Anna Wilson considers the importance of finding your own distinctive voice and in choosing a particular point of view to tell your story.
We all have a voice. Much of what constitutes voice will come down to ‘point of view’, which can often be a potential minefield. In fact, this seems to get emerging writers into more of a tangle than almost any other technical issue, and it’s certainly something that I struggle with every single time I sit down to write a new book. When I was writing my Vlad the World’s Worst Vampire series (Stripes Publishing 2017–19), I wanted to keep close to Vlad’s experiences. I wanted the reader to see things through his eyes and to taste human food as he tasted it, to see human school and human relationships as he saw them. I therefore chose to write the stories in ‘close third’, rather than from the perspective of an all-seeing, all-knowing, distant third-person narrator. However, I knew there were some things to be aware of in choosing this slightly limited viewpoint: the reader could only ever know what Vlad knew, could only ever see what Vlad saw; and I risked letting him stay in his thoughts too long if I left him on his own for any length of time. This led to me to invent a character who was nearly always with him – his pet bat, Flit.
If all this sounds like too much, and you still have no idea how to find your voice or which point of view is right for your work in progress, step away from the manuscript and give yourself a little exercise to loosen things up. Above all, have fun! It is in constantly trying things for size that we improve and grow as writers. And it is in playing around like children chattering to their first made-up scribbled pictures, that we learn to find our voice.
Anna Wilson is the author of over 50 books for children, including novels, non-fiction, poems, short stories, picture books and early readers. Her books include The Parent Problem (2016) and The Family Fiasco (2017), both published by Macmillan Children’s, and Spook-tacular Surprise (Stripes Publishing 2019), the latest in her Vlad the World’s Worst Vampire series. Her most recent picture book for children is The Wide, Wide Sea (Nosy Crow 2021). She produces an annual children’s almanac Nature Month-by-Month (Nosy Crow/National Trust). Anna runs creative workshops and is a tutor for the London LitLab and the Arvon Foundation. She will be an RLF Fellow at Exeter University from 2022. See her website for more information and read her blog. Follow her on Twitter @acwilsonwriter.
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quit impressive and interesting