The following list from Ashes contains slang, army terms, farming terms, and unusual turns of phrase: To see the process in reverse, you can create a list of out-of-the-ordinary words a character says (in speech or in first-person narration). You can do this exercise multiple times for different areas of the character’s experience. Think about subjects the character will be knowledgeable about, appropriate slang or colloquial speech, and age. Then write down all the words that character might have in his or her vocabulary. In Spellbinding Sentences, long-time writing teacher Barbara Baig suggests an exercise to capture the right words for a character. Examining her strategy can help us as writers to develop our own characters’ unique voices. Isabel narrates her search for her sister Ruth and for her freedom, carefully navigating the countryside, the warfield, and her relationships with Ruth and Curzon.Īnderson creates a distinctive vocabulary for Isabel, one that develops in the course of the novel. After a shift to her companion Curzon’s narrative in Forge, Isabel’s first-person narrative returns in Ashes. Readers first met Isabel, a young enslaved American, in Chains, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction. In Laurie Halse Anderson’s Ashes, the final book in her Seeds of America trilogy, Isabel Gardener tells the story in a voice that is hers and only hers. Writing, at its core, is about choosing the right words. Those choices connect to a character in a first-person narrative. Ashes by Laurie Halse Anderson (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2016)