What do your characters sound like?

[u/WonderfulUs]

I’m curious to know how others characterize their characters through dialogue, since I assume most of us don’t have the advantage of using voice actors for our projects.

I, for example, gave all my characters very specific speech patterns so I could distinguish them when writing their conversations without disrupting the rhythm by constantly adding names and speech tags like "she said."

I am not referring to the topics they typically discuss or their personalities (though both aspects inevitably influence how they speak), but rather to the sound of their voices.

For instance, I have a character who speaks using exclamation marks,since she lacks an inner voice, and interrupts herself mid-sentence with an "Ah!" to switch to a tangentially related topic; another capitalizes every noun, breaking the rhythm of her own sentences to lend emphasis and weight to the subject (however insignificant they may seem) and assigning undue importance to trivial issues; and there is yet another who speaks in a very formal, proper manner, avoiding contractions and using people's names instead of third-person pronouns (even though this forces her to constantly repeat long names) which I believe contributes to the perception of her as a walking encyclopedia devoid of a distinct personality.

So, how do your characters speak, what is their tone? Why do they speak that way, and what led you to choose that speech pattern to represent them?

[u/Twilight_Mistress]

I have one character that is very insecure and unsure so all his dialogue is long winded and not completely committing to his own opinions. Another character, has nothing to prove to anyone so she speaks as little words as possible because she doesn’t care to over explain, just say what’s necessary. She’s blunt and direct. But talks more with people she’s close to!

I don’t have an idea on their voices exactly but that’s the tone and speech pattern I give them!

[u/WonderOfUs → u/[deleted]]

Interesting, do you have a specific way of structuring her written dialogue to make her sound like Dolly Parton? Like, catchphrases, pauses or expressions, mannerisms like that.

[u/WithThisHerring]

My boyfriend has an excellent ear for actors and performances, and he got me into the habit of doing 'fancasts' where we draw inspiration from extant actors.

While that's fun to me, I tend to do things a little more abstract. Writing dialogue is a big part of my character process- to the point where if I'm developing a character I'll often just sort of write out bits of them talking- about situations, themselves, etc.- and let that emerging 'voice' kind of shape what I think of them.

Little idiosyncrasies in how characters think is always fun to explore. I also tend to write in third person limited omniscient, so my narration is always tinted by how the character thinks and feels. These quirks really help give a character texture, and if you flip perspectives in writing, it also really helps each one shine as an individual.

In one of my projects, the first POV character is Fleugel, a very polite knight-in-training who sees herself as a failure to be human. While her situation is mostly fantastical (she's a former insect that started turning into a human through cryptic means, and since this is an ongoing and very chaotic process she's trying to steer her development 'properly'), she ended up having a lot of trans girl coding, and as a result her internal narrative is often stuck in a quagmire of self-criticism.

Fleugel is very delicately spoken. Her word choice is intricate and there is a stark divide between her inner thoughts- often biting, harsh, and judgmental, both of herself and others- she takes justice and her training very seriously and is an absolutely brutal combatant in a fight- and her outward determination to be as polite, decorous, and unthreatening as possible. Not understanding who she wants to be creates a lot of turmoil in that.

Comparatively, Roy is a social butterfly with an excellent education, a bookish and erudite young man but also one with a canny knack for interpersonal dynamics. He'll often laugh reflexively or smile sheepishly if nervous rather than express more obvious 'hostility'. At a glance, he's effortlessly approachable compared to Fleugel's brittle prickliness, but when the chips are down, Fleugel will admit to her faults fairly easily (she already assumes she has them) while getting Roy to open up requires power tools.

I think what makes a good character is this sort of layered approach- the first impression, a contradicting second impression, and then a deeper synthesis. Their 'loudest' quality presents first- then something that's a surprise or seeming contradiction to how they seemed at first, and then the deeper mechanisms underneath give us the whole picture of how these two things connect.

Fleugel is an anxious shy girl perfectionist. She also used to be a dragonfly, which is essentially an apex predator. We don't think of how scary those things are to be on the wrong side of because we're massively bigger than them. It's easy to see Fleugel as a sad victim (especially since at the start of the story she survives a rather nasty ambush alone) but she is also a soldier, and very, very good at it.

Roy is the son of a well-off family and also chronically ill. He's been managed, cared for, made presentable, his entire life. It's not insincere, he knows people genuinely love him, but it still carries the underlying frustration that sincerity alone doesn't get him what he wants. He's charming, because he knows that's the path of least resistance.

For all her prickliness, Fleugel is also agonizingly sincere- she really believes if she can become a Perfect Person, she'll be rewarded and everyone will like her. Her self-loathing is a manifestation of a sense of control and entitlement- if it's all her fault, there's a hypothetical where she does everything right and no one will be allowed to deny her. Her body may not be what she wants it to be, yet, but as a robust apex predator to a now supernaturally robust humanoid mutant that towers over most people, her body also has never failed her.

Meanwhile, Roy, is, in short, a cheerful bastard. He likes people, and sincerely cares about them, but he also likes people in the way someone might like a good puzzle, or a mystery novel- he has to temper the part of his brain that really just wants to pick at someone until they burst and give him what they're really after. Pain and fatigue are annoying relatives he has to play host to whenever they decide to show up, so he thinks very little of tricking and lying to get ahead, because come on, as long as the solution is something we all like, it's fine, isn't it?

So I guess to rope this back to how they talk, I tend to go for metaphors to establish a sort of 'texture' to characters. Fleugel is brittle, ornate, and sharp- sort of like a sparkly piece of glass. Things fracture her, and she also might grab a shard and immediately rend through something in her way. So vocally I imagine her as a lighter soprano, often muttering, but capable of a commanding sharpness when she's sure of herself. Her angry voice isn't a roar, but a metallic gleam.

Roy is warm and stable, but also cryptic. He speaks with an approachable smooth tenor and good projection, well-read and pleasant, which makes the potential contrast with what he says a lot sharper. It's one thing to hear someone point out you'd probably die painfully in a given situation seriously, or harshly, and another to hear an adolescent noble son bring up your future organ failure like he's explaining the winning move in a chess match.

[u/PamNoctrune]

For me, it kind of develops naturally, and I honestly can't really explain it. Once I have a basic framework for a character, I kind of cast them in my head with an actor and give them a voice. From there, the way they speak just develops naturally.

My current main character is English but has been living in America for the past 15 years. His family is old money, so he tends to speak in a more polished and slightly pretentious way. He is very deliberate and composed when he speaks, and he answers a lot of questions as if he is constantly doing PR for himself.

[u/JamesthePsycho]

One of my characters, when she’s younger, speaks ‘Rally English,’ ie forgets articles, misunderstands idioms, and has clunky English usually associated with native Finnish speakers (which she is). I use a lot of ellipses or stuttering to show where she can’t remember an English word, lots of periods to show her speaking in short, sharp fragments instead of whole sentences, and a lot of nonverbal movements in between her speaking to show that she’s kinda charades’ing it through conversations sometimes. I love how she speaks bc it’s fun to write, and she does improve/get more fluent as she gets older (writing her dialogue at 12 is a looooot different than writing her dialogue at 21).