I was thinking of how to make this blog more interesting. Updating once a week with “omg still writing yay” or talking about ultimately insubstantial topics is rather dry. So, I’m going to see about writing a short series of commentaries on writing-related subjects. The first small handful will be related to voice.

Voice I: Character Voices (inc. dialects, accents, etc.)
Voice II: Author Voice
Voice III: First-Person, Third-Person, and Other POVs

Before I get into character voices, I’d like to relate a story. This isn’t exactly a flattering story, so please keep an open mind. While working on book four, I was burdened with the conundrum of how exactly to convey the voice of my hero. What I mean by this is the use of phonetics to spell out a person’s particular English accent, whether Southern United States, Bostonian, Californian, British, Scottish, French or any other version of an “English accent”. Very soon, I became embroiled in the debate of whether or not it’s fair or even politically correct to attempt to use phonetics to “spell out” an accent.

I had been asking around on a writing forum about how I might get a basis to do this with a certain English accent (movies to watch, books to read, or online sources to reference). More than half of the responses were thinly veiled contempt at what they thought was the bigoted American stumbling into another International Incident. They knew practically nothing about the circumstances of my story, assuming only that I wanted to demean whichever group of people are associated with a particular accent. I had rather been hoping that from the POV of the heroine, a naive, sheltered woman, the reader would better comprehend her difficulty in understanding the man talking to her, which would have been part of her character’s growth as, throughout the story, I slowly shifted from phonetically spelled dialogue to standard English spellings.

Alas, I was so traumatized from the backlash of my radical and terribly prejudiced literary idea that I ended up deleting the post, removing myself from the member list, and leaving that particular forum behind.

However, I have seen many many famous, beloved authors use phonetics. Mark Twain, Diana Gabaldon… Would these same forum users have attacked them for “degrading” Southerners or Scots? Do you, who is reading this now, prefer character dialogue to be written in standard English and any accents to be only referred to in the narration?

I don’t mind either way, but perhaps that is simply the view of the “bigoted American”.

In a different vein, do you ever read an author’s book series and, over the course of a couple or more books, find that the author’s heroes and/or heroines (or other characters as well) all seem to “sound the same”? As in, using the same speech patterns or similar phrases? I know very well that I probably am guilty of this, so I’m trying my hardest to avoid this, and I don’t want to point any fingers, so I’ll try to be vague. What I mean by speech patterns/phrases is difficult to illustrate, but this might include interjections less common than “well”, “hey”, and “so”, such as “come now”, “hoo boy”, or “true that, true that”. If several characters in the same story sound alike in this sense, it can be very difficult for the reader to actually differentiate who is talking. There’s always room for phrases that an in-story tight-knit group of friends use amongst themselves as a sort of secret language (as in, speech patterns that rub off with repeated use), but even then, individuals still cling to words that they like–words that only they frequently use. Perhaps a group of friends often use the word “seriously!” when in a heated debate about something incredulously annoying, but one person in that group is infamous for overusing the word “awesome”. It’s little differences like this that readers just might pick up on.

Okay, that’s the gist of my thoughts on characters voices. Do any of you want to add something?