didn't put her mother on the floor to do CPR, but given that she was confused, upset, a lot of adjectives and admitted that she couldn't remember how to do CPR, this is believable.) When Joss said that, I was all like "are you out of your mind man? She fixed her mother's skirt because she knew that Joyce would be mortified to have these strange men come into her house and see her underthings. Even if it was just her slip"

Am I wrong? I don't think so. The reason that this was so prevalent on my mind is because that is how I and my mother would react in that situation. I would know how my mother would feel in a situation like that, at that age. Recent times might be different in which my mother would make a joke about giving the paramedics a thrill, showing a little leg for the boys. That sort of thing. And I would tease her. But in a death situation, that a character hasn't fully actualized, it is within the realm of possibility.

Joss himself said, and again paraphrasing, said that he wanted to show the mundaneness of grief. These little moments that take you unawares. Things seem real and then they don't. And even within grief and shock, it happens. We've all had moments where we are concentrating on one thing, and a random thought that has absolutely nothing or very little to do with the subject at hand pops into our heads. So stream of consciousness isn't always what one person alone makes it out to be. We never know when these moments may strike.

Case in point, I was shopping at the grocery store. As I moved into the cleaning aisle, I noticed that a certain brand of powdered cleanser was on a really good sale. I had six bottles of it in the cart, because my mother had asked me to pick it up, since it was no longer available where my grandmother shopped. Happy that I had remembered her request, it wasn't until two aisles later that my husband found me crying, because I had just realized that my grandmother had passed away six months prior to that.

Another point to make, when one is writing for a character and people claim that a voice is wrong, why is it wrong? We have the character, we have the history, we have the current events. Do many people give thought to the other interactions with characters or the environment that a character is in? Apparently not so much. But consider this. There was a woman, recently in my family life. She seemed great at first, but got progressively more abhorrent as time went on. We were well rid of her in our lives. But thinking on her, I still get extremely hot under the collar about some things that were never resolved with her.

And I have gone over this, silently in my head, with my husband, my children, various friends and family. And each and every time, my reaction varies. With my mother, I can laugh off her antics as the sad misdoings of a middle aged woman desperate for power and prestige that she will never achieve. With my husband, I allow him to vent about her until we both decide she isn't worth the energy. But with my children around me, I see red about her, for the simple fact that she threatened my eldest with legal repercussions in which my child was innocent of any wrongdoing, but this woman's assertions that her husband held more sway in the community would cause us the problems and not the other way around. Obviously that is not how the legal system should work, but the very fact that she had the audacity to threaten, all because I told her that my husband was not available to take her phone call was absurd. My children are in school and I am calm about the fact, but were they here, I would be furious.

So going back to my go-to example of the day with Buffy, how does this factor into character voices? Simple, as writers, we need to be aware of how Buffy would react to something if it were her mentor and Watcher Giles, telling her something. Or if she was with her best friends Willow and Xander as she receives information. Even environment can be a major factor. Does she take news better when she is in the comfort of her own home or out in the field (er... cemetery) where she can respond physically. Even something as simple as a picture nearby can be a motivator. If there was bad news and she sees a picture of her friends in her field of vision, is that where her mind goes first and thus dictates the nature of her initial response. What if it were a picture of her sister?

It is all of these things that make me believe that a truly dedicated fan fiction author has a more difficult task than a writer of original fiction. So many people don't see that. They assume that it's a slightly skeevy past time, coasting off others ideas and stealing material. They don't see that having a world and characters and situations provided is the same as with other genres. Take any story based in the real world and you have the world. It's populated with people, some stereotypical, some not. There are plenty of types to choose from. And situations, mix and match to your hearts content. Take a story from a genre. Say... murder mystery? Well the events of the story line will have to follow a certain progression. The thing is, that the characters motivations and responses will have to come from the authors mind. Same as in fan fiction, wherein it's tougher because someone else has already dealt with this. We, as fan fiction authors have to get into the writers, and note the plural there, because it's not always the same writer writing the characters time after time, but get into that writer's head to get into the character's head. It seems like a monumental task at times. So when I've written even a moment where it all feels true on a recognizable level, I feel like I've truly struck gold and only another person that understands all this, would empathize with me.

Yesterday, I found my character's voice.