Capturing another person's voice, whether real or fictional, poses a challenge to a writer. You have to step out of your own way for a moment and forego your right to assert an authorial voice. More than that, it requires you to listen. How else could you capture the cadence of someone's voice? How else could you know what someone else would say? You might know what you wish a person would say in a given situation or what would be convenient, for you as the author, to move the plot forward, but creating something believable1 is not about making everything in your fictional world advantageous to your agenda.
Writer As Creator
For the characters in your story, your writing is a supernatural act. It sustains them and gives them life. You wield the power to force them to talk and behave however you dictate. But if you do, the results will be hollow, and you won't be satisfied knowing you manipulated your characters’ every word and deed. You have to give them freedom.2 If you must guide their path, you work through external forces—more supernatural acts of writing—which will require knowing what would motivate your characters to truly behave the ways you're prompting them.
In the story I shared earlier this week, I tried to capture three distinct voices:
Reg, an intellectual dandy;
Tom, a cynic;
and Scottie, an innocent fool but a true believer.
Capturing a voice in fiction is in more than the words characters speak. It's in how they act, their mannerisms, and even in the ways you use words to describe them. It was Reg buffing his nails and waxing philosophic on the unconscious mind, but it was also the amber sunlight making his hazel eyes soft as honey.
When it comes to dialogue, the voices should be distinct, such that you could almost know who was speaking without the aid of dialogue tags. You'd read it and say, "I know this voice," as readily as you could identify your friend holding a conversation in another room.
I left a dialogue tag off of the line "See, that's some messed up shit. He should be praying to be favored out of combat," but it should be clear that Tom is the one delivering this line. He's the cynic. It wouldn't make sense for the line to have come from Scottie. That would be out of character.
And again, Tom's character is demonstrated through more subtle avenues than overtly through his dialogue. It's the way he can never seem to get comfortable, constantly shifting his helmet around, standing up to pop his spine. It's his discomfort as much as it’s his disbelief.
On the other hand, Scottie believes the impossibilities he insists he's seen but still entertains Reg's Jungian interpretation of that phenomenon, which Tom argues was only a dream. It's his belief in the ascetic acolyte of war—the naked man meditating in the camp to hone his ability as a killer—and it's why he takes up the mantle the acolyte leaves behind.
If you haven't read the story, you can find it here.
Writer as Imitator
When you’re writing fiction, you have a lot of control over your characters’ voices. Your only limitation is that your character’s voice should be consistent throughout the story.3 If you need to capture the voice of an existing person so that what you’re writing is recognizable as their voice, that’s another beast entirely.
At work, I was recently tasked with creating half a year’s worth of daily devotionals based on a previously published book by the pastor of the church I work for. The publisher understandably requested the devotionals not be pulled from or mere summarizations of the original book’s content. Otherwise, the books would be competing with themselves and one of them might as well not exist.
You might be thinking, “So you’re just making stuff up and slapping this guy’s name on it?” And the answer is “No” (mostly). Fortunately, when someone’s been a pastor for forty years, there’s plenty of source material to pull from. I read through transcripts of sermons on the verses I’m creating devotional content for, and there’s usually enough to make something meaningful. In the rare instances where that’s not the case, I get back on the ol’ Highwire.4
As a rule of thumb, putting words in someone else’s mouth is dangerous business (I talk about putting words in God’s mouth here). Even if you have permission, it’s best to tread lightly. Doing so successfully requires the two things I mentioned at the beginning of this essay:
Knowing what someone else would say
Knowing how they would say it
Both require listening. That’s where you start—listening. Then you can move to intuition. If you put your intuition on the wire without first listening to the person whose voice you’re trying to capture, I’m predicting a pretty long fall.
“So, you just, like, copy-paste this guy’s sermon transcripts into a Word doc and call it a day?”
Glad you asked. That brings me to my next point.
Writers Are Not a Tape-Recorders
It is very rare that the way someone speaks is how their words should be presented on the page. This goes for fictional characters as well as real people. What works in audible conversation does not translate to the written word.
I know.
I just spent this entire post saying you need to listen, you need to capture their voice, and now I’m telling you NOT to say it exactly like they would. Where do I get off? It’s confusing.
Look, you already know this is true. No one is going to read anything as cluttered with “umms” and “you knows” and half-started sentences that you go back and add a disclaimer to before starting again from the beginning. Use repetition sparingly. Orally, restatement is an effective technique. In written form, it’s called redundancy.
Your job is to capture the essence of someone’s voice and make it readable. Take what’s unique about their style of speech, but don’t overdo it. I have very limited culinary skills, but here’s a cooking metaphor anyway: The information you’re trying to convey to your reader is your main dish. The voice you’re trying to capture is salt. Use enough salt that it enhances the flavor of your main dish but not so much that it becomes unpalatable.
So, no, I’m not just copy-pasting text from sermon transcripts to create these devotionals. For one thing, I have to make the voice say in 300–400 words something that might have taken 1,000–2,000 words in the sermon. There’s some cleaning up that happens. One becomes adept at excising unnecessary bits to get to the core of what needs to be communicated. It may not be exactly how they spoke it, but, if you do it right, no one can claim they didn’t say it.
And hopefully on some level true.
Or at least the illusion of freedom.
Excepting when a sufficient catalyst explains the character’s change.
You probably thought I’d never use that metaphor again, didn’t you?