I finished the first draft of my novel Rent is Theft. That sumbitch took 7 years to get through, and unfortunately the second draft will surely be a year or more in coming. One issue I had throughout was feeling like I didn’t have a distinctive voice / personality for my MC Courtney, but through a quirk of foolery late in my process, I found a fun gimmick to use. She started telling stories to her gf, and I thought to myself, Satan, you can make storytelling her thing.
I’ll have to do a lot of work to make it happen earlier in the book, in the parts I’ve written over the last several years. In the meantime, if you want a sample of her storytelling styles, here is an excerpt I amused myself with posting on tumblr. The uncensored version is funny, the censored one is kind of hilarious. The background of the scene is that the characters are living illegally in a building that is getting a heat treatment, and for lack of planning ended up having to suffer through the heat. To get by, Courtney starts to tell stories. This is about someone they know named Graeme, though they call him Grime.