A Quote by Amy Adams
I'm much more comfortable speaking through my characters' voices than my own.
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I find myself speaking through the other characters, putting ideas in their voices and heads. Writing almost becomes a splitting of myself into multiple personalities. But I don't write to make an argument on behalf of any of the characters, or to prove anything about a character. I think that's important that I be serving the story first and not my own point of view.
Novels have much more space than short stories, which gives you more leeway with the number of characters you can include. Even 'furniture' characters can be described and given speaking parts to develop background or atmosphere.
MEMRI allows an audience far beyond the Arabic-speaking world to observe the wide variety of Arab voices speaking through the media, schoolbooks, and pulpits to their own people. What one hears is often astonishing, sometimes frightening, and always important. Most importantly, it includes the newly-emerging liberal voices of reform and hope, as well as disturbing echoes of ancient hatreds. Without the valuable research of MEMRI, the non-Arabic speaking world would not have this indispensable window.
It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.
More men feel comfortable doing "public speaking," while more women feel comfortable doing "private" speaking.
They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.
We listen so much to everybody - more than ever, because we have a kabillion voices whose opinion we can access - and we care so much if everybody agrees with us. To bust through all of the noise is very challenging.
I think that I write much more naturally about characters in solitude than characters interacting with others. My natural inclination - and one that I've learned to push against - is to give primacy to a character's interior world. Over the three books that I've written, I've had to teach myself that not every feeling needs to be described and that often the most impactful writing more elegantly evokes those unnamed feelings through the way characters speak and behave.
I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.
I think I'm much more comfortable talking about other books than my own!
I've gotten to try on voices very different than my own, and I've become much more aware of structure than ever before. Also, you really weigh every word. There's no closer reading then when you read to translate.
With all of the characters I've played, I feel like I've tried to communicate through my eyes and face, as much or more than with words. That's something that I like to watch in films, and something that I like to bring to the characters that I play.
Maybe it's because we as writers are alone so often, are so attuned to listening to the run of our own thoughts, that we find it more natural to write down the thoughts rather than the deeds of our characters. But speaking as a teacher who has spent some twenty years slogging through manuscripts where thoughts and exposition pile up as thick as the aftermath of a California mudslide, I can attest to the power of the evocative detail, gesture, or figment of speech.
People experience all kinds of prejudice because of all different parts of themselves. And that doesn't make one part more important than the other. We live in a society that does not openly accept every kind of human being. And so the result is when you are yourself and someone who's marginalized, it becomes a revolutionary act - just being comfortable in your own body and being comfortable speaking, sharing your ideas. It's really amazing and also, like, kind of sad.
I leapt eagerly into books. The characters’ lives were so much more interesting than the lonely heartbeat of my own.
Like most people, I've grown a lot more sophisticated in my style choices. I know myself and what suits me better now than I did when I was much younger and feel more comfortable in my own skin.
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