Developing your narrator style/voice

[Dabs]

I prefer the word style, personally. But on to the topic.

I've noticed that a big problem for younger/teen writers is the lack of distinct style in their narrative voice. This is something I struggled with until pretty recently, too, and when someone pointed out that my narrator's voice lacked substance and attitude, I was pretty surprised. Maybe it's just me, but I wasn't really paying all that much attention to it, and it seems like a lot of others aren't as well. It's essential, though.

If you're writing in the third person, then the narrator's voice is technically your voice. You can, of course, move in and out of a character's head, adopting that character's voice, but during the time between those movements, it's all you. You need to have an attitude, an input into this story, guiding your reader where you want them to without being too overt. This idea coincides with showing, not telling, but you need to go beyond that. You can show and still have a bland voice.

Here's an exercise:

Take the following sentence and turn it into your own, even if that means turning it into two sentence, or a paragraph, or several paragraphs:

Donny quickly lowered the drawbridge so the king could enter the castle.

Here's my example:

Donny churned the windlass, his muscles tensing and relaxing with each rotation. Sweat stained his wolf skins. The fur clung to his sinewy chest. His jaw tightened; of course he would be stationed at the heaviest damn door in the kingdom.

This isn't beautiful, but I hope it gets the point across. There are so many words and structures to choose from. There's no reason to limit yourself to something flat and uninteresting.

I chose to focus on Donny in my example, but there's much more to exploit in the original sentence. You'll notice that I left out both the king and the actual drawbridge in my example, because I found Donny the most interesting aspect. Perhaps you find the king more interesting, or the drawbridge. Or if you find Donny interesting, maybe for you he doesn't look like a big, muscly dude who sweat a lot and wears skins. There are a lot of ways to color this idea, to make it your own. That's what will help you develop your narrator's style/voice. What do you think is important, and what's the most colorful way you can explore that importance?

[Georgy]

[QUOTE=Dabs;142553].
Here is my version.
Donny churned the windlass. His mouth was open, he was breathing heavily. His eyes were bloodshot. The blue vein swollen on his perspiring forehead. Suddenly, Donny farted.
The King's eyebrows went up. He frowned. His white slender fingers took a white cambric handkerchief from his sleeve and covered his noble nose. Donny did not pay attention to such trifles, and continued to work.