What You Need To Know Most About Character Voice

What You Need to Know Most About Character Voice

I’m kind of embarrassed to admit I didn’t have much of an understanding of character voice two years ago. I’m an English graduate, and none of my professors in college really talked about it. I think I remember learning the definition in high school and reading it briefly in a few writing tips.

In truth, I’ve probably heard the fact that “voice is one of the biggest draws for getting an agent or editor” more than I’ve actually heard tips on writing voice. Since then, I’ve gotten to the heart of what voice is. Or so I think. You’ll have to judge for yourself. Here’s what I found for anyone who might be struggling like I once was, or anyone who wants to learn more. The stuff in this post is what helped me bring that elusive voice into focus.

First, by definition, “voice” can refer to the writer’s style, the narrator’s style, or, your characters’ persona, thoughts, speech patterns, and word choice.

Sometimes when people think of character voice, they think of first-person narration, but really, all characters have a voice of their own, even if they aren’t telling the story. To illustrate, here are three lines from Harry, Ron, and Hermione:

“Don’t go picking a row with Malfoy, don’t forget, he’s a prefect now, he could make life difficult for you…”

“Can I have a look at Uranus too, Lavender?”

“I don’t go looking for trouble. Trouble usually finds me.”

If you’ve read the books, I bet you can tell who said what.

Voice is made up of two things: What the character talks (or sometimes thinks) about, and how she says it. In other words:

What the Character Talks about + How She Says it = Voice

Hermione believes in following rules and frequently tells Ron and Harry to do likewise. She’s also very logical and intelligent. In the first line above, she chooses to warn Harry, and then explains, logically, why he should heed her warning. Ron usually says those comical one-liners, and his language is usually a little coarser than the other two, so his quote is the second one. Because Harry is frequently accused of things, he often has to defend himself, “I don’t go looking for trouble.”

  What Your Character Talks About

So, What does your character choose to talk about? What does he not talk about?

In Lord of the Rings, the Hobbits often talk about food. They’re Hobbits, so they eat a lot more than the other characters and therefore food is important to their culture. Because they bring up food a lot, we know that’s what they are thinking about on their journey. They don’t casually strike up conversations about advanced battle tactics; they don’t have a war-based background. And any conversation they do have about battle tactics wouldn’t be on the same level as a warrior. So their background, culture, interests, and experience influence their voice.

If your character is a nutritionist, she might look at her lunch and talk about complex carbs, protein, calories, and vitamins. A fashionista might notice that her best friend is wearing this season’s color. A dentist might see people’s teeth first.

Remember, what your character chooses to talk about reflects what he’s thinking about. I know that sounds obvious, but have you really considered it? If your character says something, it’s also conveying to your reader what’s on his mind at that moment.

You can work that to your advantage by having your character say something surprising in a specific situation. If I have a character break up with her boyfriend, and she’s crying, and someone tries to comfort her, and she says, “It’s not Zach so much. Now I have to go to the dance looking like a complete idiot.” Not only is the response surprising—she’s not crying over the loss of Zach, but her potential embarrassment—it also reveals character—she’s more concerned with her image than the loss of her significant other.

Having that specific line stated in that situation conveys a lot about the character and her relationship with her boyfriend. It conveys what she’s thinking about most.

In Part 2 of this,  I’ll delve into how characters talk, mentioning some of the potential problems and a few minor techniques you can use for a character’s voice.

UPDATE: Read Part 2 here

Resources For Describing Physical Things

Setting

Abandoned Mine

Airplane

Airport Check-in

Alley

Amusement Park

Attic

Bakery

Bank

Basement

Bathroom (home)

Barn

*GE* Barn 2 (Dairy Focus)

Beach

Bedrooms

Birthday Party

Bonfire

Bowling Alley

Bridge

Bookstore

Cafeteria

Casino

*GE* Catacombs

Cave

Church

City Park

Classroom

Closet

Coffee House

Courtroom

Cruise Ship

*GE* Cryogenic Sleep Chamber

Daycare

Desert

Diner

Dragon’s Lair

Dungeon (Caution Graphic Description)

*GE* Egyptian Pyramids

Elevator

Farms

Forest

Frozen Tundra

Gallows

Garage

Garage Sale

Garden

Graveyard

*GE* GLOBAL WARMING (dystopian)

Grocery Store

Halloween Party

Haunted House

Herbalist Shop (fantasy)

High School Hallway

Hospital

Hotel Room

House Fire

House Party

Kitchen

*GE* Laboratory

*GE* Laboratory (secret genetic)

Lake

Library

Locker Room

Meadow

Medieval Castle Armory

Medieval Marketplace

Middle School Dance (informal)

*GE* Mindscape (Mind Magic)

Mountains

Movie Theatre

Night Club

Nursery

Ocean/Sea Bed

Old Pick-Up Truck

Pirate Ship

Playground

Pond

Pool Hall

Prison Cell

Pub

Public Pool (Outdoor)

Rainforest/Jungle

Ranch

Restaurant

River

School Bus

School Office

Shopping Mall

Sleep-Away Camp

*GE* Spaceport

*GE* Spaceship

Stands at a Sporting Event

Storm Sewer

Subway Station

Swamp

Taxi cab

Teacher’s Lounge

Toolshed

*GE* Trailer

Treehouse

*GE* Tropical Island City

Urban Street

Video Arcade

Waiting Room

Waterfall

Water Slide Park

Wedding Ceremony (Church)

Woods at Night

Zoo

Weather

Air Pollution

Avalanche

Blizzard

Breeze

Clouds

Dew

Drought

Dusk

Dust or Sand Storm

Earthquake

Eclipse

Fall

Falling Star

Flood

Forest Fire

Frost

Hailstorm

Heat Wave

Hurricane/Typhoon

Lightning

Mirage

Mist or Fog

Moonlight

Mudslide

Rain

Rainbow

Sky

Sleet

Snow

Spring

Summer

Sunrise

Sunshine

Sunset

Thunderstorm

Tornado

Vortex

Wind

Winter

Color, Texture, & Shape

Color

Black

Blue

Brown

Gray

Gold

Green

Orange

Pink

Purple

Red

Silver

Spotted

Striped

Transparent

White

Yellow

Texture

Bumpy

Barbed/Spined

Crackled

Crumbly

Crusty

Foamy/Spongy

Fuzzy

Gritty

Pitted

Powdery

Prickly

Saw-edged/Serrated

Slimy

Smooth

Sticky

Shape

Arch

Circular/Sphere

Crescent

Heart

Oval & Oval-like

Rectangle

Spiral

Star

Square

Triangular

Tube

Wavy

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A Short List of Shenanigans My Parent’s Dog Has Engaged In:

This is Arwen, she’s a Husky/Kelpie mix and a little Asshole:

“I wonder if she can jump?” my dad asks the first five minutes we have her.  She perks up at the word, and clears a six-foot fence form sitting on the ground. “Oh.”  Says dad. “Shit.” Later that night she got up on the counter and ate three pounds of corned beef in roughtly 68 seconds but this was considered part of the learning curve of having a new dog.

I wake up at 4 AM to the sound of the toilet being flushed repeatedly in the hall bathroom, and assume plumbing is now posessed by angry and wasteful ghosts.   I get up to disconnet it and find her in the Bathroom, standing to flush the bowl, then shoving her head in to drink the running water.   I’m not totally awake, so I stand there like an idiot trying to understand this, and my sister gets up to see what the noise is, sees the same thing and also stands there.  Fiance notices my absence and does the same.   Mom eventually wakes up and finds us standing around like very confused zombies and almost joins the parade of baffled zombies before shreiking “THE WATER BILL!” We got her a circulating water bowl after that.

My parent’s don’t have AC, but they haveone of those “fridge on top, pull-out-freezer below” fridges.  Last summer, we were remarking that we might need to shave her so she didn’t get heatstroke, to which she looked up and made a disgusted noise at us. …Then got up, used the dishrag to pull open the freezer and climbed on top of the frozen vegetables, stretching out and sighing contentedly.  “Arwen,” Mom began, but was interrupted by a loud ‘WHAAAaaaaarrr?” from Arwen.  “Ok you can stay there for now but we’re getting you a kiddie pool so you have to get out when we get back.  Don’t eat anything.” She ate a bag of frozen green beans and farted for three days straight.

Took her walking along the lake with the long lead so she could sniff things to her hearts content.  She went about shoving her head in the undergrowth, usually coming up with her head covered in leaves and pollen. Except for the bush where she came back out with a 7-foot Bull Snake wrapping itself around her ehad and neck, trying it’s best to strangle her before she can eat it.   She immediately ran back to me, the parts of her face not occupied with the snake arranged in a gleeful expression of “Look!  I found Snacks!” I screamed, not immediately regognizing that it wasn’t a rattler, and fell, splitting my knee on a rock.  The screaming made her let go of the snake, but I still had to grab her and wrestle the snake off her because it lacked the sense to just scuttle away.  I finaly got it lose from her (Despite her best effort to continue trying to eat it and turned around to fling it off the trail-  -And directly into the face of one of my 90-year-old neighbors who’d come out to see what the screaming and profanity was, making her collapse. I’m pretty sure being told “I accidentally threw a snake at my neighbor.” was the highlight of that EMT’s day.  Dottie was unharmed but she still doesn’t speak to me.

One day, we left her in a Harness and overhead tether in the (at the time) unfanced back yard so she could enjoy some relatively free-range outdoors time.  I walked by the window not a minute later to find her completely GONE, and race out to the yard to find her.  It took me a good heart-pounding five minutes to realize the overhead tether was goign UP into the ancient silver maple and realized that  1. Arwen can apparently do something really weird with her shoulders where they pop out sideways, allowing her to bear-hug the tree and  2. climb a good 40 feet into the three to fight 3. A porcupine, which i didn’t even know LIVED out here. Fortunately, Porcupines weigh considerably less than Awen and she couldn’t get a good enough foothold to get all the way up to it, but I still had to climb up there and lower her down, barking dog profanities at the porcupine the whole way.

My parents recently acquired a mechanized recliner which has been instumental inmom’s hip surgery recovery.  Execpt that Awen Also likes lounging on the furniture, and is more than capable of hitting a large, elder-friendly button with her paw.  So now when she gets back from a walk or the dog park she makes a beeline for the living room, get in the recliner and pushes the button until it’s flat and stretches out in it.  My parents didn’t have a problem with this because she gets out of the chair when they ask her (Mom even tells her “Go get my chair ready” in winter because she does a good job pre-warming it), until last winter when Arwen taught my dog Charlie, another devoted couch animal how to do this. One afternoon there was a tremendous outburst fo barkign and snarling from the living room and we rished in to find both dogs in the recliner, Charlie on the fully-reclined back and Arwen on the elevated seat and foot rest, bellowing at eachother for control of the recliner, thier movments having pitched it back to it’s two hind feet, the device swaying to and fro like a leather covered boat upon the high seas, a furry mutiny on board.  Neither dog was willing to yeild the plush throne, nor to listen to the humans yelling at them to knock it the hell off, until Arwen tackled the usurper, kocking him off and managing to cantaleiver the recliner clean over, flipping it into the hall, both dogs and all humand miraculously unharmed. She still doesn’t let him sit in it.

I love her so much.

(If you got a laugh out of this, please consider donating to my Tip Jar or Paypal to get Arwen (and Charlie!) nice treats)

Hunk unintentionally creates some awesome dance moves during a lesson with Governess Dayak.

In case you never heard a lynx meowing. Tis’ the cutest thing. 12/10

For the lovely @the-whumpy-fangirl in honor of the @whumpexchange 2018 edition. Hope you like it :) Part 2 will be coming soon.