5 Tips for Establishing Character Voices

5 Tips for Establishing Character Voices

Anybody Can Write a Novel

Chapter 7 “From Story to Art” – Section 9 “Speech and Voice”

With Links to Supplementary Material

After you finish your first draft in all of its rough, unpolished, corny, sappy, unorganized glory, you will likely note something rather disturbing about your characters. They all sound the same. And, upon further analysis, you may even discover that they all sound like you. Fear not! This is to be expected, and but another factor to be adjusted and improved in the many drafts to come.

Tip 1: Annotate how each character's speech pattern differs from your own.

When a child is young, it is often difficult to attribute them with much of a unique personality, so long as they are parroting everything their parents say. Similarly, separating a character's speech pattern from your own is not only the beginning of giving them their own unique voice, but also of giving them an identity apart from your own. Separate your speech from that of your character by writing down the many differences—not only differences due to the world, time period, and situations you find yourselves in, but also the differences in how you would speak if those factors were shared.

Tip 2: Make a list of important life events in each character's back-story, and jot down ideas for how these can affect speech.

What were the major events that led to who your character is today? Perhaps they were in the army, giving them direct and sometimes crude speech patterns. Maybe they were an assassin, and learned that the fewer words uttered, the better. Did they have strict disciplinarian parents that made them want to rebel through speaking with obscenities, or were they of a timid personality type that made them fearful of ever uttering an obscene word? Or were they raised by a kindly grandmother who made them genuinely want to speak politely? Make a list of the significant details of your characters' back-stories, and then filter them through the personality of your character in order to determine how it would influence the way they speak.

Tip 3: Create a list of your World's cultures and subcultures, and their idioms and speech patterns.

This can be as simple as whether your character was raised in a city or the country, to as complex as whether they were raised as Elven nobility or as part of a Dwarven slave caste. Regardless, write down every relevant culture to your story (even if you have to make some new ones up for this purpose). Then, judging by what that culture values (hard work, corn, fighting, gold, family, etc...) create a list of subtle and easily understood/imaginable phrases that might be used by each one. A character from a culture that farmed corn, for example, might not say that something is “tremendously painful” but rather “worse than stepping barefoot on a dried corn stump.”

Tip 4: Make a set of speech rules for each character.

Now that you have a ever-growing list of new ideas that will affect how each of your characters speak, begin to write out a set of laws for each character—a set of commandments and regulations for how each character feels they must talk. It might look something like this:

1-The fewer words the better.

2-Never use first names.

3-Never use words over three syllables (character doesn't want to sound pretentious)

4-Never talk directly about emotions.

5-Never use the word “Sun” only “Earth Scorcher”

By writing down these laws and limitations you have for each of your characters, you will not only have a constant reminder of them but you will also have created barriers that you must use creative skill in order to work around. The combination of these barriers, and the skill used to say what you need without breaking a law, will be what creates some of the richest and most diverse language in your story.

Tip 5: Tinker with your characters' voices, and try to not make them jarringly bizarre.

After you have made all of these adjustments in your second draft, your dialogue and character voices will likely come out clunky, cheesy, and awkward in places. That, also, is to be expected. Getting your characters' voices to be perfect will require many drafts, many adjustments, and plenty of reader feedback. Just ask for, and be open to, criticism; and then continually adjust until each character's voice comes out exactly as it should.

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