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How did you become a writer? For me, it was the drive to feel like I was one. I wanted the title, the passion, the historical dimension. So, at only seven years old, I started out by imitating what I knew. Like many young readers, the enormous white dragons, ancient sorcery, and enchanted cuisines of fantasy hooked me into those magical worlds, and all I wanted was to recreate that. But as I got older and entered the awkwardness of middle school, I investigated more realistic fiction/YA-style books, and through my writing, I tried to capture the ups and downs of a young teenager.
When I was thirteen, my mom moved my sister and I to Havana, Cuba – an impromptu decision to reclaim her roots. Suddenly, a world known to no one outside of this solitary island was unveiled before my eyes. Instead of white dragons, sorcery, and magical food, I found beasts of music emerging from every shadow of the old city, a language of codes, rhymes, and metaphors for intricate communication, and secret recipes concocted from the love of my great aunt’s hands. Instead of the tropes of a YA novel, I found a love story about our neighborhood’s mango tree, the decaying, cryptic architecture of the oldest avenues, and the coastal sea just two blocks from where we lived.
My Havana was so magical that nobody could write that story the same way. The city transformed how I wrote and understood writing – now, I no longer want to tell somebody else’s story. I want to tell my own.
It isn’t easy to find your own story and develop your voice, which is why we’ve compiled a list of clues to inspire you to find the magic in your life that you may be overlooking. From illuminating the characters concealed in your everyday classes to sharing the heated secret dialogues with your sister on a warm Saturday morning, discover how to sharpen a singular, one-of-a-kind voice: your voice.
Storytelling Elements
- Character
The hero, the villain, the lover, the sage, the ruler, the jester, the caregiver. We all know who they are: these archetypes appear in almost any book of almost any genre we read. Because who doesn’t want someone to save the day, someone to blame, someone to make us laugh when things get too serious?
And there’s nothing wrong with that stability, but your reader might want more than the basic outline of these characters. Not every hero is all good, not every villain is all evil. Not every lover is romantic, not every sage is elderly and experienced.
So, how do you write beyond the trope? Try asking yourself these questions to make a well-rounded character:
- What person/people in your life does the character remind you of, and why? Isolate some qualities that you find in this person/people that you want in your character as well.
- What traits about this character create a positive energy, and which create a negative one (this can be toward themself or toward others)?
- What is their appearance, and how might that affect their personality?
- Does your character have any hot takes or controversial opinions?
- What do they need and what do they want?
- How does their past fuel their actions?
Example of a strong, multi-faceted character: He killed two women and stole their belongings. Now, he’s evading the police. Yet you root for him and cheer him on – it’s impossible not to love Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
- Setting
Sight is debatably the most powerful of the five senses, and as writers, our instinct is to focus on the visuals of a setting during its description. But if you close your narrator’s eyes for a moment, another, richer world will unfold in their ears, noses, tongues, and hearts. Sounds devised by hands and feet. Scents left in the alley behind a restaurant. Tastes carrying memories of childhood, even the touch of a stranger on the street or a sister before bedtime.
Enhanced by these forceful details, the visuals of an environment offer a more startling, comprehensive statement to the reader.
Example: “In the back of the store various female voices were murmuring the rosary. The smell of salt cod was getting into my throat. I turned over some playing cards lying on the counter, and recognized the different suits of the Spanish deck: bastos, copas, oros, espadas, whose look I had forgotten. The gunfire was now coming at longer intervals. The storekeeper watched me in silence, smoking a cigar under a picture showing the sorry plight of the storekeeper who did business on credit and the sleek prosperity of the one who sold for cash only.” Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps
- Dialogue
Dialogue is your #1 resource for tricking your writer into believing the story. And while that might sound deceitful, it’s what your reader wants – to be fully immersed and convinced that your characters, your setting, and your tale is true.
How do you create convincing conversation in fiction? Start by writing down phrases or exchanges that you hear between people throughout your day. This will help you to explore how people really talk. In description, you want the words and sentences to collaborate strategically to create a poetic, magical piece of imagery for the reader; but dialogue is much different. You want it to be raw, real, and naive. You want pause, incomplete sentences, unanswered questions. You want memories and desires to infiltrate their words. You want your reader to know who's talking, even if there isn’t a speech tag. It doesn’t mean you can’t edit it to sound more genuine, but in dialogue, follow your instincts and channel inspiration from conversations or phrases that you hear in the day-to-day.
Example of powerful dialogue: Hills like White Elephants, Ernest Hemingway
- Plot
What drives your story: character or plot?
While plot is the foundation of any story, characters fuel it with their actions, desires, needs, interactions, and relationships. So, based on your character, you build your plot, asking yourself one essential question: What’s at stake? With one wrong move, what might happen in the plot that will make the character win something or, perhaps in a more tragic story, lose something?
And as a writer, there is nothing more powerful than writing about your own stakes. What are you scared to lose, or desperate to win? How can you turn that into a story that moves your characters forward?
Example of a character-driven plot: In Tracy’s Tiger by William Saroyan, a man named Tracy has an invisible tiger who one day is suddenly visible to all.
- Voice
My writer’s voice is always shifting, but the more I let my experiences take the lead, the more genuine and unique my writing becomes. I tell stories that are all driven by a magical, poetic world existing in my own mind, a world that I love recreating again and again. The story of how my mom cooks her black beans with a spoonful of sugar, of the blood red flamboyán tree in the backyard of my childhood house. The story of my neighbor who collected mangoes from the tree in our neighborhood garden, of the coastal ocean in Havana.
The mix of love and nostalgia for these memories makes my writer’s voice. So what are the little stories in your life that are unique to you? It can be hard to remember them, but try. They’re everywhere.
About the author:
Tula Jiménez Singer is a Cuban-American writer and third-year student at Northeastern University. You can read her work on The Green Blotter, The Teen Magazine, Write the World, The Weight Journal, Indigo Literary Journal, and Coelacanth 2022, among others. In addition to writing, she has been an intern at Write the World, GrubStreet, and The Boston Globe, but also works as the Social Media Manager of Spectrum Literary Arts Magazine, the Events Coordinator of Artistry Magazine, and a writer for Woof Magazine. Her pieces are a slice of her life — filled with jazz, oceans, identity crises, and chocolate. She writes because she cannot let it go.
