Character Development & individual dialogue

Listen to how people speak.

Seriously. Eavesdrop in cafes, on buses, waiting rooms.

Talk to yourself. You look crazy but it will work.
Acting classes can actually help with this too. Seriously.

Can you practice writing dialogue in the voices of people you know well? Fer instance, in my life, there are lots of unique voices:
-I read too many books and use lots of weird phrases that people don't often use. i have one friend who speaks the same way. sometimes people tell us it rubs off on them.
-My partner at all times bounces between west coast black urban accent, a vicious brummie accent (you know, from Birmingham (UK)), and the RP (you know, fancy brit english like jude law). strange but true.
-a friend who moved from Switzerland to the US in first grade uses lots of unusual grammatical constructions, speaks very carefully, is a super genius, and ends nearly every story by dissolving into a fit of schoolboy giggles.
-my landlord is an armenian immigrant with a thick accent and almost-but-not-quite correct grammar
-people from texas, people from jamaica, people with autism, fast-talking salesmen, laid-back hippie surfers from monterey, people who are trying to impress you with their cleverness, people who are manic, people who have lost all hope, drunk people...everyone says things differently. practice with some styles of speaking you are already familiar with, rather than try to invent whole new ones at first. Your characters can 'borrow' the speaking styles of people you know, and adapt them to suit their personalities as well.

Take an acting class.

When I first started writing, I would assign each of my characters the speech patterns of a character in one of my favorite well-written movies (I think you have to have seen the movie a lot of times to do this). That worked great, and I developed a better sense of the different ways in which people can speak. I don't really feel the need to copy speech patterns anymore because I have a better feel for it now. I think movies will work much better than books for this because they have more emphasis on dialogue and are easier to watch a lot of times.

You have to make sure to keep the dialogue realistic to what you're writing, though. If your characters are around the same age, from the same area, and come from the same social and economic backgrounds they may indeed all speak very similarly.

How do your characters feel about each other? Maybe this ought to guide their delivery, choice of vocabulary, length of responses, etc.

e.g. Bob hates Jim. Bob's dialogue, when he has to speak to Jim, might be minimal, abrupt, laced with sarcasm, rude, downright hostile. Is Jim aware of Bob's feelings? Depending on the answer, that's two entirely different avenues of replies, just for starters.

It's a fun chess game with a million possible moves that don't sound the same.

-Derek

Only in the sense of having a similar local accent, Hope.

Making one's characters individually recognisable and different from each other in manner and speech takes effort but the result is a far more interesting cast.

Everybody has little quirks or mannerisms or favourite phrases or ways of constructing phrases or ways of conveying their thought processes that make them that little bit different from each other.

I must say, Counselor, I am not sure what your problem is, considering the entry in your profile under 'Most people don't know....'

Use your chameleon abilities by assuming the mantle of your character and see what happens when you carry on an imaginary conversation with whatever character he is speaking to at that time.

Good luck. Aim for believable - not realistic.

Hope To The Horizon said:

....If your characters are around the same age, from the same area, and come from the same social and economic backgrounds they may indeed all speak very similarly.

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When I was younger I used to adore recording myself pretending to be my characters on audiocassette. Still have those tapes somewhere. I consider getting into individual character voices to be easy because I just hear it all running through my head. I realize not everybody can do this...just that it's hard for me to understand people who can't. *shrug*

Perhaps get out a tape recorder and not be afraid to talk to (and with) yourself for a while? A lot of the times, people's dialogue differs because of things like education level, region, how flowery or how straightforward they want to sound, and personal interests. Not to mention attitude. Somebody who is very full of themselves will usually talk differently from somebody who is quite shy. Guess which one will use more words, will sound more ostentatious, will dominate the conversation?

Perhaps take note of a few characteristics of your characters--what makes them who they are--and then don't be afraid to toss them all in a room, lock the door, and leave the tape recorder on while they talk.

Don't know how helpful that is, but it's a thought.

Read aloud the dialogue from some of the published books you like. Do you find yourself adopting a different tone or manner when reading one character vs. reading another. Why? What did the author do differently with each character's dialogue voice?

Try HP. Read the dialogue between Harry and Hagrid. I bet you feel compelled to have a different "voice" for each.

Also, once you've gotten started with differentiating character speech habits, a good way to check yourself is with a print out of the MS. Go through with a couple different hilighter pens and hilight different characters speech in different colors. Then read through just one character a time. Do you keep it consistent? Does the character use the same types of language throughout, same speech patterns? Or is he bleeding over into other characters?

Eavesdrop at the mall or cafe or wherever there are people. Listen to your friends as they speak.

Also, read your dialogue aloud. Is it stilted? Does it sound like the character you have roaming around in your head? Read it at a writing group and let them and/or your betas pick it apart.

For some reason, I've been complemented about my sense of dialogue. People have told me that my MC's sound like real people. I guess that comes from a lot of reading/TV/movies and just plain sitting back and enjoying a good conversation.

Lucky you. I think you mean 'complimented'.

maestrowork said:

Take an acting class.

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I didn't realize how good advice this was until I stopped for a moment to think about how much my limited stage experience has impacted my characterization and dialogue.

As many jokes as there are out there about actors and "what's my motivation?" it's an important question to ask of your characters. In any scene, characters will have a dozen thoughts flashing through their minds, they'll want something, feel something else, etc., and less than half of this will ever be explicit on the page (or in a script). What a characters is feeling and thinking isn't necessarily reflected in what they say. There is always subtext. When you start thinking about the subtext of all your characters during their conversations (yeah, Billy said this, but he's also thinking this, this, and this, but doesn't want to say that), it'll start appearing naturally in the dialogue you write. At least that's how it's worked out for me (I think, I hope).

It's easy to think of three-dimensional characters when it comes to actions, background, personality, and plot lines, but not everyone thinks it through to social interaction and how a character speaks. It's important to remember to ask "what does my character want?" and "how would he or she say this?" The first part will not necessarily be reflected directly in the dialogue, if they aren't talking about what your character wants, but I think when you start thinking about it this way, three-dimensionally, the dialogue you write will begin to naturally reflect that, too.