Enhancing your dialogue

Writing dialogue in 3-D, part 4 of 6

Differentiation of voices

If all the characters in your story sound exactly the same, the same speaking voice, it flattens the entire reading experience.

Differentiation of voices between the various characters in a novel or short story is critical.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Make each character’s dialogue voice unique and recognizable.

Within a few pages of your book, readers should be able to tell from a sentence of dialogue which character is speaking because of the manner of speaking, the phrasing and word choices, as well as the context of the story.

But how do you do that?

Linguistic differences

The key is to understand language and linguistic differences between different people—real people—and then incorporate that knowledge into your various characters.

There are natural linguistic differences between male and female, different age groups, race/ethnicity, backgrounds, education, parts of the country, or national origin.

Imagine you’re writing a book in which one character is from New York, one from southern California, and one from Texas, and they all meet in an airport where they have to sit together all night long because a snowstorm has shut down all transportation.

Maybe one is an attorney, one is a professional surfer, one is a rancher. They are all going to sound differently, and I’m not even talking about regional accents.

Language use and choice of words will be different.