Blog-Novel Writing Style

With all stories written in the first person (as told by the character herself) it's important to choose an appropriate and distinctive voice and stick with it.

Our advice to other blog-novelists is to think about your character's voice before you even start writing your first post. Make sure the style you want to use matches the background of the character you have. Once you're into the story, it will be difficult or impossible to go back and make style changes from the beginning.

As you write, keep in mind that blogging is an immediate activity for your character--the events of the story have just happened, or are still happening, and the emotions of the moment should work their way into the tone. Avoid the narrative distance often seen in books, where characters may be recalling events that happened months or years before the telling.

Finally, remember that your character's word choices and writing style tell readers a lot about who they are and where they're coming from. Figure out how the character's personality and background are different from yours, as the author, and be sure to reflect that difference in your writing style. If more than one character is writing the blog, each should have a distinctive voice.

For "Giant Girl Rampages" we wanted Melly Mills to be articulate and literate enough to tell her own story, so we worked a love of books into her background. She's also been isolated on a farm for her whole life, only recently gaining access to the Internet, so she's not going to be using any texting slang, emoticons, or pop-culture references. She hasn't read a lot of blogs, so Melly mostly writes the way she talks, in an informal tone with colloquialisms she picked up from her parents.

Melly uses shorthand words like cuz and 'tho because we wanted to remind the reader that this is a blog, rough and unfinished, and not a polished and edited novel. We adopted the triple-exclamation-point so that Melly can express strong emotions--and because we imagine her voice, powered by giant-sized lungs, to be megaphone-loud. We even wrote that down as a rule in our notes: Always three exclamation points for Melly, never two or four!!!

If we've done our job, a reader will believe that Melly's blog is actually being written by Melly and her words couldn't have been written by anybody else.