How to Create a Distinctive Character Voice

What character voice is and what it’s not

Photo by Eddy Billard on Unsplash

In my last post, I talked about the difference between author voice and character voice. But knowing the difference doesn’t necessarily make creating character voice easy.

This is especially true when you have multiple characters. Or when you’ve written so many stories that you find yourself thinking, “This character sounds an awful lot like the last one I wrote.”

So, here are a few things to think about when you want to create characters with distinctive voices.

Character Voice Isn’t Just Dialogue

This is one of the biggest misconceptions beginning writers have. They think character voice means they should just make everyone talk differently.

That’s part of it, sure. But it’s not enough. Character voice exists in narration, too. Consider these two sentences describing the same woman walking into an old house:

The house smelled like dust and rain. She hadn’t been here in twenty years.

Now imagine:

The house smelled exactly the way she’d remembered it, which was irritating because she’d spent twenty years trying not to remember it at all.