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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24830
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24830
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 3