I know that this has to do with the vocabulary that a character uses, and the general pattern of their speech, etc. The problem I'm having is that I'm not quite sure how best to achieve this. Should I sit down and write out a lengthy set of words that the character is likely to use? Should I write out some sample phrases, to get the feel of how the character speaks?

How do other people do this?

Alex

My CW tutor recommended putting together a list of words and phrases used exclusively by the main character(s), it didn't need to be many. 'Voice' also extends to the prose, and is easier to convey via 3rd person limited, or 1st person, than via omniscient pov or multi-povs.

If you're looking for examples of distinctive voices I can recommend Nick Hornby's About A Boy, where he uses alternating chapters from the Boy's and the Man's povs. Alternatively there's Emily Diamand's Flood Child, where she alternates between a boy and a girl mc from different cultures.

Voice is such slippery stuff, isn't it. You might find it helpful to think in terms of what kind of 'speaker' they are, in both dialogue and narrative, and the words and rhythms should start to come. And it's always hugely helpful to think in terms of differences between your characters, because then you can make quite small characteristic-nesses (?) and their effect on our sense of the individuals involved will be maginfied. So I'd always explore some of this list in several characters at once.

- long sentences or short - http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2008/09/in-praise-of-the-long-sentence.html
- complex grammar and syntax or simple
- colloquial or formal vocabulary
- hesitant or confident in opinions, in how they express themselves
- do they talk a lot, or a little?
- do they interrupt people? If they're interrupted to they go on, or fade out?
- do they stick to the point or wander off?
- do they refer to themselves in everything they talk about, or leave themselves out of their thinking? Or at least their talking?
- how big is their vocabulary?
- do they use metaphors, which are a more sophisticated kind of thinking, or only similes?
- what kind of figurative language would they use? Drawn from their own job/experience?
- region - where do they come from? Grammar, vocab and syntax all might vary? Do they come from Durham but have Irish parents - some Dublinisms might have stuck?
- generation; read the fiction of the date your novel's set, to get a feel for the difference between how the old and the young speak. Think up the same thing to say, and work out how a 20yr old, a 50yr old and an 80yr old would say it.
- how does their narrative voice, if they're a narrator, relate to their dialogue voice? http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2010/11/keeping-up-with-the-jameses.html

'Voice' also extends to the prose, and is easier to convey via 3rd person limited, or 1st person, than via omniscient pov or multi-povs.

Must say, I don't agree with this at all. Thanks to free indirect style, there's nothing you can do in a 3rd-limited narrative, or 1st person narrative, that you can't do in either full omniscient with a moving voice-and-point-of-view, or in multiple 3rd-limiteds.

Emma

Must say, I don't agree with this at all. Thanks to free indirect style, there's nothing you can do in a 3rd-limited narrative, or 1st person narrative, that you can't do in either full omniscient with a moving voice-and-point-of-view, or in multiple 3rd-limiteds.

Oh, I agree, I'm just saying it's easier in 3rd person limited and 1st person, especially if you're unsure how to do it in the first place.

As with most things, I think there are two basic ways to approach this. There's the method Emma outlines, of listing elements and building up a profile. There's also the just dive in approach. This is where you jam yourself right inside the character then think/talk/move like they do without really thinking about it. It maybe that the method you choose depends on how your mind works. Mine is very visual and aural. I tend to make lots of observations of people all the time and sort of store them in a kind of semi-active but unwritten form. So when I have to write a certain kind of voice, I just try to inhabit those memories. But whichever method you choose, I'd say you have to be able to write from within the voice, not remain outside it and too obviously controlling it. Bad actors do this, like Stephen Fry: you can always see him thinking about what he's acting rather than him just doing it. Same effect with novels written by comedians, come to think of it.

Terry

I must admit that I don't usually think about voice in an analytical way - like you, Terry, I just listen out for the characters till I hear them speak. This is particularly true with historical fiction, where you're looking for a voice which sounds authentic, but isn't pastiche of the period you're writing. It's a real 'black box' thing for me - I put lots of stuff in and.... see what appears on the page.

Trouble is, of course, that like so many instinctive things, that's fine if it works, but no use if it doesn't. Hence the kind of thinking in my earlier post. There are technical ways to help yourself towards the same result; I do remember doing that kind of thinking to find Anna's voice in TMOL, since I made her up, quite cold-bloodedly, to contrast with the already-existing Stephen.

And I'm giving a workshop on The Writers' Voices at York, so I'm really grateful to you for raising the issue, Alex, because that's the most organised bit of thinking I've done for it so far...

Emma

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The other thing about a list of things-to-think-about is that you absolutely don't have to answer all the questions properly, or any of them at all. I think for most writers they're more like oil in the instinct-engine, than a questionnair to be filled out. (Talking of voice, up to about the 1950s people "fill up" questionnaires, rather than filling them out. And they pronounce it kestionnaire, as it's French. Not a lot of people have noticed that, I think...)

That's why I get slightly creeped by those novel-writing software programmes (or courses) full of index cards for you to fill in... No one's written a programme that will do the sort of think-feel mulling-over which it really needs.

Emma, that raises an interesting question about how you teach something that may now work at an instinctive level for you (which you may or may not have arrived at via a lot of data collecting and technical exercises) to someone else who may work differently to you either or both then and now (!).

I once had a very good mentor for a sport I played. One time, I asked him how he did something I wanted to be able to do. He set me a series of exercises and I said, "Are these the exercises that you do?"; he replied no, he didn't need to do any exercises because it now had become a natural part of his game. I then asked him if he used to do them and he surprised me by saying he'd never done them. When I pressed him, he said he'd got there by a different route but one he didn't think would work for me. So instead he'd worked out exercises that suited my approach. (He was right by the way.)

Terry

Well, I ain't that sure. I s'pose you just gotter give it a bit of thought - what kinder background they come from, what sorter job they got and if they ever got a chance to go to school when they was young. And then you gotter try'n decide if they got any sorter quirks to how they speak - odd sorter words what they use, or bits of grammar what ain't all that regular - and then arter a coupler days of all this, some sorter voice'll start appearin on the page, and you won't much remember how it ever got there in the first place.

Yes, I think that's the continuous challenge of teaching - and one reason that WW has become such an important building block for me; that other people don't work the way one does oneself, and that other people may need to learn consciously some things which came instinctively to you. (Easy enough to teach someone a thing which you had to work out technically yourself, of course.)

There's a limit to how completely you can enter into another mindset, of course (I'd MUCH rather find my way with a map than a set of instructions, and draw a diagram than write a paragraph to explain something, and I can't really imagine feeling the reverse, just as I can't imagine being shortsighted, or what smoking a cigarette makes you feel like...) But I'll have a damned good try, if my character or my student needs me to.

But at least you can collect different approaches from other people - which is where places like WW are such a goldmine - and either present them to the students at the start, as a bouquet of possible tools for them to try, or have them up your sleeve for when you start discussing it. And current students, too, teach you things: I learn something - always about teaching, and often about writing - from every workshop I teach.

Plus, apart from the fact that the right tool for them may not be one you use yourself, I think it's important that students learn to hear what their own writerly self is telling them. So presenting several possible approaches encourages them - I hope - to listen for which resonates with them. Some students, of course, would rather you presented them with An Answer - The Right Way - The Rules. But it's well established in pedagogy that what students find most reassuring isn't necessarily what makes them learn best... They call it Desirable Difficulties.

Though of course there's also the blog post I'm going to write as soon as I've done my marking, about listening for the fierce resistance to a tool, which may just mean it's the right tool for you...

I love teaching for the OU, but I do miss the two-way street of face-to-face teaching, because it's so much easier to teach creatively, if you see what I mean, when you're both responding to each other. A big workshop like York - an hour, and perhaps sixty people - can't be quite like that either, though of course you can ask for feedback on what you've just told them to do, or said to them, and you can sense the temperature of the group, as well as responding to individual questions and bafflements. But then it's always horses for courses, as they say...

Emma

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Crosse with Sapph. Quite.

Alex, you could try writing some little short stories - think flash fiction - in the voice of a character you're trying to pin down, even if in the end they won't be a narrator.

One thing to think about with narrators is WHY they're telling this story. Not that you need to make it explicit, that it's a deathbed confession, or whatever. But that sorts out some reasons to use this phrase not that, what tone and so on. True of dialogue, too: people say things for a reason, and you need to know it.

Though of course there's also the blog post I'm going to write as soon as I've done my marking, about listening for the fierce resistance to a tool, which may just mean it's the right tool for you...

There was a very interesting bit on the Today programme this morning, where they discussed research that's been done on fonts. Modern opinion is very much that the clearer the font, the easier it is to learn and remember what's written in it. But this research shows it's exactly the opposite: that people recall much more detail when a font is difficult, even irritating to look at. Which reminded me of an old Zen story about two teachers: one charming, articulate and funny; the other the opposite, yet the students remembered far more of what the latter taught them. Hmmmmm . . . .

It may be that we're discussing the difference between teaching and coaching here?

Terry

Thanks for the thoughts, everyone, especially to Emma for the suggestions of what to think about. I had only been thinking about characters' dialogue, but I realise that I now need to think about them as narrators of their part of the story.

By the way: long vs. short sentences - isn't the usual advice to vary the lengths of sentences a bit, to make the writing seem more interesting? I have a tendency to write medium-length sentences all the time, unless I concentrate on varying them more.

Alex

I am so not here, talking of teaching, I am so wading through OU scripts, where I have to do most of my teaching/coaching/facilitating-learning... in balloon comments in the margins of a Word document...

Back when I've done.

Emma

Alex, I'm not sure the best reason to vary sentence length is to make your writing more interesting - although it's likely to be true that it'll be less interesting if all the sentences are the same length.

I think the main watchword is pacing. If for example you're writing a thriller, then short sentences will speed up the pace in action scenes, as well as mimic the lack of ambiguity that goes with chase sequences, shoot-outs, etc. But when the detective is sitting at home later, trying to work out who dunnit, longer sentences will match better his thought processes (which will probably be fairly long links of reasoning) and slow the pace down accordingly. Of course, when he gets his light bulb moment, you can contrast this with the sudden insight in a short sentence, e.g.

"Moriarty did it."

Terry, that's really, really interesting about fonts, and makes a lot of sense (must try Listen Again for the Today programme. Was it Simon Garfield, whose new book I haven't got hold of yet? I'm fascinated by typography and graphic design)

I'm working on a theory that one reason that clichés and second-hand language or just run-of-the-mill competent writing with no particular freshness about it, make a book ultimately less satisfactory, however much you enjoy the story, is that your reading mind slides over them too easily; gets the story, but doesn't linger. The reason I re-read Sayers quite often but rarely Christie.

One of the more essential defining qualities of literary fiction, to me, is that the prose is more original - less second-hand, never run-of-the-mill. And of course that can be enjoyed for its own sake - admiring it as good art/craft, specially if you're practioner yourself. But I've never felt that's enough of a reason to want readers to like more literary fiction if they don't by nature, not least because it can be very difficult to persuade lit-fic-resisters why it's a Good Thing to be more aware of the brushstrokes, as it were: it sounds too self-regarding, as if you're asking them to admire the curlicues in the plasterwork above the door, when they want to find the kitchen, as if they feel it's getting in the way of the story.

But what if that originality - which means it's a bit slower to read, which catches your word-mind in a way that second-hand language doesn't and clichés are positively designed not to... what if that snagging of your mind is actually part of what makes the reading more involving? Gives the language, rhythm, images, more time to sink in? It's a Desirable Difficulty, in other words?????

I could go on about the revelation I had reading an article about Rembrandt's brushwork, which is intimately connected with this, but I won't because I'm still not really here...

Emma

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Alex, I'd say it's not so much important to vary the number of words in a sentence, as to vary the overall rhythm and pace of the paragraph - if you worry about the latter, the former will normally follow.

As Terry says, that variation should be dictated by the nature of the scene, as well as voice etc. If you have a whole series of sentences which have the same rhythm (and most of us do have default patterns) then it's very dull to read. Reading aloud will pick them up, though. But if you try for elegant variation just by messing around with the structure for no good reason of storytelling, it won't work; like everything to do with grammar/syntax/vocab it needs to be rooted in what you're trying to say.

Still, there's no harm in thinking about sentence structure, as I was here: http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2009/09/the-right-words-in-the-right-order.html

One of the tricks I use, when writing first person narrators, is to think about their motivation for telling the story, and who their ideal implied reader is.

Because I'm interested in people who lie, most of my narrators are twisting a story in order to show themselves in a positive light to an imaginary audience who they assume to be sympathetic to them.

It's not something you can pull off with every single narrator - but if it's appropriate to your story, just thinking about why the character is speaking and who they are speaking too can be a brilliant help.