This time I'd like to talk about "voice", that is the elements
that make up a particular character such as their background,
education, personality, etc. (NOT to be confused with
the 'authors' writing voice, which I may talk about later.)

   Any story must have a 'plot' or framework to support all
the incidentals of character, action, dialogue, etc. 'Dynamic
Tension' or suspense is the engine that moves the story
along. But 'CHARACTERS' are the actors on the stage.
These are the people who *do* things (or have things done
to them). It's entirely possible to write and publish a story
w/o characters. Tom Clancy, Issac Asimov and E.E. (Doc) Smith
all did pretty well using essentially 'stock' characters, depending
on PLOT or "Gee-Whiz" effects to move the story along.

   Despite that, IMO it's the characters that make for a memorable
story. Characters (Good Guy's & Bad Guys) grab the readers attention
keep their attention and give life to the story. Ideally an author
should create three-dimensional, living breathing people 
who capture the reader, make them laugh, cry, worry about
their failures, cheer their successes. (I include
aliens, dragons, elves, Lassie, etc under the umbrella of "people")

   Real People have a back ground, a life story which gives them
a particular body language, speech pattern, word choice, 
phobias, comfort foods, vocabulary . . .and on and on.  The author
must put enough of this into words to help the reader 'see' a 
character (but not so much that is clogs the flow of the story.
Writers Mantra: "NO INFODUMPS! NO INFODUMPS!")

   A characters "Voice" comes through primarily in dialogue, but
also in narrative. Ideally the writer can strip away everything
except the dialogue and the reader can still instantly tell Character A
apart from Character B, solely on the basis of "voice", just as
you can quickly tell your Girl Friend apart from your Bank Manager
over the telephone.

   The concept is very simple. An Oxford Don, born to privilege and educated at Eaton is going to have very different  speech patterns from an illiterate  Mongolian Yak Herder.  Execution is a bit harder. For example, real conversation is full of hesitation, interruption, unfinished sentences (sentence fragments for English Majors) etc. But it's not sufficient merely to put a one-to-one correspondence of "real conversation" onto paper.  Mark Twain once said "Truth is always stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense." In this case, a fictional conversation has to move the story along, it has to fit the flow of the story, must be easy to understand.

   Fictional dialogue has to be focused and sharp while still sounding unscripted and natural. So, fictional dialogue has to 'sound' real, even though it's artificial. 


   Let me give a couple of examples from my WIP "Beastworld".  First I'll show an initial draft using 'dialect' for some of my characters. Then I'll show a much later version of the same scene, and hopefully with the mistakes corrected.
(FYI: since ASCII doesn't allow italic or bold . . .*italic*, **BOLD**)

Version 1:
@@@@
   Keeping up her ceaseless scan for enemies, Mercy grabbed the empty left-hand pistol dangling from it's lanyard and pulled both hammers to half cock, flipping the spent percussion caps from the nipples with a thick thumbnail. Raising the pistol to her lips she pulled the hammers to  full cock, then blew hard into the percussion tubes to clear them of fouling and lingering  sparks.Thrusting the pistol into it's holster sideways, hammers facing out, she reached for one of the pair of comma shaped cap-magazines clipped to her belt in the small of her back. Pressing the narrow end of the bronze container against the first nipple, a spring forced a cap onto the tube. Repeating the procedure for the second barrel, she replaced the magazine on her belt.  

   As she was reaching for a cartridge the wind brought her a snatch of conversation from her ambushers as they recovered their dead and wounded. Tearing off the end of a paper cartridge she dumped the powder down the top barrel, straining to hear more of the cursing voices.

     "Youwah stoupid shit!" 

     Mercy pressed the .50 caliber conical bullet passed the forcing cone of the top barrel, using the oiled paper of the cartridge as wadding.  It sounded like the two Beast's were talking with a mouth full of honey, but she could almost understand them.

     "Sahid wooud be *eaasii! *Ayun-towth don' look eaasii. Rahzoh don' look eaasii. Both them look cemeterii reddi an' cemeterii bound with they heahd blow clean off they self!"

     *Iron Tooth and Razor?* Probably the wolf-beast and the weasel-beast Mercy thought, as she finished loading the second barrel of her pistol.   She was beginning to make sense of the speech. It sounded something  like the Brute handlers along the Midland rivers and canals.

     "Youwah self gohna be cemeterii undah look-n up, if youwah self don' shut mao-wt." Came a third, gravely voice.  Now where had she heard that . . .? Mercy bit her lip in concentration as her hand automatically went through the motions of loading the empty top barrel of her second pistol. She was ramming home the bullet when she remembered.

     "Jake!" She called, feeling a bit better with both pistols fully loaded. "Calico Jake! Is that you?"

     "Hu-wa krak teet?" The bass voice rumbled back, surprise evident.

     *Hu-wa? What the hell is . . . Who. Who crack . . .tit. No, 'Who crack teeth' *

     "It's The Thornbreaker, Jake." Mercy replied, wondering why Jake hadn't starved as a pirate. By the time anyone understood his order to 'Heave to and be bordered', they were probably twenty miles and two days down the river.

     "Merciless?!" A light, cultured tenor that cracked slightly, somewhere to the right of the bass that was Calico Jake. 

     "Peet?" Mercy's mouth twisted as the rest of her memory came into focus. Paisley Peet the Pansy Pirate. The willowy Golden-Jackal did most of Jakes talking.  "You and Jake are kind of far from the river. Did you give up pirating?"

     "We've got bigger plans than being river pirates," Peet answered peevishly, "and you're not going to mess things up like last time."
@@@@

    <sigh> Well, it was a good try, but . . .nope. Readers could certainly tell one character from another solely on the basis of dialogue. Unfortunately, they couldn't understand what the heck they were saying. A good example of realism getting in the way of readability. (this dialect was based loosely on a phonetic rendition of Gulah, a rapidly vanishing dialect of the Outer Banks of SC.)

Back to the Word Processor, a bit of cutting, pasting. A LOT of rewriting and:

Version 2:
@@@@
 *The weak are meat. The strong eat!*

  Clenching her teeth against nausea Mercy pressed against the cold granite, forcing an even rhythm to her breathing.

     *The weak are meat. The strong eat!*

           That was the first mantra Mother taught her from Chadar's Book of Ourjens; it had  been  both a taunt and a challenge when she'd been too small, too weak or too slow to snatch even a  scrap from her more massive ursine siblings.

     The chevrons on her cheek ached again.  

     The precious poisonous Blue that killed and sustained the Chadar was burned into her face with Razorwhip and a hot iron by her adoptive brother. Permanent reminder that she was *mherci*, failure and child of failure, discarded on the trash pile.  Surviving her Bitter Shadow, she had chosen the human name Mercy to throw her success back in his face.
     
     Mercy flipped her braid around her throat in a practiced motion that got it out of the way and offered some protection against teeth and blades. Tucking her injured arm inside of her coat she pulled the belt tight to hold it in place while the Nurse-dink worked.

     *The strong eat. And I'm damn hungry.*

     Mercy grabbed her empty left-hand pistol and pulled both hammers to full cock, flicking the spent percussion caps from the nipples with her thumbnail. Thrusting the pistol into its holster hammers facing out, she reached for a cap-magazine clipped to her belt. When she pressed the narrow end of the bronze magazine against the first nipple, a spring forced a cap onto it.  She'd finished capping the second barrel and was reaching for a paper cartridge when the wind brought her a snatch of conversation.

     "Are shit stupid, you?" An angry voice drifted from behind some rocks about forty yards away. "There doing nothing but sitting!"

     "Easy would be, said you!" came a second voice, somewhere near the first. "Iron-Tooth  and Razor, easy look not their heads off blown!

     The two Beasts sounded a little like River-Brute Handlers she'd worked for along the Midland waterways.   Mercy pressed a .50 caliber conical bullet past the forcing cone of the top barrel, using the oiled paper of the cartridge as wadding. Repeating her actions she finished loading the second barrel of her pistol.  

     "Worms for eating will be you!" came a third, gravely voice from farther away. "Mouth shutting and head keeping down do not you."

      Where had she heard that voice? Mercy bit her lip in concentration as her hand automatically went through the motions of loading her second pistol. She was ramming home a bullet when she remembered.

     "Jake!" She called, feeling better with both pistols fully loaded. "Calico Jake! Is that you?"

     "Crack teeth is who?" the bass voice rumbled back.
     
     "It's Mercy, Jake." Mercy replied, wondering why Jake hadn't starved as a pirate. By the time you figured out: 'Stopping boarding for you', meant, 'Stop and be boarded' you'd be twenty miles past him.

     "*Thornbreaker!*" A horrified tenor voice shrilled from somewhere to the right of Calico Jake. 

     "Peete?" Mercy's mouth twisted. Paisley Peete, the Pansy Pirate. The willowy Golden-Jackal had made a pretty good living as a dress maker, until lust for a cargo of sea-spider silk had tempted him into a life of robbery and murder. "You and Jake are kind of far from the river. You stop pirating?"

     "We've got bigger plans," Peete retorted peevishly, "and you're not going to mess things up again."
@@@@

   OK, I did two things:
1) I cut some  dialogue
2) I made my dialect a *lot* easier to read.

   All of this took many passes by pre-readers and it's still not finished. 
However even at this stage it's easy to see differences between
the characters solely by their 'voice'. (at least I hope it is.)
Jake: Uneducated, brutal, perhaps a bit 'slow'
Peete: Better educated, prim, maybe a bit of a 'sissy'
Mercy: Focused, intense, a bit cynical

   A character's 'voice' is a pretty difficult thing to get onto paper,
but it's well worth the effort. I hope this little essay has been of
some interest.  (I *think* my next attempt will cover "dynamic tension"
and the "narrative hook")

 as always, go to 

http://www.sfwa.org

if you want to hear what published authors have to say about the craft of writing.


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