This week I want to talk about giving characters distinct voices. It’s a very difficult but important part of writing. Making your characters read like different, unique individuals should be everyone’s goal. I’ve been trying to achieve this, but… well just click below to see if I’ve had any success.
Before I get to the subject at hand, I want to say something. I’m not writing these posts to come off as some kind of writing expert. I’m not. All I am is an amateur writer trying to finish his first book. These posts are just me talking about the issues I’ve had. None of what I say here should be taken as anything other than an opinion. I really don’t want to give anyone the wrong impression.
My first thought when it comes to differentiating characters by they way the speak is to use accents. It’s something I’ve been doing in my current story. This brings about a few problems. To do an accent, to write one, you have to spell words phonetically so that the reader can ‘hear’ the accent.
For instance, if you are doing a southern accent you will right “Ah” instead of “I”. So a sentence may read like this “Ah did it, Ah’m guilty.” But that’s just the beginning. Figuring out what words would ‘sound’ different and how to spell them is tough. I often find myself questioning just how far to push this.
Then you have to consider word choice. Take the sentence I used above. Is that how a southern, and by southern I mean over the top stereotypical southern, person would speak. I think it’d go more like this “Thas right, Ah did it. Ah’m guilty as sin.” or “Ah done did it, alright. Ain’t no way around it. Ah’m guilty.” Each of those examples uses phonetic spelling as well as unique word choices that get the ‘southern’ character across.
Doing a character as over the top or stereotypical as ‘southern’ is easy. The real issue comes when you’re dealing with a more subdued character. One of the characters in this story, Angel, is a city girl with no real accent. She speaks relatively normally. This means it’s difficult to give her an easily distinguishable voice. I’m working to give her certain vocal ticks, that is to say a particular rhythm of speaking that will set her voice apart.
For instance she wouldn’t introduce her self by saying “Hello, my name is Angel.”, she’d say something like “Hi! I’m Angel.” She’s a very upbeat and caring character so she has a speech patter that shows openness and is instantly friendly. Angel should have a very youthful almost innocent way of talking. She isn’t formal or concerned with properness.
Let’s go back to her introducing herself. I could easily go too far and have her come off as brainless and naïve, instead of innocent. If she said “Hey! Hi! Hello! I’m Angel!” that would be too much. The repetitive word use and exclamations change the way the reader will ‘hear’ what is being said. While the statements are different by only two words and few punctuations marks, they read completely different. Take a second, close your eyes and say the two introductions in your head. The image that pops into mind, what you think Angel looks like, will be drastically different with each line. Knowing how far to go is vital.
It’s not easy though. A character’s voice is their character. Is the person nice? Are they respectful? That means they’ll use different words in different ways than someone who is cold and dismissive. But if you have two nice people speaking to each other you have to give them their own traits. This is when you can fall into the trap of overcompensating.
I notice that when I get into a groove I write everyone the way I speak. That’s not what I want. I don’t want a book filled with people who sound like me. I often find myself having to go back and rework the dialog. I try to embody the character and get into their head so that I can ‘speak’ like them.
I’ve had success doing this with most of the characters but there are one or two who are just a little flat. They don’t have, well I haven’t given them, big enough characters to embody. Let me give you an example.
One of the big characters of this book is Rebecca Rios. She is the first of Hazard’s clients we meet. She is a woman whose boyfriend turned out to be a conman and who stole everything from her. She hires Hazard to find him and return her money as well as her property. When I started writing this the plan was for her to die very early on in the story, until I threw everything out the window and just played it by ear. That means she’s still alive and I have no idea what to do with her. That is a small problem, the bigger issue is that she was never meant to be a character at all, she was just a plot point.
This woman was supposed to be the catalyst for this story and her death was an important character moment for Hazard. It was supposed to show just how cold and distant he is. As I said in other posts this story has taken on a life of it’s own and bears very little resemblance to the original idea. So now I have a living character with out any real ‘character’. That’s a problem.
How do you write the dialog for a character you never, and still don’t, have a plan for? Actually, that’s not the right question. I’ve been doing that for every character other than the original four (Hazard, Angel, Rebecca, and Douglas). Every other character in this story is new and thus I had no plans for them. The difference is these new characters are more easily defined. They are broader and can be played up.
Allow me to elaborate. One of these characters is Vivian, a former prostitute who now owns a bar. She’s a very friendly, open, motherly, flirtatious, character with a slight ‘southern’ speech pattern. She doesn’t have an accent but she uses words like ‘honey’ and ‘sweetie’. She is very easy to write. All I do is start with the idea of a friendly, older woman and add some sexual undertones. Throw in a few niceties and you have her down.
Or take Joe. He’s the owner of an Army/Navy store who happens to have a huge collection of weapons under the store. He’s a Texas boy who may or may not be racist. He says very racist things, goes on these terribly offensive rants, but happens to be married to a Columbian woman. He and his wife also adopted a little black girl that Joe loves unconditionally. Doesn’t make sense does it? That’s the point. Joe is a man who swings between extremes and comes off as slightly unstable because of it. Except that there is a possibility that it’s all an act. When I write him I start with a Texas/Cowboy accent, then I go from overly friendly to aggressively hostile. He can go from talking about how much he loves his daughter, to using the most foul racial slurs in one breath. Getting the phonetic spelling for his accent is difficult but his thoughts are easy. All you I have to do is unhinge my mind. It’s disturbingly easy.
Rebecca is a different bag all together. I know nothing about her. She’s just a victim. I haven’t done anything for her character that’ll allow me to get into her head. That’s my fault. But in my defense she hasn’t had much to do in this book so far. I have an end in sight for her, but that has little to do with who she is. If I don’t know that, I can’t really get her voice right.
Getting an accent is hard but research can help with that, defining a character is something that you have to do on your own. I’m at a part of the story where I’m going to have to lay out some facts about Rebecca. Really allow the reader, and myself, to know who she is. I’m hoping that will let me to get a better hold on her voice.
I want to get back to accents for a second. I’ve read books, by very prolific writers, where they take this to the extreme. In one of these books the author was writing a inner city black character. He was attempting to giver her a ’ghetto’ accent. She used a lot of (Is Ebonics still a thing?) slang and was written phonetically. The issue was that the writer went too far. He made this American born, native English speaker sound like a foreigner who was two weeks into an ESL class. It was painful to read. And this is a very famous writer. It’s easy to go over board with this. The key, in my opinion is to find the middle ground.
I want to go back to Joe. I used the term “Hitch in your giddy up.” when I wrote his dialog. It fit with the scene and flowed with the dialog. What I didn’t do was use words like “pardner”, “polecat”, or “yellah”. I stayed away from the really stereotypical cowboy slang. It would have been very easy to make his character a joke. Which is not what I wanted.
Getting a character’s voice right is immensely important and very difficult. I’ve only recently realized just how important this is. When you are writing in an omnipotent narrative you can just fill in the blanks for the reader. You can state that a character is angry or confused. But since I’m writing this in the 1st person I can’t do that. The main character, Hazard, can guess the other person’s mood but I need to confirm it through dialog. Without an omnipotent narrator to get into the other character’s heads and explain their motives, I have to spell things out through the dialog.
This makes the dialog vastly more important. You can right a 1st person narrative without dialog but it’s a very hard thing to do. I wouldn’t want to try it.
Back to voices. In my opinion the most important thing to keep in mind is that the dialog is supposed to be people speaking. People don’t talk in perfect sentence and paragraphs. That wouldn’t be natural. People drop or misuse words. They speak in run on sentences and ramble. You can’t be afraid to throw out the rule book when it comes to dialog. Maybe someone speaks very quickly and doesn’t take breathes while they ramble on. In that case you may want to drop a comma here and there. (Commas are my worst enemy. I‘m never sure when to use them. I‘m sure there a many misplaced commas in this post. If you find any comment below.) Another character may make a statement but in a questioning manner. In that case you may want use a question mark, even though the sentence should end in a period.
It’s a juggling act. One that I’m only starting to get a grasp on. But, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, it’s fun. I’m actually enjoying writing this story. I think a large part of that is the dialog. The fact that I’ve been able to stick with it and see visible advancement doesn’t hurt either.
Speaking of which I’m up to 55,726 words, which is 98 pages. I have no idea how long this thing is going to be but I have no intention of stopping.
That’s it for this week. See you next time.
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