Posted: March 6, 2025

Dissecting Character Voice

Consider this snippet of dialogue:

What's her name?"

"Janet."

"I don't feel comfortable calling anyone by their first name, especially a woman. Do you know her last name?"

"No, I don't. You'll just have to call her Janet, I guess."

Perfectly good, serviceable stuff, right? Clear, fairly concise, smooth. Now look at how Rex Stout actually did it in the short story "The Cop Killer:"

"What's her name?"

"Janet."

"I call few men, and no women, by their first names. What's her name?"

"That's all I know, Janet. It won't bite you."

The same information, but you can hear Nero and Archie in the second version. That difference is voice.

I've written before about how elusive voice can be. I've suggested possible places to look for it and covered some of the hallmarks of good dialogue. But it might be worth taking a deeper dive into how it can be done.

In the example above, notice how the word choice -- and the unspoken assumptions behind the word choice -- fit the two characters. Nero's love of precise language is there in the concision and precision of the parallel "few men and no women." The exact repetition of the question, "What's her name," amounts to an imperious rejection of Archie's use of the first name. And Archie's self-possession is there in his breezy dismissal of Wolf's rejection. Essentially, their characters and their relationship are all there in those two lines of dialogue.

Or, take another example.

For years, I have been sharing car-related passages from some of my favorite authors on a site for old car geeks. Thus year's passage, from John Jerome's 1979 book Truck, is also one of the best examples of distinctive character voice I've seen. The background: in 1970, Jerome bought, for various philosophical reasons, a 1950 Dodge pickup and spent a year getting it running again. Through a combination of ignorance and mild stupidity, he destroyed a relatively obscure part -- the timing chain cover -- and wrote to various junkyards trying to track down a replacement. This introduced him -- and us -- to Armad T. Winship, a junkyard owner in Fontana, California.

You can read the entire passage here, but here are some highlights of Mr. Winship's letter. Spelling and punctuation are as in the original.

You might not believe it but space is and always has been the problem even before Fontana got the "middle-age spread" and passed ordinances in restraint of our trade. Ten acres is all we have left, guess how may cars that will hold and Ill send you free a dimmer switch for your truck, no rust, out of the packing box, if you come with 20 of the correct number. We have a special technique for getting the most cars on the smallest lot, no its not on their sides.

*********

I . . . drove crosscountry in a 36 Plymouth in 1940 just before the War, a sweet running little car if you didn't try to push it in the desert. Everyone had those canvas waterbags on their bumpers so the evaporation would keep it cool. We didn't and like to died, it felt like. I asked a man in a filling station for a little taste from his canvas bag, and it was cool for a fact.

*********

I will turn 75 next May 1, May Day but I always say Im no Communist, it was my birthday before it was theirs. Mrs. Winship is even older but she does not like me saying it.

*********

Some of our parts are mint, some we call perfect used, but we don't let anything go out we would not put on our own pride and joy. It is a 1940 BUICK with fender-mounted spare. Franklin Roosevelt used to ride in one, a real classic and I keep it running like a watch. And not an Ingersoll, either. No offense to the Ingersoll people, they try hard.

So what makes this voice so distinctive? It helps that this was a letter [link to letter article], which gave Mr. Winship's voice room to roll on without interruption. Beneath that, there is the apparent disorganization of his thoughts, the stream of consciousness flow that leads to a lot of doubling back to qualify what he's just said. (My favorite is the comment on the Ingersoll people trying hard -- they're the ones who gave us the Mickey Mouse watch.) But even deeper than that is the exuberance and enthusiasm for what he's doing. That's what drives the words to gush out so fast that he can hardly keep up with them. Just on the basis of this one letter, I feel like Mr. Winship is someone I would like to know.

Incidentally, he did send Jerome a timing chain cover. And, in a personal note, Jerome's book inspired me, when I was 19 in 1979, to pull a derelict 1939 Buick out of a backyard where it had been parked since 1961. Over breaks from college for the next few years, I got it running and roadworthy again and drove it for several years after college.

So, how do you do this for your own characters? Well, that's the elusive part.

Ideally, your viewpoint character's voice will flow out naturally. But even when the words are flowing, it's sometimes hard to tell whether or not they have a distinctive voice. So try an exercise I've recommended in the past. Take all the dialogue spoken by one of your characters and put it into a single file and read it through, all at once. Then do the same for another character, and another. Can you tell the difference between the characters just on the basis of their dialogue? Remember how distinctive Nero and Archie were in just two lines.

If you can't tell the difference, one of several things might be going wrong. You may not know your characters well enough. If so, I've written before [link] on how you can meet them at a deeper level.

It may be that you're so taken by how the story is unfolding, how the dialogue is moving things forward, that you've simply forgotten about character voice. If so, it can help to imagine yourself into your viewpoint character's head before writing a scene. I'm talking about a step-by-step, deliberate act of imagination -- picturing what their hands look like, what they're wearing, where they sitting or standing. Filling in details from their immediate past -- what happened to them just before the scene, how they feel abut the other characters or the situation they're walking into. Enough practice with these acts of imagination, and you may find your voice flowing more easily.

Mark Twain once said that analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog. You can learn a lot, but the frog tends to die in the process. And much the same is true of voice -- it's harder to enjoy something when you've trained yourself to see the gears and levers at work. But this may be one way to develop the skills you need to give your readers as much delight in your characters as I took in Mr. Armand T. Winship of Fontana, California.