How can one not let their voice show through in all the characters?
I was critiquing a friend's novel and I noticed that all the characters seem to have the voice of my friend. Speech fillers, vocabulary, sentence structure all seems the same throughout.
How can he avoid this?
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The other answers are good but they strike me as abstract. Maybe I'm a philistine, but I like my advice concrete and practical.
Different people naturally use different:
- Vocabulary
- Sentence length
- Sentence structure (think balance of simple and complex sentences)
- Register (which is a mix of things, but roughly 'level of formality')
- Patterns of thought (More direct or roundabout? More emotional or practical?)
- Approach (Blunt or diplomatic? Complainer or problem-solver? Loner or relationship-builder?)
When people talk about voice, that's what they're talking about. If you want distinct voices, pull apart your dialogue and reconstruct it with one eye on the above.
Hope that helps.
(Semi-flippant PS: this method of making your writing better might feel less like magic and more like work. I would argue that this is not a coincidence.)
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Your characters do not need to sound different.
Reading current fiction, I rarely can tell the characters apart by their voice alone. That is, if you take a page of dailog and remove all references to who speaks, usually all the characters speak pretty much the same.
If it is part of your writing style and artistic vision to give each character an individual voice, then asking a question here is the wrong way to begin. You will need to listen to how people speak and try to emulate that in writing. There are no ready-made recipes that you can blindly follow, you will have to develop your ear and your writing ability by practicing.
If, on the other hand, you just want to tell a gripping story, different voices for different characters are not at all necessary, and most writers don't do it.
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There are famous, well-respected writers whose characters all sound alike, so if the rest of the writing is strong enough, it might not even be a problem.
But to fix it, the only real solution is this: You can only do well at writing what you love, so if you want to improve your dialog, you have to learn to love the different ways real people speak. If it's not something you pay attention to on a daily basis, it will never be reflected in your writing.
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There are two places a novelist may find a character: inside of themselves and out in the world. The desire to write may come from many places: sometimes from a desire to "express oneself", sometimes from a desire to share what you have seen and heard in the world around you. I doubt there is any way for an inward looking writer to sound like anyone other than themselves. I think an outward looking writer will naturally pick up and reflect the voices of those around them.
I not sure if you can become a sufficiently outward-looking writer simply to fix a problem like this. Writing is driven by what interests us most, and if we find that within, that that is where it will come from. I think the outward looking writer has a far better chance of producing something that is convincing and of interest to others. You don't have to be interesting yourself to discover what is interesting in the world. But the inward-looking writer may succeed if they find something sufficiently interesting within.
What you certainly can do is to try to stand back from your characters and think about who each one of them is and what each one of them wants in a scene. Every character should have their own agenda, and should be acting to advance it in every scene. What makes characters real and distinct is far less how they talk than what they say and why they say it. If your characters are distinct people with distinct agendas, they will have distinct voices, even in they all share the author's tone and vocabulary.
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