wyatt_shah85•16d agoProlific Poster

Caught myself writing every character with the same voice for 6 months

I was working on a short story for a contest last week and my wife read it. She said your detective talks exactly like your bartender who talks exactly like your landlord. I went back through my last 30 pages and she was right. Every single person had the same sarcastic, short sentence style. I thought I was good at dialogue but I just write me over and over. How do you guys force different speech patterns without it feeling fake?

3 comments

3 Comments

tylermurray15d ago

juliahall nailed it with the real world observation thing. I started people-watching at coffee shops and noticed how some folks bounce around with filler words while others pause and choose every single one, and now I just steal little pieces from each person I see.

juliahall15d ago

See I actually disagree with @michael_bennett11 a little here. I mean yeah it's a real problem but I don't think reading out loud in different voices is gonna fix the root issue. The thing is your voice is your voice and trying to force a bunch of different ones on purpose usually comes off even more fake in my experience. What worked for me was studying how real people talk in different situations. Like listen to a nervous person ordering coffee versus a confident one. They're both saying the same thing but the words come out totally different. Once you start noticing that in real life it's way easier to translate to your characters without it feeling like you're putting on a costume.

michael_bennett1115d ago

Oh man, "I just write me over and over" hit me right in the gut. That's exactly what I was doing for like a year before I noticed it. I had this whole cast of characters all making the same snarky little jokes (you know, the kind I think are clever) and ending every sentence with "right?" or "though." It's so easy to do and so hard to catch on your own. I started reading my dialogue out loud in different voices, like a terrible one-man show, and if it sounds the same in my own voice I know I need to rewrite it.