Voice and the Living Spirit of a Character...

If you are writing a book in the third person limited with alternating chapters from different characters' perspectives, how can you use language to create voices that are unique to each character? 

I hadn't given much thought to this .... not at this stage of the writing... but a comment by my friend Elizabeth after she read Shayna's chapter Chain of Words really got me thinking.  Elizabeth said that she loved Shayna and the prose poem genre.

Wow!

It hadn't occurred to me that I was writing in a prose poem genre, but I went back and reread this piece and other pieces from Shayna's point of view and said, "Yes!"   Of course these pieces could be prose poems.  And it made sense organically for this particular character who lives in her own rich, deep and complex inner world, a girl who is obsessed with words to have her story told in this poetic way.

So Elizabeth's comment ( shared on Facebook) became a spark for me to think about my other characters. As the book is writing itself now, there are three main characters whose lives intersect.  Without realizing it, I have been using language slightly differently depending on which one is the focus of a particular chapter.

Now that I have seen the way in which the Shayna chapters read like prose poems and how that makes sense for the kind of interior dreamy girl that Shayna is, I can be more conscious about the choices I make with form and language - not just for the dreamy Shayna, but for the practical Tiger Mendelbaum and the lost and confused Bobby ( Oh Say Can You See) Olansky.

Elizabeth also felt the magic surrounding Shayna and told me that she's seen a girl like her dreams.

I definitely believe there is magic Shana -- an ineffable connection to something larger than myself that I have tapped into.

My daughter Ali is expecting her first child. After she learned she was having a boy, she told me this. "If I were having a girl, we were going to name her Shayna."

Shayna.

Ali didn't know that I was writing a book. And she didn't know about this magical girl who's come to live in my dreams along with her friends Bobby and Tiger.

Shayna is my mother's Yiddish name. Ali didn't know that either.. just felt some kind of mysterious pull to that name.

Shayna means pretty and this girl who has come to live in my dreams is beautiful in an other-worldly way, coming into the full power of her beauty at adolescence, a time when other girls become awkward and all out of proportion.

Shayna -  who sees the world like a prose poem.