Character Voice

Your character’s voice is their distinct view on the world, which is displayed in what the character notices and how they describe it. Their world view depends on their experiences, goals, hobbies, quirks, habits, qualities, friends, family, job, and emotions; it is filtered through their introspection, brand of humor, and syntax.

Examples:

Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help:  

“By sixteen I wasn’t just not pretty, I was painfully tall. The kind of tall that puts a girl in the back row of class pictures with the boys. The kind of tall where your mother spends her nights taking down hems, yanking at sweater sleeves, flattening your hair for dances you hadn’t been asked to, finally pressing the top of your head as if she could shrink you back to the years when she had to remind you to stand up straight” (Stockett 67).

Skeeter notices her height not because she cares, but because her mother cares, displaying her people-pleasing personality and insecurities.

Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking Trilogy:

“Ben’s sent me to pick him some swamp apples and he’s made me take Manchee with me, even tho we all know Cillian only bought him to stay on Mayor Prentiss’s good side and so suddenly here’s this brand-new dog as a present for my birthday last year when I never said I wanted any dog, that what I said I wanted was for Cillian to finally fix the fissionbike so I wouldn’t have to walk every forsaken place in this stupid town, but oh, no, happy birthday, Todd, here’s a brand new puppy, Todd, even tho you don’t want him, even tho you never asked for him, guess who has to feed him and train him and wash him and take him for walks and listen to him jabber now he’s got old enough for the talking germ to set his mouth moving? Guess who?” (Ness 4).

Todd notices the inconvenience of his dog and describes it in long, rambling sentences. This introspection shows his humor and makes him relatable, allowing readers to connect with him.

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye:

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you” (Salinger 121).

Holden notices the squaw’s bosom and the deers’ skinny legs, displaying his churlish nature and immaturity. However, his clever introspection about how nothing changes in the museum except the viewer is relatable and uncharacteristically wise for a teenager, making him unique.

If your characters would describe the same scene the exact same way, something’s wrong. Find your characters’ voices by practicing:

• Write three scenes from the perspectives of three different characters sitting on a park bench. They all see the same stranger pass by. Using no dialogue, make each scene wildly different as they each describe the stranger.
• Have your character write a diary entry or a letter to a friend.
• Find a friend and each pretend to be your own character. Have a conversation.

Voice is imperative because it allows readers to connect with your characters and it makes the book unique. Most editors look for a unique voice because it’s so difficult to teach. Plot and setting can be fixed, but voice is all up to the author.

Note:  First person and third person limited emulate character voice most effectively as we are in the character’s head.