Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/6965
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

We surely all have little quirks to our speech. Like my daughter once criticized my writing for using the word "surely" too much. (See, I used it on this post.)

So how do you keep all your characters from sounding the same in dialog? That is, how do you keep them all from sounding just like the writer? It's easy to say, "Pay attention and be careful", but ... pay attention to what? Okay, in my case I've got my eye out for the word "surely". But what else?

There are some obvious extremes. You can make the scientist use a lot of technical language. A 5-year-old should normally talk like a 5-year-old and not like a college professor. In the story I'm working on right now I have a character who lives in another country and who would likely not use English much, so I put some grammar errors into his speech. Etc. Maybe you could give a character some stock phrases that he always uses: "Elementary, my dear Watson", "To the Bat Cave, Robin", etc. But I'd think there are limits to how far you can go with such things without it sounding too gimicky.

Any tips?

Original score: 15