How to Write Dialogue Unique to Your Characters
By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)
Do all your characters sound like you? Or an idealized version of you?
Do they all sound like each other?
Would you recognize if they did?
Try this – Could you delete a character and give their lines to someone else without a problem? Could you swap the dialogue of two characters in a scene without it changing anything significant about the characters?
If you’ve been told your characters seem flat, sometimes the problem isn’t that you haven’t fully developed your characters. Sometimes it’s the way you’re writing their dialogue.
Whether you’re a planner, a pantser, or something in between, you can benefit from figuring out three things about how your character would speak before you start to write or re-write.
Know the Regionalisms from Where Your Character Grew Up or Now Lives
Small touches in word choice make a big difference. Take my husband and I as examples. I’m a Canadian from Southwestern Ontario. My husband is an American from Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C.
I say pop – He says soda.
I say supper – He says dinner.
I say chocolate bar – He says candy bar.
Along with small differences in word choice, characters from different regions will have different catch words. Stephen King’s characters from Maine say “Ayuh” as an affirmative. Canadians will use “eh” as both an affirmative and a question, depending on the situation.
If you’re going to use a regionalism, make sure you understand it properly or you’re going to disgust a large portion of your readers. Thanks to the internet, there’s no excuse for not contacting someone who lives in that region and asking them for some tips.
If you’re a science fiction or fantasy author, regionalism can be a goldmine for adding depth to your world. For example, does a regionalism give away a character’s real nationality?
In the novel Lisa Hall-Wilson and I are currently working on together, our Amazon protagonist has no word for “brother.” In her society, all male babies are killed so brothers don’t exist. The closet she can come is saying “son of your father.”
Know Your Character’s Education Level, IQ, and Station in Life
While even the most highly educated among us rarely uses perfect grammar when we speak, grammatical errors, strategically used, say much about a character.
The character who says “I didn’t see nobody” isn’t the same as the character who says “I didn’t see anyone.”
A character who’s highly educated or well-read will also naturally drop ten-dollar words into their speech at times. (Don’t overuse this and send your readers running for a dictionary…or away from your book. As with grammatical errors, choose your spots for maximum impact.)
I’m a writer, married to an editor, and we’re both avid readers. Words we’ve recently used in casual conversation between us include egregious, deleterious, incongruous, tout, and insipid. (Yes, I know we’re weird.)
What if your character’s first language isn’t English?
My grandparents were born in Slovakia (the poor, rural side of what used to be Czechoslovakia). My grandpa spoke no English when he first came to Canada, and he struggled because Slovakian is different from English in a very fundamental way. It depends on changing the ending of a word to indicate the word’s function in a sentence rather than on word order. According to my grandma, he would make mistakes like saying, “Throw the cow over the fence to some hay.”
Non-Native English speakers also struggle with definite and indefinite article usage (“the” “a”) and subject-verb agreement.
If you have a character who wasn’t born in an English-speaking country, you can play with these issues (again, use a light hand) to set their dialogue apart. If you’re a science fiction or fantasy author, do your races speak different languages? If you don’t have a Star Trek-esque universal translator, how will you handle this?
Know Your Character’s Personality
Is your character the kind who always sticks their foot in their mouth? Are they well-meaning or just so self-absorbed that they don’t realize they’ve said something stupid? What do they do after they stick their foot in their mouth? Do they apologize and try to explain or laugh it off?
Is your character confident or does she second guess herself? A confident character makes definitive statements. A character who second guesses herself will add qualifiers—I think, maybe, most. They’ll end their statements with a subtle request for reassurance—Right? Eh? Don’t you think? She’ll also ask questions rather than giving her opinion directly—Do you think that couch might look better over there? rather than The couch would look better over there.
Does your character have a problem with authority? Are they a control freak? Or are they naturally curious about the way things work? These types of characters will want to know the why and the reasons behind something rather than accepting what’s said at face value.
Is your character a gossip?
Does he jump to conclusions?
Is your character a concrete thinker or an abstract thinker? (I’m not talking about psychological development here, but rather how we naturally think about and make sense of the world.) A concrete thinker prefers to talk about what is rather than what might be. They don’t enjoy plays on words. They take things literally. An abstract thinker takes what is and projects into the future what might be. They enjoy puns and word plays, and if you listen to them explain a concept, they’ll often use metaphors. Many writers are abstract thinkers and don’t realize that there even is another way of thinking.
What other tricks do you have for making your character’s dialogue unique?
If you’ve missed the earlier installments in this series, you can find them here: 5 Basics About Dialogue You Need to Know, 7 Tricks to Add Variety to Your Dialogue, and Does Your Dialogue Deserve to Exist?
I hope you’ll check out the newly released mini-books in my Busy Writer’s Guides series–Strong Female Characters and How to Write Faster–both currently available for 99 cents.
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Nov 01, 2012 @ 13:38:53
Physical and habitual traits sometimes me with dialogue. For example, a character who has long thick hair used for shielding the face when afraid or stressed will have more demur dialogue than a character who has layered brighter colored hair and is constantly whipping her hair out of her face.
Nov 01, 2012 @ 16:29:21
Great tips – thanks! Sometimes I worry that all of my characters sound alike – after all, most are middle-class, educated people from Ohio. But when I try removing tags, it’s obvious who’s speaking. Some of my characters never swear, others do it all the time. The other thing I have to be cognizant of, writing time travel, is *when* a character is from. This can be a lot of fun when it comes to slang!
Nov 01, 2012 @ 16:37:16
If you can remove the tags and you can still identify them, then you’re doing it right 🙂 Playing with slang in a time travel romance would be fun!
Nov 01, 2012 @ 17:01:49
Professional jargon can be helpful too. My husband worked as a quality assurance officer for the ministry of transportation – never interchange ‘concrete’ and ‘cement’ in his presence. There’s a whole lecture… The military and police have a whole language unto themselves that lends a lot of credibility and authenticity.
Nov 01, 2012 @ 18:01:30
Very true. Every profession has their own pet peeves about what words shouldn’t be mixed up. Never, ever call my husband a “soldier.” Soldiers are Army, and he was a Marine (Navy). My flute teacher would visibly cringe if someone called flute keys “buttons.”
Nov 01, 2012 @ 17:19:38
I attended Robert McCammon’s workshop on dialect & dialogue at the Surrey Writer’s Conference last year. He’s a charming author from Birmingham, Alabama. His advice when writing dialect was like Marcy’s don’t over do it and never have multiple accents in the same scene. If everyone is speaking with accents and using slang it bogs the reader down.
Nov 01, 2012 @ 19:24:19
I like the idea of removing the tags and seeing if you can still tell who’s talking. A better, and more difficult, test might be to remove the tags and see if someone else can tell. Would work better in a completed work, or best in a series, I think.
Either way, I greatly appreciate your dialogue articles. I like the fact that you put a lot of examples in, that helps quite a bit in trying to understand particulars.
Nov 01, 2012 @ 19:32:51
Thanks 🙂 That might be a good exercise to try one week if you’re part of a critique group, or if you have a regular crit partner.
Nov 02, 2012 @ 16:20:51
These are great tips, Marcy. I say ‘pop,’ ‘dinner,’ and ‘candy bar.’ You’re right about how different regions use different words. It’s kind of cool when someone is from a certain region and moves to another region and picks up the local lingo and mixes it with their old lingo. It would be fascinating to be a linguist. I’m so impressed with the vocabulary your husband and you use!
By the way, you’re one of the winners of Curse of the Double Digits, my children’s book. Please contact me at lynkelwoohoo at yahoo.com and I’ll give you the info. Congrats!
Nov 02, 2012 @ 17:13:40
All great tips, Marcy. Important things to always keep in mind for each and every character. Thanks!
Nov 04, 2012 @ 16:21:36
I watch reality TV. That’s both a confession of a guilty pleasure, and a reveal for one of my character building tricks. I listen to the words the people use, the cadences of their speech and remember that when I’m writing dialogue.
Nov 05, 2012 @ 03:37:23
Thanks for the great advice!
Nov 06, 2012 @ 20:49:42
Ah, more excellent items to digest, eh!
When I’m writing about a character, I do try to think about where they come from, etc.
My grandmother came from Finland with no English skills. When she learned to speak English “that’s not good” translated into “dat’s no good.” The Finnish, Canadian culture developed their own language. Finnglish, or least those living in Northern Ontario did. She couldn’t even pronounce my name. Tracy became “Trasue”. 🙂
Thanks for conjuring up great memories too! 🙂
Nov 06, 2012 @ 23:18:38
Love the inclusion of “eh” 🙂
That’s really interesting that your grandma couldn’t say your name. My name obviously doesn’t exist in Slovak, so when my grandparents would call the old country and talk about me, they’d call me Marishka. (I may not be spelling that correctly, but it’s their version of Mary, which is the closest they have to my name.)
Nov 06, 2012 @ 23:28:08
Hee hee. My “Nana” was disgusted that my mother didn’t give me a proper Finnish name. What do you think about that, eh? LOL 🙂
Nov 29, 2012 @ 19:44:37
This is a great remind for all of us. I collect books on common sayings for different states whenever I can get my hands on them. They are entertaining and useful!
Nov 29, 2012 @ 19:52:58
What a great idea! I’ll have to keep that in mind as a useful tool.
Dec 04, 2012 @ 11:52:48
Marcy, that’s a brilliant post. As writers we to often assume that our own idioms are universal. Just travel to the next county – let alone country – and very often they’re not.
As a writer of historical fiction (I did my PhD in it), I have a particular disgust for authors who show folk in medieval times casually shaking their heads at each other or clasping hands with strangers. They didn’t do it! The first was an insult, and the second implied a legal contract.
In dialogue, idioms are everything!
Dec 04, 2012 @ 13:43:07
Thanks, John! Your examples show the value of research. We don’t know what we don’t know, so we have an obligation to put in the work necessary to make what we write as accurate as possible, whether that’s in our dialogue or in historical details.
Jan 06, 2014 @ 23:12:56
thank you so so so much for this! So helpful! one question I have is how to deal with different kinds of intelligence. For example, one of my characters is extremely smart when it comes to math, science, and so forth, but is dyslexic and is not fond of reading and anything to do with words or literature. Another character is practically the opposite (in fact she literally lives in a big library!) How would I emphasize this in dialogue? anyone?
Jan 06, 2014 @ 23:25:20
Hi, Beth. Thanks for commenting. This is going to be largely a matter of word choice, syntax/sentence structure, and even how they think about things. For example, the character who is extremely smart when it comes to math and science is more likely to be a concrete thinker. He/she won’t use as many metaphors and other figures of speech as the character who reads more frequently. One of the best suggestions I can make is for you to read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes and Double Vision by Randy Ingermanson. Study how those authors have dealt well with the same thing. In Flowers for Algernon, the narrator is a man who undergoes a scientific procedure that slowly increases his IQ from 68 to 185 before he regresses. In Double Vision, one of the main characters (Dillon Richard) has Asperger’s and is a math and computer genius. Both authors do a fantastic job with internal and external dialogue for these characters.