GIVING A CHARACTER THEIR VOICE

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            When writing dialogue, how can you keep your characters from all sounding the same?  If you’re good at this task you can use regional dialects as a distinguishing characteristic, like my friend Wayne Zurl [http://www.waynezurlbooks.net] does so well in his Sam Jenkins series.  If you do it well enough, and Wayne does, before you know it you have books that will sell well as audiobooks where differences in speech usage and patterns are the essential clue in individuating the characters as you listen to the story.  At least for me, this is hard to do as you need a very nuanced ear and a very good memory for what they said and how they said it to make people sound different based only on word choice.  According to The Guinness Book of Records [http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-2000/most-character-voices-for-an-audio-book-individual] the greatest number of characters given distinct and distinguishable voices by an actor in an audiobook is 224.   This amazing record was accomplished in 2004.

What can the aspiring author do to make their characters different from one another?  If the educational level of the characters varies (college educated P.I. versus high school dropout thug), you have another way to make their voices quite different.  The thug can use a lot of slang and slur his word endings, maybe even say a few bad words here and there.  You can make a character stutter or misuse certain words, or even have an accent.  One of my characters slips a Spanish word into his English every now and then.  The perfect word for Vincent to be overusing for this particular idiosyncrasy is the classic parsley word used promiscuously in conversational Spanish, “claro”.  Vincent could make a chimichurri with all of the claro parsley he sprinkles into his conversation [check out a previous recent post on this blog on “Salsas” if this doesn’t make sense to you, or go directly to the recipe at http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/chimichurri].

Can You Hear the Beat?

Pat Bertram offers a guest post:  She discusses the use of "beats" to enrich dialogue in our books.  There are some helpful ideas for all of us in this example of writing technique.

I once read the entire oeuvre of a bestselling author, trying to figure out the reason for her popularity, and I had a hard time slogging through her words. It’s not simply that I find romance novels unappealing, it’s that she does not use beats. Beats, as you know, are interesting bits of action used as dialog tags:

“No!” Mary rushed to grab the paring knife from her two-year-old son. So much more interesting than: “No,” Mary said.

Beats make the book; in many cases, they are the book. I first noticed this when I read an Iris Johansen thriller. I got bored with her series character and, for a change of pace, started reading only her beats. To my surprise, the entire story was there. The character’s fear, lessening of fear, relief, escalating fear, despair, desire, lust, all reaching to a crescendo of utter terror, and then finally peace and acceptance.

From that, I’ve learned to cultivate beats. When I’m looking at a movie that doesn’t capture my full attention, I watch the actors and try to put what I see into words. The other day I saw a character shoot a finger at a friend and smile as if he were agreeing with him, then the smile faded and he shook his head no. Not only did it have an element of humor (doing the opposite of what’s expected) it was a brilliant beat, perfectly timed.

Obviously, not using beats has not hurt the bestselling romance writer any, but for the rest of us, the beat goes on.

The following is an excerpt from my novel Light Bringer, showing the use of beats. Since there are only two characters, we’d know who was talking even without identifiers, but the small bits of stage business help set the scene.  The book is available at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/49822.