Character Voices

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

Another question: I can do my own voice, or a child’s voice. That’s it. I have no idea how to figure out how another character would speak, especially someone who has a big speaking part. How do you improve at this? Is there a way to research how e.g. crochety old ladies or charming young men speak? (Or charming old ladies, or crochety young men, for that matter!)–rose

Well first, you stop trying to write a character’s voice according to their role in the story. There is no way that all crochety old ladies (or sidekicks, or young men, or…anyone, really) speak. There is only the way that this particular old lady (sidekick, young man, villain…) speaks.

This means that research will only get you so far. You need to develop an ear for different kinds of dialog, as well as learning how to write it down once you can hear it.

First, though, here are a couple of things that will hopefully reassure you a bit:

1) Different characters don’t have to sound different on the first try. It is perfectly possible to write everyone sounding exactly the same in the first draft, and fix it in the revisions. This is, in fact, one of the ways of getting more aware of differences.

2) There may be very good reasons why some characters sound similar– for instance, if they are all from the same family, or even just from the same social class or the same small town.

Reassurances aside, you do want to develop an ear for dialog. This comes in two parts: “hearing” it, and getting it on the page. Both things will probably require conscious attention and conscious practice, until it all becomes almost automatic and intuitive.

The “hearing” part mostly involves paying attention in real life–listening to the ways people talk on the bus or in restaurants, and to actors in plays and movies (especially ones with different regional dialects–Southern U.S., New England, Australia, Oxford, Yorkshire.  Listen for word order, colloquialisms, and vocabulary more than accents). Pay attention to the dialog in your favorite books. Copy out bits of dialog from movies and plays on separate pieces of paper and leave them in a drawer for a while, then draw them out and try to guess which one was which character in which book based on how they sound. (Or have somebody else copy them.)

Then there’s the getting it onto the page. The simplest way to handle this is mechanically–design a couple of very distinctive speech patterns and develop characters who talk that way. When I was teaching myself how to do this, it was a lot easier to remember and reproduce large, obvious differences in speech patterns than subtle ones. Which is why Telemain, Amberglas, and Ranlyn have really distinctive speech patterns. Essentially, I started with speech patterns and then figured out who the characters were.

The alternative is to start with the characters and figure out how they talk. If you’re already half done with a book, you probably want to try this.

So: Speech patterns say a lot about a character. Who are your characters, and what do you want each character’s speech pattern to emphasize about them?

Some possibilities: they do/don’t have a lot of formal education. They come from a specific region, culture, or country. They are/aren’t socially inept, expert in a field, polite, subtle, easily irritated. They do/don’t catch on quickly, show off, have certain skills or knowledge. They are/aren’t arrogant, easily distracted, curious, kind. (These things will almost certainly not be the same for every character in the story.)

Once you know what you want to say about the characters, you come up with guidelines for each character’s speech: Alex is simple and unpretentious, so he speaks in sentences of seven to ten words or less, with few words of more than two syllables. Betty is highly intelligent and socially a bit clueless–she uses long sentences and lots of obscure words of three or more syllables and doesn’t get why that annoys people. Charles is a non-native speaker whose native language has a subject-object-verb sentence structure, so he frequently gets the word order wrong in English. Dana is exceedingly formal–she always uses correct grammar, proper titles and forms of address, and never uses contractions, so she comes off as stuffy. Ella is an insecure people-pleaser, so she always says “should we…” and “do you think…” and “would it be alright if…” and second-guesses herself in mid-sentence. And so on.

Then you apply those guidelines to your characters, either as you write them or during a revisions pass. Note that the guidelines can be extremely mechanical (e.g., ten-word sentences, three-syllable words, no contractions), or they can involve the content (“should we…,” proper titles, etc.). Or they can involve rhythm–Shakespeare’s noblemen spoke in iambic pentameter, while his rude mechanicals didn’t. (I used this trick for the Fairy Queen in Snow White and Rose Red, to make her sound just a little different from everyone else. It was a pain to check, but worth it.)

If you want to practice, come up with some specific, really off-the-wall dialog rules–ones that mean the speaker will be instantly identifiable–and then take a conversation from one of your stories. Assign each character a set of rules and rewrite the conversation. Then swap the rules and rewrite the same conversation again.

You can also “cast” the characters’ voices, as if Han Solo, Sherlock Holmes, and Mr. Spock were arguing with Queen Elizabeth I, Elle Woods (from “Legally Blonde”), and Hermione Granger. Or perform each character yourself, out loud, to check that their dialog is distinguishable while still sounding like dialog.

The eventual goal is for the writer to pay attention to differences in speech patterns as automatically as they do to things like hair color and clothing styles. It becomes part of one’s character creation process.