5 Tips for Creating Character Voice Readers Will Love
“Say it again, I double-dog dare ya,” Ferret said through clenched teeth, his dark eyes narrowed.
Basil replied, seemingly unfazed by his proximity to danger. “I shall say it again, and mean it, my good man!”
Clementine clutched her pearls, her slender fingers trembling. “No, no, no. I shan’t be a party to this barbaric display.”
Ferret reeled his fists tight. “Cut the chin music, sister, you started this rumble, so’s I’m gonna finish it.”
This is a short bit of silly dialogue right off the top of my head, but it relates to the topic at hand—character, voice, and how to get it on the page.
(Using Internal Dialogue to Reveal Character.)
Can you imagine what Basil, Clementine, or Ferret might look like? How they might be different from each other? I could begin to. I’m Team Ferret, by the way. I don’t know what Basil and Clementine did to him, but whatever it was, Ferret’s not going to take it lying down.
All this image conjuring is what readers rely on to latch onto characters and engage with them, it’s what pulls them into a story and keeps them wanting to read more. Does any of the dialogue conjure up an image of Ferret, Basil, or Clementine for you? Like I said, it does for me, and I just met them two minutes ago.
Character voice is important. It is essential to successful character development. Writing a story, ignoring voice, and then expecting your characters to be rich and full and memorable is like playing Beethoven’s Concerto No. 4 in G major on a piano with no black keys—it’s not going to happen.
The goal of voice and every other craft element in fiction is to pull your reader in, make them want to stick around until the end of your story. Writers want to entertain readers, give them something thought-provoking or life-affirming, something fun or chilling, or warm and fuzzy. An experience is what we’re going for, even if it only lasts 300+ pages.
So, voice is crucial, critical, and you as the writer should spend some time developing it and getting it right. That’s in addition to all the other things you should consider like pacing, setting, description, plot, theme, and point of view. All of it has to be included and all of it has to work together. Like with a good gumbo. In gumbo, every flavor counts. You try making a good gumbo without the Holy Trinity. Go on, I double-dog dare you.
There’s no one way to skip-de-doo down the story path, though. Every writer’s different. If writing out detailed character sketches leads you to voice, do that. If you meet your characters on the page and they start talking to you there, run with it. Use what works, discard everything else.
Here are a few of things I consider when I’m fishing around for characters at 5:30 a.m. I hope my five tips for creating character voice work for you.
Back to Ferret just for a second. To me, he sounds short and stocky. Maybe he has a boxer’s nose, broken, reset, and broken again. I’m seeing a barrel chest and beady eyes, a square chin, and a lot of moxie for a guy barely five feet tall. Basil sounds like a toff. Clementine? Not enough information to go on yet, but it doesn’t sound like she’s blameless in whatever’s about to jump off.
Now, here are my tips for creating character voice.
1. Character
It all starts here. You have a story. A plot. Now you need characters, good ones, juicy ones. You cannot have a play without actors, and you cannot have a story without book people. So, choose your Meryl Streeps and Sir Laurence Oliviers wisely.
Consider what your characters will have to accomplish, how they must move your plot forward, what roles they must play. Be as thorough as you can here. You need a cop, build a cop, but build a multilayered cop. You need an amateur sleuth, construct one step by step, but don’t stop at the superficial, dig deep.
A voice might emerge at this stage as you’re building. If so, grab it, flesh it out. If not, keep layering. Voice is in there somewhere.
2. Distinctiveness
None of your characters should speak or think the same. How they think and how they speak, what they choose to think about, should be as distinctive to them as imaginary fingerprints. Your reader should be able to read a passage of dialogue from any page and know immediately which characters are speaking just by the way you’ve presented them.
Out in the real world, none of us speak the same way as the guy sitting next to us on the bus, even if we live in the same town and drink water from the same water pipes. People are not cookie-cutter cutouts, your characters can’t be either.
We’re distinguished by where we were raised, how we were raised, and by who raised us. We are distinguished by socioeconomic status, race, neighborhood, religion, cultural identity, along with a host of other things. People are as individual as snowflakes, and that’s what makes us great. Replicate this variety on the page. Mix it up.
3. Sound/Style
I’m from Chicago. It’s in the Midwest. We sound different here, but some of us sound a lot different than the rest of us. Remember that old “Saturday Night Live” Bears sketch that popularized the phrase “Da Bears”? The Chicago accent is a thing.
Somebody says, “Da Bears!” Everybody in town knows what neighborhood they grew up in. It’s the sound. The style. With a Chicago accent, the D replaces the “th”, an S is added to the end proper nouns, and there’s a flat A in Chicaaago. Sound. Use it to plant your characters in a place or time.
Vary the sounds. Where is your character from? Townie or country guy? Twang or drawl? Is it “Da Bears” or “Haaavad Yaaad”? Characters shouldn’t sound alike, look alike, walk alike, think alike, or speak alike.
4. Dialogue
Character can be revealed through dialogue and should. This is where your reader will get a good sense of who your characters are by seeing how they interact with those around them. For you as the writer, think about getting that specificity in, those varying sounds, those differing styles of speech.
Work on mixing up the length of dialogue—long passages, short ones. Same with sentences—longer sentences, short ones. Listen to how real people talk out in the wild. Real talk is a little different from book talk. Take the time to note the differences. Is your character an obnoxious blowhard or a quiet country mouse?
Book talk is talk with a purpose. You’re trying to move a plot along, so characters have to keep things popping. But in real life people talk about the most random things. I once overheard a coffeeshop conversation between two teens as they debated which they’d each rather be, zombie or vampire. The debate went on for long minutes. You don’t have that kind of time in fiction.
Dialogue is concentrated talk, purposeful talk. Book talk should ape the real thing, but it can’t be the real thing. Dialogue has to move but make your characters’ voices so distinguishable that readers instantly know them when they open their mouths. Back to the zombie-vampire thing? I didn’t jump into the conversation then, that would have been rude, but I’d definitely go vampire. They dress better.
5. Backstory
OK, you’ve got your characters, you’ve made them distinctive, they don’t sound or speak or think like anyone else in your story. They have a shape and form, now they need a history. Enter backstory. Characters should be a product of their past experiences. These experiences, these life hits, these failures and successes, this past, will make your characters more multidimensional. The more your reader can recognize your characters as human, the more they are likely to be interested enough in them to continue reading.
Colorful pasts often produce colorful people. No one gets through life unscathed. Same must hold for your characters. A character who has suffered some kind of tragedy or loss will behave quite differently than someone who’s led a relatively happy life unfazed by misfortune. The perspective, worldview, mood, attitude, and outlook of a wounded soul is going to be different.
Maybe we’d likely be dealing with a pessimistic, fatalistic personality. Or, maybe not, maybe despite tragedy, the character is uncharacteristically positive, upbeat, joyful. That’d be an interesting thing to explore. Could all that positivity and joy be a mask for something else? Could that upbeat character, touched by tragedy, be a ticking time bomb ready to blow? How would either of these perspectives affect how a character might speak, think, or navigate their world?
Backstory, however you decide to use it, is the core around which you will build your complicated, particular book people. Make it original, make it deep, tailor-make it to one character and one character alone. Louis Armstrong once sang, “Oh, nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, nobody knows my sorrow.”
That’s true. Armstrong’s sorrow’s not your sorrow or my sorrow. Sorrow’s specific. If sorrow’s what you’re pinging on in your story, it should be specific to your characters as well.
So, in short, dig deep on character voice. It can’t be interchangeable. Let the sound of the voice anchor your character to a precise and particular time and place—a town, a neighborhood, a bar, a prison cell, a home. Then layer on those details that distinguish one character from another—an interesting past, a flaw, a chip on the shoulder, a grudge, a hurt, a walk, a customary head nod, a smirk, a sly smile, emotions, maybe deeply felt, or not felt at all. All of these things play a part in how a character might act or present themselves to the world they live in. They might also affect how they talk to you as you’re putting them on the page.
Play around with the craft elements. Move your book people around like chess pieces on a board. Go real, go deep, or go home.
Now I’m going to go check on Basil. I have a sinking feeling he’s on the way to the hospital without his teeth.
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