Character Voices

I don’t want to talk too much about character voices in dialogue, because we all know every character should have his or her own individual speech patterns (but read on, I am going to get into it near the end of this post). Instead I want to talk about the narrative style in a novel with multiple viewpoint characters.

It’s rare that I find a novel where the narrative style really changes when the writer switches viewpoints. There are a few. I thought Adrian Phoenix (link to the right) did a good job with this in her debut novel, A Rush of Wings (I reviewed it in January on Fantasy Debut). But in many novels the narrative style (the writer’s voice) doesn’t change much from viewpoint to viewpoint, and yet that fact doesn’t really jump out at you as you’re reading (or at me, anyway). In a few, however, the fact that there’s no change really does kind of spoil the novel. For instance, in a mystery I just finished (notice I’m naming the good example but leaving the bad example nameless) the main viewpoint characters were a crazed psycho killer and the detective trying to catch him, with occasional input from two kids. But they all sounded exactly the same. The narrative voice didn’t change at all, I mean at all, when the viewpoint switched.

I think in a novel where the overall viewpoint is closer to omniscient you can get away with changing your narrative voice less as you follow different characters, whereas in a close third-person you’d probably want to change your voice more. But I wonder to what extent most novelists think about this. I’ve always written close third-person and relied on my intuition to make it sound like my characters, but I’m not sure if that worked. I think I need to be relying more on conscious decisions about their voices. After all, in one of my favorite short stories ever (of ones I’ve written, that is) I made some specific decisions about how the characters would talk based on who they were, and I think that’s part of why I like it so much (for the curious, my Saxon main character spoke English using as many English-derived words as possible, whereas for the Norman guy I used French-derived words and sprinkled his dialogue with occasional snippets of actual Norman French from the period, which was around 1070 AD in post-Conquest England). But I’m curious about the extent to which other writers plan out how their viewpoint characters will sound before they start writing from their points of view.

In a book with only one viewpoint character, it won’t be as obvious if the character’s voice is really the writer’s voice. But I still think the character should sound like himself (or herself). This is a topic that’s been on my mind a lot lately as I plot to add more viewpoint characters to my own works-in-progress (and by the time these babies are done they’d better be the best damn novels ever, because they’re sure taking me forever).

Now about the things you can do to distinguish your characters’ voices in both dialogue and narrative. A lot of it comes down to how they think, but some will be based on external matters such as where they grew up and what their educational background and social status are. Regionalisms are an aspect of voice I don’t see used too often. Then there are speech tics, like, you know, characters who like use certain words or phrases in like every sentence, you know (although that would get like really annoying to read, you know?)? One trick that Adrian Phoenix used was to have characters refer to other characters by nicknames even in the narrative. So the minute you see a character using that nickname for somebody else, you know you’re in his head. It was effective.

There are a lot of other methods. Sentence length and structure can vary based on how each character expresses himself or herself. The writing will still sound like you, the writer, but at the same time it will sound like the characters. One note of caution, though, especially for dialogue: DO NOT, do not, do not have every sentence by every character trail off half-finished. Do not do this. I think people do this in an attempt to… Well, I mean, it’s probably supposed to… After all, in real life isn’t that how people…

NO. People do not talk like that in real life, and even if they do, dialogue isn’t about how people talk in real life. It’s a simulation of how they talk in real life. Trailing-off dialogue, especially when it never gets to the meat of what the characters are trying to say, is a big turnoff, at least for me as a reader. I see more of it in scripts than I do in fiction, but that’s probably because I read more unsold spec scripts than unpublished fiction. If one character talks this way, it’s not a problem, because it’s how that character talks. If they all talk this way, it becomes a problem.

Now I have to go figure out how my characters should talk.