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Finding Heart

Your Character's Voice

Establishing a voice in fiction can be a challenge. Not only do you need to find your own voice as narrator, but you will also need to consider how any character would say what you need him or her to say. How can you learn about your character and work to improve your dialogue?

 

Some have tried to represent the change in character voice by spelling dialogue differently from traditional prose. Not that it’s a bad idea, but if you’re going to be using that character’s dialogue frequently, you don’t really want your reader to struggle to make sense of what you wrote. It’s another matter when you’re writing actual words that they can look up in a dictionary. But if you’re writing gibberish, “because that’s how he’d say it” you’ll lose a large portion of your audience. Aside from this, you need to know your character more deeply than his pronunciation of certain words.

 

If you build your character well, the dialogue will always fit who she is as a person. An ancient proverb states that, “Whatever is in the heart overflows into speech.” (Luke 6:45, The Living Bible) So if your character is going to speak, you need to give him a heart. What does that mean? What if the character is a robot programmed to speak?

 

A heart in this case isn’t something that beats inside your character’s chest. It’s his motivation, his wants, his desires, his reason for living. (Even L. Frank Baum’s Tin Man proved that he had a heart.) Every character has a heart. Without a heart, there is no story. Ask yourself: “What does my character want out of life? What does he care about? What is he willing to do to succeed?” Unless you have an answer, your character will be flat. A story can only be meaningful when the characters have heart.

 

Your audience should have some anticipation about how your character will react as the scene unfolds. And if the character’s expressions agree with the audience’s expectations, the audience is generally satisfied. Not that your character cannot surprise the reader. But if he does so, there must be a hidden reason, something that speaks from deep inside your character. In this case, his heart simply goes another direction.

 

Do you really know your character’s heart? Based on what you know does his dialogue ring true? As an exercise, try to read one of your heavy-dialogue scenes while skipping the speaker tags. Can you figure out who said what? If not, perhaps this bears a bit more consideration.

 

Having trouble getting to know your character deeply? Try writing your next planned scene in first person from your character’s point of view. (If you’re already writing in first person, choose another character from the scene.) Though this takes a bit of effort to get used to, if you do it right, your insights into your character will be tremendous. Remember that this character too needs to have a life. She doesn’t simply exist for the sake of the story. If she does, she will be two-dimensional. And it’s very hard for a two-dimensional character to escape the printed page. A lot of what she will observe through your prose, how she will personally react and why, will give a better understanding about who she is.

 

Some time ago, I challenged myself to write an entire novel from the viewpoints of multiple characters in first person. Just about every character in that novel had written a portion of the story, excluding one who was in fact later determined to be illiterate due to her background. Because I took on this challenge, I had a better grasp of what my characters’ inner feelings were when it came time to write about them in traditional 3rd person. You needn’t be so extreme, naturally. But if you should choose to write this way, you may very well find you like the result.

 

We often write dialogue to give key details about our plot. But the best dialogue tells as much about the character as it does about the scene. Put forth an effort to understand who your characters are and your dialogue will ring true. Characters with heart can reach your audience’s heart and remain there forever.