{"id":66,"date":"2025-06-11T09:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-11T07:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/writing-in-many-voices-how-to-make-a-child-a-woman-and-a-monster-think\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T10:06:47","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T08:06:47","slug":"multiple-points-of-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/en\/multiple-points-of-view\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing in Many Voices: How to Make a Child, a Woman, and a Monster Think"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

June 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first article, I told you about my universe turning into a three-thousand-year labyrinth. But even before I got lost in it, another challenge was waiting for me, one more intimate, more delicate. A challenge that had nothing to do with dates or maps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I needed to make my characters think<\/em>. Really think. Each one inside their own head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The gamble of multiple voices<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first part of my novel isn’t built on the supernatural. It’s built on a far more ordinary horror: the daily life of a woman under the thumb of a violent man, and the rebuilding that follows. A heavy subject, one I wanted to handle from the inside, without indulgence or voyeurism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To do that, I made a choice that was going to give me no end of trouble: telling the same reality through several sets of eyes. Several points of view, each with its own way of thinking. Not just \u00ab\u00a0one person’s chapter, then the other person’s chapter,\u00a0\u00bb but radically different ways of thinking, consistent from beginning to end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A five-year-old girl. A woman surviving. And the man, whose skull I had to live inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three heads. Three languages. One same house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aster, five years old, and the truth that hurts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Aster is the daughter. Five years old. And of all the characters, she’s maybe the one who demanded the most precision from me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trap, with a child narrator, is making her think like an adult in disguise. Sentences that are too long, a vocabulary that’s too rich, an analysis that’s too mature. It rings false immediately. On the flip side, make her too \u00ab\u00a0baby\u00a0\u00bb and you lose all the power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted something else: simple words, a child’s syntax, but a clarity that hits the mark. A little girl who prefers Wednesday Addams to Cinderella, and who knows exactly why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One evening, her mother reads her the story of Cinderella. Aster listens to this princess who always obeys, who never says no, who waits for a prince to come and save her. And she comes out with it: \u00ab\u00a0Cinderella’s dumb.\u00a0\u00bb Her mother asks why. \u00ab\u00a0She doesn’t say anything. She obeys all the time. Even when the ladies are mean. Wednesday wouldn’t do that. She’d say something. Or she’d leave.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The words of a five-year-old. But the adult reader understands that Aster isn’t really talking about Cinderella. She’s talking about her mother. And the mother understood it too, which is why her eyes suddenly turn sad, and why she closes the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s where the whole difficulty lies: writing a voice that says more than it knows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raven, or survival counted in seconds<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Raven is the mother. Her inner voice has nothing in common with her daughter’s. Where Aster observes, Raven survives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her way of thinking, I built it around one mechanism: counting. Measuring time, because measuring time means knowing how many seconds are left before he wakes up. Getting out of bed becomes a military operation where every movement takes five seconds, ten seconds, an eternity of controlled stillness so as not to trigger the beast sleeping beside her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her voice is made of calculation, restraint, mastered terror. A woman who has learned to make herself invisible in her own home. Writing that meant inhabiting a permanent tension, the kind felt by someone who never truly relaxes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steven, the head I didn’t want to enter<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

And then there’s him. Steven. The husband.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Him, I’ll be honest: he’s the hardest I’ve ever had to write. Not technically. Humanly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because for a character like him to be believable, it isn’t enough to describe him from the outside like a cardboard villain. You have to get inside his head. And inside his head, Steven isn’t a monster. Inside his head, he’s<\/em> the victim. He’s the one who works, who pays for the roof, the food, the crappy apartment but still an apartment. She’s the one \u00ab\u00a0putting on an act,\u00a0\u00bb \u00ab\u00a0pretending to sleep,\u00a0\u00bb who trapped him. He knows every one of her breaths after seven years, and he reads them all as evidence against her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The real vertigo, writing Steven, is realizing that the monster never sees himself as a monster. He tells himself a story where he’s right. And to make that believable, you have to inhabit that twisted logic from the inside, for a few pages, without ever excusing it for one second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You don’t come out of it unscathed. There are chapters you write and then need to close, afterward, so you can go breathe a little.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Empathy as a working tool<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If I manage to do that, to move from the head of a child to that of a terrified woman and then to that of her tormentor, it’s probably because I’m a deeply empathetic person. I put myself in people’s place. I enter into what they feel, almost in spite of myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I won’t lie: these characters don’t come from nowhere. Like a lot of authors, I write with what life has put in my path, with realities I’ve been close to, things seen and felt that were only waiting to find a shape. I won’t say more, because some stories belong only to the ones who lived them. But they’re there, somewhere, beneath the ink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s part of it too, maybe, what gives a text its truthfulness. Not technique alone. The fact of having truly felt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where my notes started overflowing again<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

That leaves the very concrete problem: holding all of it together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three distinct voices that must never contaminate each other. Aster must never start thinking like an adult. Raven must not suddenly let go of her tension. Steven must not soften for no reason. Each style has to stay itself, chapter after chapter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And on top of that, there are the crossed viewpoints: one same day, one same waking up, told once by Raven, once by Steven. The two of them lying in the same bed, each listening to the other’s breathing, each telling themselves an opposite version of the same moment. For it to work, the two versions have to fit together perfectly. Same facts, reversed perceptions. Zero contradiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I made sheets. One per voice. Each one’s style, verbal tics, rhythm, what they know and don’t know at any given moment. And here we go again: notes everywhere. Continuity reminders scribbled across three different surfaces. The constant fear of letting Steven say a line too clear-eyed, or Aster a word too big for her age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was spending more time checking that my voices stayed themselves than making them sing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I needed a place to put all of it. A place where each character would have their own living sheet, right in front of me, while I write. Where I could compare two scenes at a glance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That place didn’t exist yet. At least, not the way I wanted it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

And that’s when the slightly crazy idea started to take root. But that’s a story for the next episode.<\/em><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Making a five-year-old child, a woman under a man’s thumb, and her tormentor think \u2014 each in their own language, without ever letting them bleed into one another. The gamble of multiple voices, empathy as a tool, and the moment my character sheets started overflowing again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-behind-the-grimoire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67,"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions\/67"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}