Hearing Voices, Making Choices

I went back to the now definitely-going-to-be-a-short-story (if it merits completion; we'll see) last night. Once again, the voices were all over the map.

My attempts at straight prose - rather than scripts for comics, film or TV - have been few and far between. Perhaps because I wrote that way so rarely, the results tend to be interior pieces, very inside the protagonist's head. Reflection, internal monologues, more agonizing over what to do than doing it.

Well, that wasn't working for me last night. I'd spent the two writing sessions prior inside the main character's head, and as I said, I couldn't pin down his voice.

So I moved the conversation outside of his head and brought some other people into it. Four other characters. The result was a bit shaky - his voice still shifted, and I don't know that there's really enough personality in the dialogue to spread across four more characters.

It doesn't even read like prose. It reads like a script, mostly dialogue with brief descriptions of expressions, actions and reactions.

Something else that'll need a lot of fixing if the piece every ends up in a second draft.

But for me, last night, it worked as a change of pace. 814 words.