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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31471
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31471
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Be careful not to fall into writer as actor syndrome, imagining the movie of your book and how the actors might act the parts. You are writing a novel, not a prose description of a movie.

While you can certainly create a visceral experience of sight and sound (and smell, and tastes, and touch) in a novel, you can't bring out all the physical detail you would find in a movie because you can only present the reader with one word at a time.

The unique voice of a character in fiction is not based on how they say things, but on what they say. Think of each line of dialogue as an attempt on the part of the character to get what they want. No word is spoken idly. Every word is there to advance an agenda.

How you advance an agenda is based on what you want, what you fear, what you love, and what you respect. These define the path you are willing to take to achieve your objective, and therefore they define what you will say in any given situation in your attempt to achieve your objective. If your characters are well defined, then you know what they want, fear, love, and respect and from this you can figure out what they will say.

Can you add other inflections to this? Certainly. You can hint at an accent. You can play with word choice and sentence length. But these are secondary effects. The reader will know who is speaking because they recognize that this is what a particular character would say in this situation to advance their agenda. If you can take all the inflections out and the voice of the character is still clear from what they say, you have a strong character voice. If you rely on the inflections alone, but don't put genuine sentiments into their mouth, you won't.

Original score: 3