Tracking your characters’ voices
Hey there writers, authors, and storytellers! A while ago I was chatting with a few people from the writing community on Twitter, and a piece of writing advise came up that, until that point, I had thought was perhaps a little too nerdy to admit publicly. As it turns out, someone found it really useful – which surprised me a lot. Maybe I’m not as freaky or geeky as I thought. Thanks for the revelation @LelaKAuthor. So, anyways, I thought since one person found the advice useful I would try to write it out for you guys, who knows, maybe there’s a second someone out there who could use this.
The advice was regarding character voices – something I care about to extreme or obsessive lengths. Basically, it is the fact the different people talk in different ways – and not just depending on their level of education, but speech patterns is also a way to communicate core beliefs and personality traits. For example, Russel T. Davis once said in an audio commentary “it is just two women driving down the road talking about the fact that there is no afterlife.” Here choosing to add “the fact” to something that is generally viewed as a belief goes to show his character. Of course, you cannot show character just by word choice, this example might mean any number of things from pessimism or hopelessness to a belief that anyone who believes opposite is less intelligent, or even to a “you only have one life, make sure to live it” mentality. None of those can be said for certain to be the reason for him phrasing it like that, the only thing we can really know is that there is some reason for him choosing that word at that time and that it is most likely because that phrasing fits his core beliefs and personality – whatever they are.
With that in mind, I hope you can agree that how a character speaks is important and that every character in a story having the same voice is unforgivable. A good author can make each voice so distinct and yet so natural that a reader can recognize who is speaking without the end tags and without the characters becoming caricatures. If you want a quick guide to which words might indicate what, as well as examples of real-life speech patterns to draw inspiration from you, can sign up for my email list and get that plus a short story for free (and I promise you not to spam your inbox, there’s nothing I hate more than receiving two emails a week telling me to spend money on something). For now though, I am skipping the “what” guide and going straight for “how”.
This is how it looked last time I did this. It looks slightly dawning at first, but once you get going it makes everything so much easier.
What I did was pick out as many different-colored highlighters as I could and assigned each color to a character. I went through the entire printout of the book and highlighted every sentence a character said in their color as well as adding a bookmark of that same color on each page the character spoke (except for the main character, she never shuts up and putting a bookmark on every page seemed like a waste). Be aware that you might need more than one highlighter for your main character depending on how much they speak – I think mine drained three highlighters.
In this case, I printed out two copies of the book so I could reuse a color for a new character in the second round (I think most stories have more than 4 people who speak enough to warrant this kind of scrutiny over their speech patterns). Also, the second round of slightly less important characters have become much more important in the sequel, so I am thankful I did all that leg work early on.
Another thing I did was track keywords or phrases that needed to be introduced at a certain time – I had been moving chapters around so much I have lost track of what was where. This helped me make sure a character didn’t use a phrase she only learned three chapters later.
Once I was done marking everything I needed I went over it all, one character at a time, to make sure their speech pattern was consistent and recognizable (to a reasonable extent, don’t overdo it). I made sure they used words they would actually know, words that would come naturally to them with their background, their level of education, the situation in question (a character might, for example, try to sound smarter than they are at an exam). Looking at the book like this also allowed me a clear view of the development of each character without everyone else fogging it up.
As you can see I tracked different things for different characters. The first image is from page 4, and there I established a baseline of how MC spoke and what it said about her. Here I made myself aware of all the little things in her language that showed personality, like how she would say “sorry” in a none apologetic manner, how she would evade uncomfortable subjects with a joke, how she would ask questions to which she knew the answer out of politeness, and how she would sometimes be patronizing or mocking even. That gave me a baseline for her speech pattern which I then made sure stayed consistent and situation based throughout the book.
Funny story actually, I did the same for a minor character that was loosely based on a friend of mine. The character used the pronoun “I” more than any other to a degree that was self-centered, instead of thanking her friend for helping her she insulted her in a seemingly friendly way, and when she finally said something nice it was unempathetic and limited to her own view of things with no regard to the recipient. By recreating my “friend” in a fictional environment and looking at her speech pattern from a more objective point of view I realized that I was better off without this friend (it’s also been several months since I have talked to her, and she hasn’t realized yet).
Anyways, on page 60 you can see me writing little numbers next to the blue text. That is how many times he uses each pronoun (1= 1st person, 4= 1st person plural). The amount of times this character uses a first-person pronoun on this page is 31% which is a significantly low rate. Of course, the character I mentioned above also has a low rater of first-person pronouns (28% first-person, 57% second-person), so this alone is not enough to prove selflessness, but generally using a small number of first-person pronouns indicates a distance from self – in the case of Howard (blue) that is due to focus on other’s people’s needs above his own, and in the case of Sasha (not depicted here) it is due to low self-esteem that she tries to hide by putting the spotlight on others – whether that light is good or bad.
On page 82 you also see numbers by the green text, these refer to the number of words the character uses in each sentence. This character is a shy guy who dislikes interacting with people because he assumes they all want to harm him – therefore he gives as little of himself away as he can in each sentence. This character also uses high words when he can, even if it’s the difference between “just” and “only”, because he wants to prove he’s not an idiot, and at the same time he uses contractions so he won’t stand out as much. On that page he uses an average of 5.6 words pr time he speaks, by comparison, the red character (MC) uses 15.4 words pr times she speaks.
As I go through the story my notes become less and less frequent as I come to recognize each character’s voice on instinct and can tell if something is off without the counting.
Of course, this is a lot of work, but I do think my story is the better for it, and I also believe it is a fairly easy way to do it.
Like I said at the beginning, if you sign on for my mailing list you will get a free guide to character voices and how to use speech patterns to indicate character. If you are still not convinced this is an important topic come back next week where I will show you just how much you can tell from the frequency of a single word or word group (and in-depth analysis that took me years to finish).
