The Lactating Armpit and How To Make Your Characters Have Different Voices

Voice is such a big deal for making memorable and believable characters in your story, but it’s one of the harder things to understand sometimes.

As writer Rita Mae Brown said,

“People are funny. No doubt you’ve noticed that others are not nearly as reasonable as yourself. Shocking, isn’t it? This difference between you and other people comes out in speech. Obviously, difference displays itself in the subject matter people speak about, but on a deeper, more subtle level, it displays itself in the way in which they frame those very ideas.”

The voice of your character is truly the heart and mind of your character and their background expressed on the page.

Or as Brown says, “Speech is a literary biopsy.”

There are a lot of different ways to think about the voice of your characters, that thing that makes them believable and sets them apart from the other characters even when they all have similar demographics (college sophomores, white women, middle class background, from Missouri).

But first we have to think about the two different ways voice is represented for characters.

There is

INTERNAL VOICE

What they think. (Use only in first and limited-third person POVs)

EXTERNAL VOICE

Word choice

Dialect

To make that character’s voice stand out, writers tend to do one of three things or a combination:

Write your way through it until your characters sound different.
Listen to people who are like your character and copy their cadence and word choice, sentence length, etc.

Sadly, all the notes won't fit here, but if you want to see them, just head over here. 

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.

Here’s the link. This week’s podcast is all about strange things people do for luck.

Resources Mentioned

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/dad-catches-son-sneaking-out-24763972

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/dad-catches-son-sneaking-out-24763972

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