The Idiot's Guide to Writing

Lesson 5: Character Voice

Obviously there are more characters than just your protagonist in your stories. Unless you're narrating from a third-person omniscient perspective or something like that and have access to the thoughts of every single character (and even then the narrative usually closely follows the protagonist anyway), the only way they can express themselves is through dialogue and behavior. Character voice is the official term for how they do that and how one particular character separates themselves from the cast of others, and this is my favorite part of writing characters because this is how they come to life. What makes character voice good is not how loud it is, but how personal it is. It's the small things, not the big ones, that make characters feel like people, because the small things are relatable.

That's probably the biggest thing authors don't understand about character voice because, well, as the person pulling the strings, it can be really hard to see or treat your characters as people, because you understand better than anyone that they're not. It's easy to think of character voice as just texturing. But your purpose is to make sure the audience doesn't recognize that, and ensure that the hand of the author is as invisible as possible. If your characters are taken out-of-character, they will notice. And they will complain.

So, two things:

How do we develop character voice?

How do we keep characters in-character?

These are the building blocks, and on the top of that...well, character voice doesn't really have a lot of hard rules because it's so broad. Experiment with it in as many ways as you want—there are a multitude of different methods to express it that nobody has ever tried before. That's why I love it.

About thing one. The essence of writing character voice is the character's traits reacting to the world around them, and what makes it different from the next guy. Everyone feels anger, sorrow, joy, and everything else in different ways, and what causes them is different, too. Ask yourself what these things manifest as in your characters. Some people lock up and refuse to talk to anyone, some people can't restrain it and explode, and some people are very sensitive and break down. So on and so forth. Your characters will be no different, and I'll be very surprised if your characters don't feel extreme emotion at any point in your story. They have to master their internal conflict before they can realistically face their external conflict, and how they do that is exclusive to who they are.

That's on the deep end of emotional conflict, but the same idea applies on a smaller scale. Your characters should all behave uniquely even when they aren't experiencing intense emotions. We develop speech patterns, thought patterns, and body language, and other behaviors throughout our lives. This is what separates characters beyond big emotional story beats, and I think this is more important because more of your story's content will be the low-stakes, interpersonal stuff. I'm not going to go over an exhaustive list of how each of these traits manifest in a character since this chapter is three months late, but I will touch on speech, since practically every character expresses themselves in speech or some speechlike way.

There are two big things that influence our speech patterns—personality and the environment we are surrounded by. Our environment is the most influential, because that can also affect personality and how we act. Different environments, cultures, and social settings cultivate different kinds of behavior and speech, and if a person had been exposed to a particular environment for a long time, they will carry the patterns they have grown familiar with in regular circumstances, and may even carry those speech patterns into places where it is not appropriate. This can manifest itself in the form of slang and/or swearwords, vocabulary, what things characters will talk about more, what and how much information they're willing to share, etc. There are changes in these things across any social class or culture—just because slang is attributed to street talk doesn't mean that higher society has its own type of jargon. Understand the social climate your characters have gotten used to and how that would change how they speak.

Aaaand personality. People speak and behave in their own ways independent of anything else because that's just who they are. They latch on to their own forms of figurative language (which may be influenced by their culture). I love figurative language, and you can probably tell if you've read Stormbreacher. The protagonist Athena's speech filled with verbal irony that is unique to her, making her stand out. Some characters also speak more or less, or use bigger or smaller vocabularies. Find a way to make your characters sound unique.

Not every page needs to be dripping with personality, but my general soft standard for character voice is that you should usually be able to tell who is speaking and who the POV is without specifying. That will make it easier for your readers to follow a conversation.

Juggling all of these little details can sound like a nightmare, but you don't have to treat each character and their voices like a list to remember across an entire cast. In fact I'd argue don't do that because some of your characters will change as time goes on. You don't need to be a control freak with regards to your characters. That's a really unnatural and stiff way to think about them, and that's not even how we work anyway. Humans are unpredictable and illogical things—we just don't behave the exact same way across the board. Everyone is unique, but not stagnant.

I've also heard some stuff about using personality types as a tool for writing character voice, like MBTI, but...eh? I'm of the opinion that MBTI is a pretty stupid concept anyway because human nature is not as simple as four randomly-assigned values, and MBTI also does not account for anything in-between or cover exactly how and why we behave in any certain way. Our personalities are so complex and informed by so many things that it's honestly not efficient or useful to attempt to classify any of it. And I've also gotten the sense that MBTI personalities feel very...archetypical? I don't know, it feels like people work out INTJs to be silent and cold weirdoes who are basically aliens to interact with, ESTP seems like the ADHD-afflicted kid who's bored out of his mind in the back of the class. We assign roles to personality types because they allegedly determine who we are, and that's not good. Labeling people as x, y, z, or anything else has never been a good idea and it never will be a good idea. Use your experiences with people you know rather than use stereotypes.

Character voice is very complex, but the more you practice writing your characters the more natural it will become. But sometimes the plot demands characters to act in ways they normally wouldn't. When this happens with no justification, it can be very jarring. But there are ways to stop that from happening.

Usually, the best option is to stop a character from doing something they probably wouldn't in the first place. If you're not sure if they would or wouldn't, ask yourself why this character is doing this and if it aligns with what you've established about them. But if this isn't possible and you absolutely need your character to act in a way they normally wouldn't, consider the following options:

1. Find a new way to provoke the same outcome. Again, this may not be possible, but you may be able to find a smoother reason for a plot point to occur.

2. Find the character's breaking point and break it. At some point, we will do things that aren't natural for us but make sense in the moment.

3. Call the character's actions out in-story. An introspective character may realize that what they did wasn't smart and be mopey about it, or other characters might confront them about it. This is my personal preference because it can lead to growth, but unfortunately it doesn't answer why the character was out-of-character in the first place.

And that's character voice. Remember to write your characters naturally and ensure their actions make sense.