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].
