There are a lot of ‘cheats’ to giving your character a unique voice. Word choice is everything, but it’s also very important to make your characters sound different so that the reader never has any doubt which one is speaking.
There are accents, although they don’t always look great on a written page, but there are certain ways someone from different parts of the UK will sound. Just as someone from New Jersey doesn’t sound like someone from South Carolina.
“Y’all know what I mean?“
But if your setting means every character has a similiar accent, you’ll want to use a different set of cheats.
Attitude is the easiest.
If someone is chipper and excited, they’ll ramble and shout.
“But you know exactly what I mean, don’t you? I mean it’s so obvious!”
But maybe they are direct, concise.
“Understand?”
There are subtle ways too, the create a specific cadence. Some people refuse to use contractions because of either pretension or a desire to be clearly heard.
“Do you not understand what I mean?”
There are other character ticks you can add. Perhaps your speaker never uses personal pronouns.
“You understand, don’t you?”
Or they use too many personal pronouns.
“I want you to understand me. Let me know if you don’t.”
Or maybe they talk like Starfire from TEEN TITANS GO!
“Do you the understand what it is that I am the saying?”
Give your readers an easy way to differentiate and you’ll save some finger energy not having to add a million speaker tags.
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