Listening to the Voices

One of the blog posts I read this morning was about characters. She asked her blog readers how they go about making each character have a distinctive voice. It made me think - long and hard - until I remembered something I read somewhere  - learn to eavesdrop!

In the modern world of technology, the next time you get asked to a party (and it may be sooner than me because of my cheesy salsa incident) take along a voice recorder. Discreetly place your cellphone (mobile) or other listening device on the table amongst the chatty Cathys and press the record button. At the end of the night, go home and listen to the recording.

Write down each person's name and their dialog. It will surprise you (or maybe not) that you will recognize each individual just by the sound of their voice. You will also notice that each person has their own speech pattern and special phrases.

That's distinctive voice.

Now, just because people have distinctive voice doesn't mean we want to write like we speak. Why? Because most of our conversation (I would say at least 50%) is filled with babble and small talk. Whereas dialog in a book should 6 elements:

• 1)It should always move the story forward
• 2)It should make sense to the reader
• 3)It should end. Who wants to read an hour's worth of conversation?
• 4)It should have a point.
• 5)It should tell us more about the character
• 6)It should be interesting and meaningful

Tomorrow I'm going to show some distinctive voice traits and how to write them so they don't irritate the reader. Enjoy the rest of your day! See you later...

 Picture Source: here

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Great post about descriptions at Random acts of Writing.

Elizabeth at Mystery Writing is Murder lists six really important questions you should ask about your plot.

Rayna, uses a great example to show how important it is to know your readers.

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Dialog: Distinctive Voice - the three Vs

Here are the three Vs (hey, that rhymes) of distinctive voice as taken from Brainstormers by James V. Smith:

1) Vocabulary - Each character should have their own vocabulary or pet phrases that separates them from the others

2) Verbosity - You should determine the length of each character's thoughts and speeches. You may not get some characters to shut up while others need prompting to say two words. Stereotypically (so it shouldn't be used much) grandmothers, women or old people go on and on while young teenage boys talk in grunts.

3) Velocity - The pace and rhythm of a characters speech  and be altered. It's in how you arrange words, sentences and ideas. One could speak without pausing for breath (maybe take out some of the commas) or one can pause often (maybe use more '...') or one could stutter (st-st-stut-tter)

Here is a good example of distinctive voices (take from Emma by Jane Austen - a conversation between Emma and Mrs. Bates):

"My mother's deafness is very trifling you see--just nothing at all.
By only raising my voice, and saying any thing two or three times over,
she is sure to hear; but then she is used to my voice. But it is very
remarkable that she should always hear Jane better than she does me.
Jane speaks so distinct! However, she will not find her grandmama
at all deafer than she was two years ago; which is saying a great
deal at my mother's time of life--and it really is full two years,
you know, since she was here. We never were so long without seeing
her before, and as I was telling Mrs. Cole, we shall hardly know
how to make enough of her now."

"Are you expecting Miss Fairfax here soon?"

"Oh yes; next week."

"Indeed!--that must be a very great pleasure."

"Thank you. You are very kind. Yes, next week. Every body is
so surprized; and every body says the same obliging things. I am
sure she will be as happy to see her friends at Highbury, as they
can be to see her. Yes, Friday or Saturday; she cannot say which,
because Colonel Campbell will be wanting the carriage himself one
of those days. So very good of them to send her the whole way!
But they always do, you know. Oh yes, Friday or Saturday next.
That is what she writes about. That is the reason of her writing out
of rule, as we call it; for, in the common course, we should not have
heard from her before next Tuesday or Wednesday."

"Yes, so I imagined. I was afraid there could be little chance
of my hearing any thing of Miss Fairfax to-day."

"So obliging of you! No, we should not have heard, if it had not
been for this particular circumstance, of her being to come here
so soon. My mother is so delighted!--for she is to be three months
with us at least. Three months, she says so, positively, as I
am going to have the pleasure of reading to you. The case is,
you see, that the Campbells are going to Ireland. Mrs. Dixon has
persuaded her father and mother to come over and see her directly.
They had not intended to go over till the summer, but she is so
impatient to see them again--for till she married, last October,
she was never away from them so much as a week, which must make
it very strange to be in different kingdoms, I was going to say,
but however different countries, and so she wrote a very urgent letter
to her mother--or her father, I declare I do not know which it was,
but we shall see presently in Jane's letter--wrote in Mr. Dixon's
name as well as her own, to press their coming over directly,
and they would give them the meeting in Dublin, and take them back
to their country seat, Baly-craig, a beautiful place, I fancy.
Jane has heard a great deal of its beauty; from Mr. Dixon, I mean--
I do not know that she ever heard about it from any body else;
but it was very natural, you know, that he should like to speak
of his own place while he was paying his addresses--and as Jane used
to be very often walking out with them--for Colonel and Mrs. Campbell
were very particular about their daughter's not walking out
often with only Mr. Dixon, for which I do not at all blame them;
of course she heard every thing he might be telling Miss Campbell
about his own home in Ireland; and I think she wrote us word
that he had shewn them some drawings of the place, views that he
had taken himself. He is a most amiable, charming young man,
I believe. Jane was quite longing to go to Ireland, from his account
of things."

Writing: Distinctive Characters

I think nothing s more frustrating than creating fiction that your readers can find glaring errors with.

Where writers create problems for themselves is when they try to invent distinctive characters.

Although I don't agree that a writer should only write what they know, if you're going to create a character that's a geek, you, the writer, should at least know what HTML stands for or be willing to Google it. (If you do not know what 'Google' is, don't go down the geek path. In fact, the word 'geek' is probably going over your head right now...)

Why? Because you know there's a geek out there reading your book and saying, 'you can't do that.' Or what kind of coding is this?

What if you're really an experienced writer, what if you've never been out of the state or province you were born in? What if you want one of your characters to speak Punjabi? Does that mean you're stuck?

Yup.

Nah, just joking.

But, you need to be willing to research. And, if you truly know little about a certain subject, don't throw in details that you can't backup.

In my latest book, my detectives go to a house and meet a man who draws Anime. I don't know why I chose that hobby but I don't know much about it. What did I do? I went to the library and I search on Google and learned as much as I could about the subject. And then, I hardly mentioned it at all in the book other than he painted anime floor to ceiling in his living room and that the girl drawn had large eyes in proportion to her head.

Why do I go through all the effort?
1) I want an accurate book.
2) I am a lot smarter now than a fifth grader. Well, almost.

The point: If you don't know and don't research - don't write!

Oh, and please, if you haven't done so already, submit something funny to the contest. I would love to award someone $50 worth of books for their trouble.

Here's a joke my son told me... (this is an example of what I'm looking for)

Question: What's brown and sticky?
Answer: A stick.

That wasn't so hard.