* This post was originally pulished in July 2015.

Writing the words your characters say may be easy, but it isn't always easy conveying your character's "voice." I have edited a lot of writers whose characters all sound the same, and if you get a group of them in a single scene, it can be confusing to keep track of who says what.

What your characters say--and how they say it--is just as important as their physical attributes.

Why is this even an issue, you ask? Having developed and distinctive characters can be what makes your work stand out from others. It can be what makes readers remember your story long after they've finished reading.

If you struggle with making your characters more distinct, read on and see how Patricia Robertson addressed this issue.

Dialogue Tips For Characters From a Similar Background
by Patricia Robertson
©2015

“On dialogue, you seem to use the same voice for each character. They use the same phrases and speak the same way, which is not very realistic for a multi-generational story.”

Or so one of my beta readers told me. Ouch! Not what I wanted to hear, but definitely what I needed to hear. Better to hear this now than from a reviewer later. But how to fix the problem? My characters were all white, middle-class, mid-Westerners from pretty much the same extended family. Of course they sound alike. No interesting Southern twangs among the bunch or other dialect to set the characters apart. What to do?

I sought out advice from other writers, including Zetta Brown, and searched the Internet. I purchased an ebook on dialogue which was helpful to some extent but didn’t address my specific problem. Then, based on suggestions, I went back over my characters, looking for points of differentiation. While all were from the same general grouping, I had characters of different ages, educational backgrounds and professions. That was my starting point.

An Internet search for tips on common slang for teens yielded a page on Yahoo Answers on slang for fourteen year olds. The range of answers was from “whatever you do, don’t use old, non-sex related slang terms. In general, most of today’s slang terms are sex related,” to, “There’s not really any slang. I’m fourteen and I can’t think of anything that we really use that can be considered as slang.” A lot of the slang teens use today are related to texting, OMG and WTF.

For the twenty-something group, I went to my twenty-seven-year-old daughter who gave me the following tips: Younger people also tend to say “I know” a lot and use “really” or “very” more than necessary. One other thing that I don’t know you would want to put in but might be helpful is the use of the phrase “I mean.” It is not necessary to the meaning of a sentence, and it’s more of a filler, but it has become very common. So you would say something like: “I mean, I get where she is coming from, but I still don’t agree.” People also say “I can’t.” as a single sentence to refer to an annoying situation or something they just can’t deal with at that moment. So when a colleague of mine is being utterly ridiculous and irritating, one of my young colleagues might send me a single chat message that says “I can’t” or “I just can’t.” She also commented, like the fourteen year old above, that she doesn’t usually use slang.

This tells me that slang use is not universal to these age groups, so it’s best to use it sparingly unless my characters were the type to punctuate every other word with slang, which they weren’t.

I also paid attention to young adults at meetings I attended to pick up ideas. I felt comfortable with the older characters in the novel, because of my age and my experience working as a chaplain at a retirement community for twelve years, so I didn’t do further research for them.

With this in mind, I went back over the dialogue between these younger characters and made changes. I tried to use just enough slang to indicate the age of the character without overdoing it. I then sent these changes to my daughter to make sure I was using the terms correctly.

Then I looked at the education level and professions of my characters. I made sure those who had only a high school education didn’t sound like a PhD candidate. I reserved the bigger words and more complicated sentences to the doctors and Pastor Joe. The minister, Pastor Joe, talked more using longer sentences and paragraphs because that’s what ministers do!

I also looked at the male characters to make sure they didn’t sound like women. While not necessarily the “strong, silent type,” I went through my main male character’s dialogue and shortened it, and at times used silence as his response to questions and situations with which he was uncomfortable.

I went through all of the dialogue looking for words that were more “me” than my character—certain phrases or words that I tend to use that cropped up in my characters dialogue. I also looked for “signature” phrases that would help distinguish one character from another, and phrases that were used by members of a particular family. For example, the phrase, “don’t borrow trouble,” was used by the mom, and then by the son, and then by the grandfather, indicating that it was an idiom passed on through the generations of this family.

Hopefully, the end result of my efforts is dialogue that not only comes alive, but indicates who is speaking without necessarily having to say who that person is, something difficult to achieve.

So how about you? How do you handle dialogue, especially when your characters are from a homogenous group? I would appreciate hearing your tips.

P.S. Resources suggested by Zetta Brown:

• Dialogue by Gloria Kempton in the Write Great Fiction Series published by Writer’s Digest,
• and for slang, Urban Dictionary.com (www.urbandictionary.com)

Patricia Robertson is the author of fiction and non-fiction books, some self-published, some traditionally published. She recently released her novel, Still Dancing, the sequel to her novel, Dancing on a High Wire, and is looking forward to writing the next book in the series during NaNoWriMo this year. She blogs about life and writing at http://patriciamrobertson.com.

©2015. Zetta Brown. All Rights Reserved. Zetta is an editor and the author of several published short stories and the erotic romance novel Messalina: Devourer of Men. She provides editing services through JimandZetta.com.

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