How to Not Make Your Characters All Sound the Same

Unique character voices is the topic for today. Here are some ideas we came up with for giving each character a distinct way of expressing themselves:

• Give them a strong personality trait. But don't overdo this, unless you want a cast of caricatures instead of a cast of characters.
• Know your character's age. Adults, teens, and kids all have different ways of talking.
• Think of someone you know and try to have your character say things the way they would say them.
• Listen to a lot of people. Get to know lots of different patterns of speech from different regions, cultures, professions, and backgrounds. Pick the best one for your character.
• Voice comes from who your character is, so know your character!
• Have imaginary conversations with your characters until you know their voices.

To practice distinct voices, we did a writing exercise. Everyone in the room filled in the blanks to the following sentence:

Three ___________ walked into a room and saw ____________.

I collected the papers, shuffled them, and handed them back out. Everyone had to write the first thing each character said in reaction to what they had seen, doing their best to give everyone a unique voice.

My sixteen-year-old son figured out a way to defeat my writing exercise. He wrote "Three vampires walked into a room and saw Medusa's face." Apparently they can't say anything. They're statues. So instead of writing, I captured their final, permanent, stony expressions.

How to Begin?

Because first impressions are so important, the opening pages of your book have got to really shine. Some readers only read the first sentence before deciding whether to put a book down or keep going! You have a paragraph at most to catch a reader's attention, and you may lose that attention any time in the first few pages. How do you keep readers going until they're hooked? Read on:


1. Start where the story begins. If you want to start two weeks before the story begins and write chapters and chapters of nothing happening, go right ahead. You'll learn a lot about your characters and the world they live in. But then get out your axe when it comes time to revise. CHOP! Your readers don't care about what your characters have been doing for the last two weeks. They want the story.
2. What makes your story really interesting? Be sure it shows up in the first few pages.
3. Your beginning sets the tone for the rest of the book. Choose an opening scene that promises the reader whatever the story will deliver.
4. Draw the reader into your fictional world. You can do this with a strong character voice, a clear and powerful image, an intriguing idea, or in many other ways.
5. Don't be afraid to go down deep and get at the heart of your story right away.

Because beginnings are so important, many writers save the beginning for the end. You have to start writing a story somewhere, but don't feel like your first draft needs a brilliant beginning. It may not be until you've written the end of your book that you will know what the beginning should be.

Fan Fiction

One of our club members began e-mailing us episodes of an Avengers fan fic this past week, much to everyone's delight. It got me thinking about the benefits and uses of writing in someone else's imaginary universe.

When you write fan fiction, the world and the characters are already there. No need to spend a lot of time developing back-story, building scenery, hammering out a magic system or inventing new technology, anything like that. You can focus on other aspects of the writing process, like pacing, dialog, and character interactions. Get right to the high-level stuff.

And fan fiction is fun! It is fun to write, and your friends will probably have fun reading it since they know and love the characters you're working with.

You may have so much fun writing fan fiction that you never get around to doing your own stuff.

Don't do that.

You can't publish fan fiction. It's illegal, unless you get hired by the owners of the intellectual property to write it. Some people make good money writing novelizations of popular movies, but they've been asked to do it, or else they asked permission to do it by submitting a book proposal and having it approved. If you really want to know more about the process, I know some authors you can talk to.

For most people, writing fan fiction as a career is not an option. I wouldn't even post fan fiction on the internet as a hobby. Some intellectual property owners are cool with it, but others are not. And besides, you don't want to be known as a writer of fan fiction.

You want people to write fan fiction about the characters and worlds YOU create.

Writing fan fiction is GREAT practice. In fact, most artists begin by copying other artists that they admire. The goal is to keep writing and reading and writing and reading until you develop your own style, something unique, something that others will admire and want to emulate.

Today, the fan. Tomorrow, the challenger.