« Good News | Main | Character Education »
April 06, 2006
The Day After
I started preparing months ago for my talk, Voice Lessons: Finding Your Character's Perfect Pitch, for the Seattle chapter of the SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators). As if speaking on that topic to my colleagues wasn't stressful enough, I had also decided to take my Power Point skills public for the first time.
All went well. I remained upright, there were no technical glitches, people laughed where I had hoped they would, there was great audience participation and great questions afterwards. Two strategies I shared that seemed to be really helpful to people were writing letters as your character to other characters in the story (even if these letters won't appear in the book itself) and generating lists of words that are organic to your character. To do this, you have to know how your character experiences and understands the world. For example, Hattie is a bad baker. So she knows about cakes that get flat or lumpy. That's why, when she describes the Montana landscape in a letter to Charlie, she writes: "Remember that sheet cake I baked last year for your birthday? Montana is a bit smoother of surface but not much." And she also plays baseball which is why I had her describe the hailstorm that ruined her crops like this: "Like a pitcher on fire, throwing fastball after fastball, heaven struck me out and good."
If you want to read one person's take on my talk, check out Jaime Temairik's chompoblog. Jaime is the marketing genius behind the first chapter sampler we've created. If you want one, email me.
Posted by kirby at April 6, 2006 05:57 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.kirbylarson.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/5
Comments
Thank you so much, Kirby for your wonderful talk on finding a character's voice! I was enchanted. It was fascinating to learn how you searched for Hattie's voice through writing short poems about her world. That idea really hit me because your poems were incredibly powerful and evocative. Your great-grandmother is very fortunate to have an angel like you remembering her for all of us. Many many thanks. (PS Your Power Point was great. I never would have known it was your First Time.)
Posted by: Colleen Lourie at April 9, 2006 10:06 PM