Announcements: For the past year, Tim Cooper has been running around Minneapolis taking pictures of different people reading Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks in places featured in the book. He’s currently running a kickstarter project to finance an art book collecting all the photos. Check it out. (Full disclosure: I’m one of the readers in one of the forty-two photos.)
People talk about the importance of making different characters’ voices different, but they often don’t get down into the nitty-gritty of how to do it. It’s one of the things that took me a long time to begin to get the hang of.
“Differences in character voices” applies to dialog, which means what you have to work with are the character’s word choice, grammar, and syntax. At first glance, this doesn’t look so complicated, but if you think about it, the character’s background will affect all of these things. His/her beliefs, attitudes, and worldview will also factor in, as will the character’s culture-of-origin, class, and life experience, which in turn are affected by things like race, religion, age, ethnicity, and gender. Personality is a big factor, too – just think about that person you know who goes on and on about his/her current hobby or crush, without regard to whether anyone else is interested, and compare them to the one who never says much of anything about him/herself.
Lots of writers do character voices by instinct, basing them on specific people or groups of people they know. I did that with Telemain in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles; he sounds like every obsessed computer programmer I knew at the time, rolled up into one guy, with the topic changed from computers to magic. Sometimes, though, one wants to be a little more conscious about one’s choices, and one way of doing that is to look at your tools, one at a time.
Word choice: Start with overall vocabulary. At least some of your characters won’t have as large a vocabulary as you do; what kinds of words are they missing? Long, polysyllabic ones? Formal ones? Specialized terminology about cars or gardens or knitting? Why are they missing these words – lack of interest in car engines, or lack of opportunity to study them?
Are there words this character would never use? Swear words are one obvious choice, but there are gradations; you can have a character who never swears or only uses euphemisms like “darn it,” or one who swears but only using vulgar words, never profanities like “God damn it,” or one who is always profane but never vulgar. Are there things the character would never talk about, given his/her background? (Money, power, and sex are both the three great motivations and, at times, the three great conversational taboos, but there are plenty of others.)
Grammar and syntax vary based largely on class and background – not just ethnic or cultural background, but which part of the country someone is from. In the U.S., a Southern accent is very different from a New England or Midwestern accent, and within the South, a Texas accent is different from a Georgian accent or Mississippi accent. If one is inventing one’s own world, one should keep in mind that in a large country, there are going to be regional styles of speech; if it’s a multi-cultural empire, things are likely to be even more varied.
Grammar, syntax, and word choice can also vary with membership in a particular social or professional group. Computer programmers can speak what sounds like a totally different language when they’re discussing their specialty; so do most professionals, from doctors to insurance salespeople. Science fiction fandom has its own set of terms; teenage slang changes with every generation (in part so as to be impenetrable to adults); groups from motorcyclists to hip-hop artists to surfers have their own idioms and speech rhythms.
Above all, though, speech styles reflect personality. The anti-social character may choose to speak seldom and in monosyllables whenever possible, in spite of his vast vocabulary and noble background, because he wants to be left alone. The one with a tendency to be a drama queen may use long, rambling sentences as a way of hanging on to control of the conversation (as long as she’s talking, nobody else can get a word in).
What it ultimately comes down to is: for this particular character, which of these things has the greatest effect on the way they sound? The answer will be different for each of them; the monosyllabic character and the garrulous drama queen may be next-door neighbors or even siblings, with the same ethnic, class, cultural, and educational backgrounds.
Once you have a clear speech style for each character, you have to keep that in mind whenever you’re writing a line of their dialog. Again, this ends up being largely intuitive. There have been many times when I wrote a line for someone and stared at it, because it was what they would say, in terms of content, but it didn’t feel like the way they would say it. Sometimes, fixing it is a matter of changing a word or the word order; sometimes, it takes rewriting the whole sentence. It is both embarrassing and gratifying when a beta reader or editor points out where a character’s voice is not in character – embarrassing because of the mistake, but gratifying in that it means that the character’s other dialog has a clear enough voice that a reader can spot the wrong bits.
I’ve heard that it helps to read them aloud and see if you can tell who is who, but it’s never worked for me because I can always tell that by what ax they are grinding.
One of my novels involves a ship from Earth coming to the aid of a scout/colony vessel that was stranded on an alien world with its own intelligent civilization. One of the more difficult aspects of writing this was determining how the language of the two human factions diverged in the intervening 150 years. It is obvious to me that they would evolve in different ways, even without the influence of an alien culture on one of them.
It has always disappointed me that so few SF&F writers make even a half-hearted stab at language. Colonies separated by millennia still speak identically, even using the same idioms and cultural references. And, of course, in the movies, most aliens speak English with a US Midwestern accent. How convenient.
That War for the Oaks photo project is an absolutely brilliant idea! I fell in love with the book just last year, and I’ve often wished I was familiar enough with Minneapolis to recognize the places it mentions. (My grandparents lived in Minnetonka, so I know the general concept and some of the names, like Hennepin Ave, but I’ve never been to most of the sites.) I’ll definitely be donating to the Kickstarter!
Swear words should be fun. (I said this somewhere awhile ago.) Most taboo/vulgar words are either religious or bodily functions. I’m not sure if there are others.
I have had some fun with this in a Pathfinder campaign (roleplaying game). I have a den of kobolds whose members refer to members of a nearby sheepherder community as “sheep-brothers”.
I’m glad it’s mostly intuitive, otherwise, I really wouldn’t have much hair left!
Character voices are something I do by instinct, and I don’t have confidence that I’m doing them well. Some I try to make erudite, some I try to make plain-spoken, and for some I try to get across that they’re not speaking their native language, but except in extreme cases I don’t know how well I’ve succeeded.
Swearing occupies a strange place. IME it’s often a part of worldbuilding, as much as (or more than) individual character development. I’ve got one setting where, in the cultures seen so far, sexual vulgarities are not used and excremental vulgarities are ramped up in power so that “piss” is a very strong four-letter word. The use of profanities varies among the fictional cultures in the setting, due to different religious beliefs, and for one of them an angry exclaimation of “ten thousand she-devils!” has become a stereotype.
Swearing is really tricky, because of all the things you mentioned. Same goes for idioms, insults, expressions like “go jump in a lake.” When authors get it right, it’s brilliant, it adds to character, worldbuilding, humour . . . And when they get it wrong it just sounds precious and totally throws you out of the story. I think beta readers are invaluable for figuring out which side of the line you’re on.
I have wars going on in my head all the time – what should I do? What do I think? Where do I really want to live and why?
So far, I seem to take a subset of my inner self, round it out with a bunch of extra stuff to make a full character (don’t want to have ANY character be all of me), and then ask myself how to make that character a separate entity that I have something in common with – by giving the character a life history very different from my own, but that leads the collection to ‘be’ someone I might have been had our lives intersected more.
Then, when it’s time to write a scene from that character’s pov, I have a way to get back inside their head, but everything else is determined by backstory and the needs of the current story. Makes it a little less alien to be looking out through their eyes.
Is this weird? I thought everyone did this.
When authors try to spell accents I get confused. It’s sometimes work for me to figure out what word is being spelled. Occasionally I get something ambiguous (Uh-huh and u-uh).
But then, sometimes actors in a movie with correct accents are hard for me to understand without subtitles.
A piece of advice I read a long time ago, back in the prehistoric days when manual typewriters roamed the earth, is that phonetic spellings should be used with a very very light touch.
OTOH, I’ve also noticed that some phonetic spellings go over much better than others. But on the third manipulating appendage, I prefer to reserve phonetic spellings for cases where the accent is very thick or the voice a very strange one – and thinking back on the use by other authors, I suspect there’s a trick to making it look like there’s more phonetic spelling there than is actually used.
Giving characters voices is something I’m not very good at, so I appreciate the advice. One approach you don’t mention is stealing voices, from your own writing and other people’s.
For my first novel, I created a distinctive style of speech for my protagonist and then made the mistake of letting it spread to most of my other characters and my narration. In my second novel I applied that style to one secondary character, and he was the one character that a reviewer criticizing the lack of distinctive voices noted as a exception. I based the speech style of another character on Peter Whimsey’s mother, a distinctive and attractive character in Dorothy Sayer’s writings, and I think that worked as well. But I still don’t have the trick of creating enough different voices so that the reader can tell who is speaking by how he speaks.