Quick Fiction Fixes – Distinctive dialogue

We’re all busy, whether working full-time or chasing/chauffeuring kids around all day. Yet we’re also writers, striving to get our words on paper and then polish it to a sparkle.

This column gives quick fixes for fiction manuscripts specifically for busy writers. Pick and choose what works best for you!

Make each character’s dialogue distinctive to that character.

Separate from your own unique writer’s voice is each individual character’s voice. Sometimes writers will not make each character’s own dialogue distinct enough to be able to tell characters apart.

Many times, if you remove the dialogue tags and action beats from a scene of dialogue, the two characters will sound exactly alike, whether it’s two men, two women, or a man and a woman.

Each character should be so individual that even their speech patterns are distinct. I’m not talking about dialect or slang.

Lots of things can contribute to character voices–pacing and rhythm, word choice, grammar, sentence length, casual versus formal.

Don’t cop out and give one person a lisp or a dialect—try to make them unique just by their words alone.

You, as the writer, know who is who as you hear each character talking in your head. The challenge is to convey the distinction on the page to the reader.

One exercise I like to do is to take an incident and have different characters tell it. Often, I can see—and hear in my head—the differences between them as the characters convey the exact same information as each other. It’s especially useful if I’m seeing that two characters tend to use the same phrasing as each other—it’s a clue for me to try to change their character voices to be more distinct.

As an example, here’s how the four cousins in my Sushi Series novels would tell the story of how they responded to a handsy guy on the bus.

Jennifer: I told the man, “Excuse me, but you’re standing too close to me.”

Trish: I said to him, “Excuse me, but have you ever heard about personal space? Well, you’re violating mine.”

Lex: I stomped on his instep and said, “Back off, Jack!”

Venus: I told him to keep his lecherous hands to himself or I’d shove my umbrella up his left nostril. He discreetly backed away after that.

For revisions, pick one character to focus on. Play around with that character’s dialogue, decide how they speak and how it’s distinctive from other characters. Then go through your manuscript and revise that character’s dialogue.

On another day, pick another character to focus on and go through your manuscript, revising that character’s dialogue.

Eventually, all your characters will sound distinct from each other.