How Do I Develop a Character’s Voice?
Before a character’s voice becomes clear to me, I have an early image and sense of that character in my mind’s eye and also in my body—how they might move, talk, think, their mannerisms, and their overall aura. I then begin writing, and their voice and character description come alive.
(Using Internal Dialogue to Reveal Character.)
I recall taking a writer’s workshop in which we were taught to consider what a character’s likes and dislikes might be—what they might like to eat and wear, their hobbies, their activities, and even to make a list of these likes and dislikes. While I don’t typically write all this out, I become quickly familiar with my characters’ likes and dislikes as I spend more time writing about them and writing their dialogue. As they interact with other characters, the contrast between these voices and the interplay and dynamics between them also help me to define their individual personalities even more clearly.
As a new writer, who has also been a psychotherapist for more than 25 years, one of the most challenging things to learn is that one needs to express the character’s inner voice outwardly. They can’t just be thinking and thinking some more. No one’s interested in that. It’s like watching a movie, there needs to be action, and that action needs to express who each character is. The action may be quiet or loud, small or expansive, but it needs to exist on the page to keep the reader engaged in the narrative.
Developing a character’s voice is akin to an artist’s first sketches of each subject in their painting—first they draw and paint with broad strokes, later developing the sketches with paint in much greater detail as they continue to progress with the painting and spend time with their subjects. For me, I definitely do not have each character all worked out in the beginning of the story, but I do have a strong sense of each of them which then becomes more developed over the course of the story. That’s where a fair amount of editing takes place, not just in the story itself, but in more clearly defining who the characters are.
For example, in Klara’s Truth, Klara’s cousin, Hanna, is a character I went back to many times. While she is quite suspicious of Klara’s motives upon initially meeting her in my final story version, this was not the case at first. While it felt like Hanna’s heightened level of suspicion of Klara made sense for the tension and suspense of the story early on, it later became more important for the characters and the story for them to get along.
Check out Susan Weissbach Friedman’s Klara’s Truth here:
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The character I spent the most time developing was Klara, the protagonist. I knew she had a lot of potential inner depth, but that she would start out with a strong lack of awareness about herself and others, possessing a great emotional void due to her lack of nurturing relationships in her life up until that point. Once she meets her Aunt Rachel, her late father’s sister, who is immediately sincere, warm, and loving with her, she slowly begins to thaw. This thawing happens in steps which together multiply Klara’s willingness to even consider being open.
As Hanna slowly allows her guard to come down, spending more time with Klara and even warming to her, that’s another step forward for Klara. Discovering her father’s deep love for her before his death when she was only six years old is another important step in Klara’s process of emotionally unfreezing while beginning to connect and trust others. These steps then prepare her for a possible romantic relationship with Filip which she flip-flops over several times, having tremendous difficulty making this type of consistent emotional commitment.
I knew I wanted Aunt Rachel’s character to be maternal and loving toward Klara—the mother she never had, and I knew I wanted Filip’s character to be patient and caring, while still setting appropriate limits of what he was willing to tolerate in Klara’s hot and cold behavior. I was also cognizant of making most of the characters in Klara’s early life disconnected and aloof, like her mother and grandfather. Although, I did want her to have an experience with a loving adult, her father, even though it was only for a short time, which she could later remember.
Writing this brings more acute awareness to me about just how intertwined my characters’ voices and the story are. For me, each moves the other forward. I did not start out with an idea about exactly how this story would evolve or end, and I did not begin with a concept of exactly which qualities each character would or wouldn’t have. As the book progressed, I found that each of the characters’ voices became fuller and more varied, less two-dimensional and more three-dimensional.
While Klara is the clearest example of this evolution, I believe that each character possesses both strengths and weaknesses, some possess more strengths while others possess more weaknesses, but it’s not simply one way. I think this more accurately reflects real life. While this can make things more confusing for all of us, it also makes them much more interesting.
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