When I first started writing, one of the things I struggled with (and still do) was character voice. Based on my experience, voice has always been more important than physical descriptions. While reading, I might end up forgetting how a character looks, but I don't forget the way they talk. One of the mistakes I made while writing was using formal language for dialogues and making sure my grammar was on point. Now looking at this, I understand that this is not natural. Back then, my concept of dialogue was a totally different story. This happened as a result of confusing my own (author's) voice with character voice. For those of you unsure about the difference between the two, author's voice is more of a style of writing, while character voice refers to their internal and external view of the world. This can be seen through one's feelings, thoughts, and actions.
In natural flowing conversations, we tend to jump thoughts or cut people off. To help myself while writing dialogues, I decided to listen to people talk. Not only was I aware of the conversation around me, but I would take notes while hearing broken conversations. It sounds creepy, I get that, but my focus wasn’t on what people were saying, but how they were saying it. Now let me rephrase, these notes I was taking were mainly mentally written. I still use this technique, especially when I have to write in multiple P.O.V.s. Before I talk about studying humans, note that character voice also includes non-verbal communication. If your character tends to stray away from crowds, and refrains from touching people, compared to someone always engaging with people around them, then these actions are expressing a lot of information for the readers.
When someone is talking to me, I look for the diction used, their facial expressions and the gestures they make. Later, when I’m writing, I use these traits to develop personalities for my characters. It’s difficult when writing in the perspective of different characters because on average, we are after all a single individual, but you have to pretend to have multiple personalities, who speak and behave differently. This is why I enjoy observing people and learning about individual voices. You want to write about someone who readers can interact with and care about. This comes from having a character that is relatable through their thoughts, feelings and actions. We’re not as unique as we like to think, and when used right, this becomes a technique to connect characters with readers.
If I'm writing in four different perspectives, I pretend that they are four people I know in real life. Based on this, my characters will have specific desires and motivations. Now because I am no mind reader, I don't really know the exact thoughts of the people around me. However, by observing one's behaviors, we can make inferences about their feelings. For character speech to differ from one another, I read over my texts with humans and focus on the types of words they use. For example, I have an English major friend, who uses plenty of sophisticated words, and some other friends, who repeats a few of the same phrases. To expand on this last point, most of us carryover phrases from previous conversations because we don't want to spend time creating new sentences. This is a technique to decrease the amount of energy we exert when communicating. Thus, I like repeating phrases my characters speak throughout the story to convey this natural human behavior. To create distinct characters, I enjoy having them ponder over the same matter in various ways. My aim isn't only to create polar opposites---I place them on a spectrum, so all of them can overlap in different ways. Like I mentioned before, no one individual is entirely unique (trust me). I believe putting your characters through different scenarios is also helpful in finding distinct character voices. This can help you determine how they are different from each other, and even find similarities between them.
Sometimes I struggle to understand why one of my characters behaved in a certain way. I might have a specific scene that is meant to move the plot along but it may not fit with a character's past actions and behaviors. This leads to one of my favorite things when writing: I stare at my screen and continually ask my characters why they are behaving in such manners. It's not as easy as it seems sometimes. My characters can take days to answers and all the while, I wait patiently. There are times when my characters ignore me. When these situations arise, I seek outside help. This assistance often comes in the form of my friends and siblings. Either I present them with a scenario and ask how they will respond, or I tell them about my character's inconsistent behaviors. Eventually, an answer makes its way to me.
Lastly, let's not forget reading really helps with this too. We can really learn from other authors, and study the large and subtle differences that divides the characters from each other.
I hope you enjoyed this post on character voice, and as always, thank you for reading. Make sure to check out our Instagram account @dreaming.in.ink!
~ Fiza