What's up my friend? Abbie here, and welcome back to Writer's Life
Wednesdays. Today we are talking about character voice. Last week we dove into the topic of writing
in deep point of view, and I asked you guys if you wanted to see a video about character
voice. And so many of you were like, "Yes please." So here we are. Today I'm going to show you seven techniques
that you can use to totally rock your character voice. And it's especially important to rock your
character voice when you have more than one point of view that you're writing from. I mean, sure, you'll have the chapter headings
to tell the reader whose point of view they're reading, but you don't want that to be the
only thing that tells the reader that they're in another character's head. You want it to be obvious because of the character's
voice. So that's what we're going to be talking about
today. And after I give out the seven character voice
techniques, I'm going to answer some frequently asked questions on character voice. It's going to be good. Let's go. Before we begin, I just want to put this out
there. Character voice is hard because basically
what you're trying to do is write something and put your own unique and personal touch
on it, but also at the same time make it sound like you didn't write it. Weird. Difficult, but not impossible. So let's jump into the seven techniques that
I personally use to make my character voice strong, unique, and recognizable without sacrificing
the quality of the writing. Number one, learn your character's personality
type. You've heard me talk about MBTI types a lot. Not saying that MBTI is like the be-all end-all
of somebody's personality. Absolutely not. But it's a good place to start, especially
for your characters. If you know your character's MBTI type, it
is so easy to just learn everything you can about that MBTI type, how they think and act,
how they respond in certain social situations, what their greatest strengths and weaknesses
are. How I usually choose my character's MBTI types
is by getting a general idea of what role they're going to be playing in the story. Usually when I first get a story idea, I like
immediately know what characters are going to be broody and serious, what characters
are going to be fun and sarcastic, what characters are going to be maybe like energetic and silly
comic relief. That's the first step for me, figuring out
the general personality and then nailing down an MBTI type for each character. A lot of times I use this handy little graph
that I found somewhere on the internet, and also this list of the MBTI types summed up
in a few words. I'll link those images in the description
box below if you want to check them out. Number two, make your characters polar opposites. This one is kind of a hack, but it is great,
especially if you are new to writing character voice. In fact, if you've never really tried making
your characters have super unique voices, then I really recommend doing this even just
for practice. Character voice is one of those things that
you just, it clicks for you at some point and you're like, "Okay, wow, yep. I get it. I get it," and then you never struggle with
it again. That's how it happened for me, and what made
it click for me was writing fan fiction. Some of you already know that in years gone
by, I used to write tons of Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys crossover fan fiction. I know I have at least one fellow member of
the Clue Crew out there. Anyways, I shipped Jancy hardcore, so of course
I would always be alternating between Nancy and Joe's point of view. It took me awhile to get the hang of it, but
at some point it just clicked for me and it was because these two characters are total
opposites in personality. Same sort of thing with my debut novel, 100
days of Sunlight. My two protagonists, Tessa and Weston, are
very different from each other. Tessa is reserved, quiet, serious, sensitive,
sometimes very sarcastic. Weston on the other hand is the energetic,
spontaneous, unfiltered, hilarious, adorable life of the party. Opposites attract and they definitely make
your job easier as a writer because their voices are already so unique. But I get it. You might not want to make your characters
total polar opposites. If that's the case, just do the other things. But I do recommend practicing with this polar
opposite voice thing, even if it's just for fan fiction. Number 3: assign certain phrases to each character. This is one that I use all the time because
it just adds that authentic touch in a very subtle way. You know how certain people will say a phrase
that you basically only ever hear them say you maybe don't hear a lot of other people
say it? I like to assign certain words and phrases
to certain characters and not let other characters use that particular phrase or word. Like maybe one character says, "Oh my gosh,"
whenever they're surprised, and then another character always says, "No way," whenever
they're surprised. Or even something as small as saying, "Look,
all I'm saying is," versus, "Listen, all I'm saying is." If your characters all use the same phrases,
expressions, and expletives, they'll start to sound like they're just carbon copies of
each other. Not good. So I recommend making a little phrase list
or guide fields manual thing for each character and adding it to their character profile so
that you can stay consistent with those phrases and give each character a little unique linguistic
touch of their own. Number 4: learn their form of manipulation. In my character profile template, I call this
the character's weapon of choice, but I really should change that to the character's method
of manipulation because that's really what it is. If you're writing some kind of fantasy or
sci-fi adventure novel, then you might want your character to have like a go-to physical
weapon. But the other day I got a message from a writer
asking, "What are some good examples of a non literal weapon?" And as I was thinking about the answer, I
was like, "Really that's ... It's more like a method of manipulation." You can find all kinds of ideas online if
you just google, how do people manipulate you? Some of the most common ones are deception,
physical intimidation, yelling, condescending comments, passive aggression, guilt trips,
silent treatment, being a martyr, overly complementary, frame control, exploiting other people's weaknesses. And the list just goes on and on. Even if you don't consider your character
a manipulative person, every single person on the earth uses some form of manipulation
to get what they want when things are not going the way they want. Yes, even me. Guess what mine is? Passive aggression. Number 5: use metaphors that the character
would actually use. Given their life experiences, the place they
live, their job, hobby, et cetera. Of course, some metaphors and similes and
maxims are not specific to anything like careful what you wish for, but I'm talking more about
like analogies, metaphors. I tend to be pretty metaphorical with my writing
and I often have my characters comparing an emotion or a person or a thing with something
else that they're familiar with. For example, when I was writing my last NaNoWriMo
novel in 2018 my MC girl was going to describe something using a metaphor of the ocean, and
then I was like, "Wait a minute. She lives in post-apocalyptic South Dakota
and has never seen the ocean." So it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for
her to have a ocean themed metaphor. Needless to say I made it like a desert themed
metaphor instead. In another novel that I wrote that takes place
in a coastal town, my MC constantly uses ocean metaphors because he lives right by the ocean
and is kind of obsessed with it. Which kind of leads us to number 6: what your
character does all day affects how they see the world. We touched on this in last week's video, but
I wanted to talk about it again because it is so key to making your character voice shine. Basically it's a well-known rule of psychology
that what you train your brain to focus on, it will find. Research shows that people who have jobs that
force them to focus on something very specific tend to see more of that specific thing in
their daily lives, even when they're not at work. Which makes sense, right? I mean the mind is like a muscle. So the more you work one part of your mind,
the stronger it becomes. Don't go crazy with this though because not
everything in our daily lives reminds us of what we do for a job or hobby. So not everything in your character's daily
life is going to remind them of their hobby. And if you just keep like going overboard
with all these metaphors relating to their job or hobby, it might end up sounding kind
of corny. But if you sprinkle in these references, it
can add such a good, authentic, unique touch to your character's voice. Example, yesterday I was editing another novel
that I wrote in which my main character is a YouTuber and he said something like, "My
brain is still trying to download this information." I was like, "That's perfect." And finally, number 7: impossibly the most
important thing, create your character's DFM lens. You're like, "Well, what the heck does DFM
mean?" Desire, fear, misbelief. We talk about this all the time, how your
characters must have a desire, fear, and misbelief that makes them the conflicted person they
are. And because this desire, fear, misbelief is
so much a part of who they are as a person, they're going to see everything that happens
through the lens of their desire, fear, and misbelief. For example, if you have a character who believes
that money and fame equal happiness and she's afraid that she'll be a failure if she doesn't
achieve this, then you have a character who is going to see everything that happens through
the lens of that misbelief. She's going to see rich and famous people
and feel super jealous of them. She's going to look at her current life as
if it's not good enough and she's not good enough. Or let's take another example. Let's say your character wants to fall in
love and have a relationship with someone, but he's afraid of commitment. He's going to see other people in love and
be jealous of them. He's going to see his own singleness as a
curse and constantly look for ways to have a relationship with someone without really
fully committing to them. That's essentially what the DFM lens is. So craft one for your character. I know this seems like it's more about character
development rather than character voice, but one begets the other and all these parts work
together to create a really strong character with a really strong voice. Okay, so I just remembered one more tip. Let's just throw it in as a bonus. Use a different font for each character's
point of view. This is actually a tip that I stole from my
sister and it works so well. In fact, I do not write a book without doing
this. Every font kind of has its own personality,
right? And so every character's point of view that
I write gets their own unique font. It's such a small nuanced difference, but
it can make you feel totally different when you're writing. For a poetic character I might use a fancy
Serif font. For a more logical and serious character I
might use like a clean Sans-Serif font. For a comic relief character I might use Comic
Sans MS. No, just kidding. I don't use that font, ever, of course. But I have heard things about like the psychology
of that font, and it makes like, it makes your brain totally not self-critical of it
because it's like such a joke. I don't know. You'd have to read more about that. Google it. Those are my seven best techniques on character
voice, and I hope they will help you. Now, before we wrap things up, I want to answer
those frequently asked questions I talked about on character voice. Some of you might be wondering, "Can a third-person
omniscient narrator have a voice?" We're going to talk about choosing a point
of view first, second, third, close third omniscient, not next Wednesday, but the Wednesday
after that. So stay tuned for that if you're interested
in a video about that. But for now I will say, yes, third-person
omniscient can have a character voice because your character is the narrator. A perfect example of this is The Book Thief. Part of what makes this book so unique is
that it's omnisciently narrated by death, which of course makes it super dark. But it also gives a very interesting reading
experience and very creatively uses character voice. Next question: How do I make a guy's voice
guyish and a girl's voice girly? Don't. Seriously. Go by personality, not gender. There's this common myth that if you're a
woman, you can't write a man's voice well, and if you're a man, you can't write a woman's
voice well. This is not true. People are people regardless of gender, and
we all have a different personality and way that we look at life. Remember the MBTI types that we talked about
at the beginning of this video? Well, in each one of those groups, there are
males and females. It's not just like all feeling types are women
and all thinking types are men. If you seriously think that, go educate yourself. How do I make a little kid's voice sound like
a little kid? Detach. You don't have to go overboard with stupidly
simple language or bad sentence structure. In fact, I would advise against doing this
because it can make your writing seem messy and muddy and just hard to read. But also, don't write from where you are now
because you're an adult now. Even if you're a teenager, your prefrontal
cortex has developed to way more than the average kid voice that you're trying to write. So expect to adjust the way you see things. And that's the thing, really, the way you
see things. It's not so much the way you word things as
it is the way you see things. Try to remember how you used to see things
as a little kid. Read some good books that are written from
the perspective of a little kid and just notice what makes it feel authentic to you. My personal recommendation, of course, would
be To Kill a Mockingbird. This book is written from the perspective
of a six-year-old and it's so authentic. It just, it's amazing. And the last frequently asked question: How
do I know if my character voice is good prose? Don't go by is this good prose. Go by is this enjoyable or immersive to read? That's what matters. When I write, I don't try to write good prose. I wouldn't even consider my writing good prose. My only goal is to make my writing emotional. I want to make my reader feel something when
they read my stories. And oftentimes that comes from writing more
simple, not more complicated. So write, have someone read what you've written,
and ask them. Don't ask them, "It was that good prose? It was that like impressive writing?" Instead, ask them, "Was that immersive? Did you feel like you were the character?" That's what you're looking for. Okay, boom. That is all I have to say about character
voice. Comment below and tell me, do you use any
of these techniques or all of them? Do you have any other secret techniques and
hacks and tricks that you use to rock your character voice? If so, please share it in the comments below
so that we can all benefit from it. Smash that Like button if you liked this video,
and be sure to subscribe to this channel if you haven't already, because I post writing
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