Adding Voice and Life to a Story: An Exercise

Man looking into the distance

Some stories feel alive. You know them, and I know them. I see them in writing workshops and in MFA applications. The story grabs you from the beginning, and you see the world and characters nearly immediately.

How do you know when you’re being told a story? What does someone say to you that makes you pay attention, that makes you want to find out what happens? I think of when a friend says over lunch, “You’ll never believe what happened to me today.” Immediately, I’m paying attention. I trust that friend to have a point, and for that story to have a beginning, middle, and end.

One of my favorite exercises to add voice in fiction asks the writer to imagine that friend, that family member, recounting what happened to them that day. The exercise comes from Francine Prose’s READING LIKE A WRITER, a book that really examines how to read other people’s fiction in order to improve your own. In Chapter Five: Narration, Prose talks about tricking herself into writing a novel by imagining the story being told by one character to another.

In the chapter, she discusses the advantage of this method:

“[Imagining one character telling the story to another] permitted me to skip over slow parts of the plot by having the listener become impatient and hurry the narrator along, while, conversely, an expression of doubt or a request for clarification could slow things down and let me explicate some tricky point of causality. At the same time, it forced me to confront the painful question of whether what I was telling was actually a story or merely, say, a rumination. Was it something one character would tell another in the way that people tell stories about their lives? Would anyone imagine that these recounted events would hold another human being’s interest, and would the reader believe that anyone, even a fictional character, would stay focused and pay attention all the way through?”

By imagining one character speaking to another, Prose is telling us to skip the boring parts. By imagining the listener, we automatically give form to the story — here’s what they need to know and here’s what they don’t. In addition, we come to know the speaking character better, which also automatically shapes voice. “Let me tell you what happened,” the character says, and the reader is on board.

EXERCISE: In your manuscript, can you imagine one character as speaker and one as listener? Do you need to invent a listener (maybe a policeman or a town? It’s always really interesting when someone’s giving a postmortem of a crime, for instance.)? How would the speaker character tell the story? How would you change what you’ve written so far?

Now, record yourself as that character telling the story. Just for the moment, separate the writing work from the story work. What changes for the story you tell? Are these changes worth incorporating into your story?

It’s such a simple exercise: imagining a speaker and a listener. And yet it’s a really powerful tool to make a story come to life.

Have you tried this technique? If so, what were your results? Do you have another method for waking up a story that doesn’t quite spark just yet?