Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called the human voice “the organ of the soul.” Writers must become skilled organists to differentiate and describe the voices of multiple characters.
This practice is worth taking the time to master. When it’s done well, readers barely need you to tell them who is speaking. The characters become clear instruments of their various personalities, backgrounds, and ideas.
In this article, I’ll explore ways to describe a voice, and I’ll give you some helpful tools and tips to keep your characters from blending together. Lastly, I’ll give you a Story Weapon to practice differentiating characters.
In devising ways to describe a voice authors should try to mix musicality, subtlety, and personality. As an author, you know your characters in a way that is unfair to expect of the audience on their first read — read the characters’ dialogue out loud, think about how their voices change when they interact with other characters, and study how people naturally talk to dive deeper into your character voice.
Cut extraneous descriptors
Before we get into the details of how to think about the voices of your characters, let’s clear something up. One common habit you need to avoid when describing the voices of your characters is adding unnecessary tags to their dialogue.
Here’s an example:
“I hate you,” Irma said sarcastically.
When you’re describing someone’s voice, don’t simply turn to a list of adjectives. This falls into the realm of telling and not showing.
And here are some different approaches:
“Oh, I absolutely hate you.” Irma reached over and stole a fry off his plate.
“I hate you. Deeply. Profoundly,” Irma said, fighting to keep her mouth straight.
The actions contradict what Irma says without commenting on the contradiction. This shows her sarcasm instead of stating it outright.
Your goal is to clarify how characters speak, communicate their intent, and differentiate them to show their unique identities. Let’s get started!
Tone of voice
The first aspect to someone’s voice is their tone, the emotional quality of what they’re saying.
If someone says, “Sorry,” the tone they use tells you if they sincerely mean it or if they’re only giving you a perfunctory apology.
Identifying tone means knowing what your character is feeling when they speak and their relationship to the other characters in the scene. If something happens that makes them angry, they’d have a sharp, loud, or possibly growling tone. If they mistrust someone, they might have a reserved or clipped tone.
Characters often have a natural tone that they revert to. Eeyore is a good example! Do you need any descriptors to feel the tone of his voice in this line?
After all, one can’t complain. I have my friends. Somebody spoke to me only yesterday. And was it last week or the week before that Rabbit bumped into me and said “Bother!” The Social Round. Always something going on.
The emotional tone of your character’s voice can be expressed in the words they choose and the pacing of their language. Someone angry can be terse or blunt. People in love gush about their lovers.
When you’re writing dialogue, make sure the emotions of the characters are clear to you and let that inform what they say. If you can channel their energy as you write their lines, the tone will come through.
Timbre
Timbre is the quality of the voice given to us by the shape and size of our bodies.
For musical instruments, timbre is the main difference between something like a guitar and a piano. The same musician might play both with the same tone, but the differing timbre of the instruments is unmistakable. The same is true for characters.
This has to do with the way that breath comes through different bodies, the gender aspects of where the voice sits, and the difference in people’s vocal chords.
To help differentiate the timbres of your characters, here are a few examples of how their voice might manifest:
- A big barrel-chested man has a deep, rumbling timbre to his voice
- A mousy person might have a more nasal voice
- A smoker might have a raspy timbre
- A person could have a breathy tone of voice for many different reasons
- Someone comfortable with speaking in public might have a bright timbre to their voice
You can communicate the timbre of a character’s voice to your reader in a few ways. Describe it when they first speak as a way for your readers to get a measure of who they are. After that, show how that voice influences the people around them. A nasally voice could be irritating and a deep timbre might scare a more timid character.
Little reminders of how they sound can be helpful as the story progresses to keep that character’s timbre in the mind of your reader.
Pitch
The next aspect of voice is pitch. This is how low or high of a note a person’s voice lands. This has to do with a few factors.
Gender
Men tend to have voices at a lower pitch, due to their larger vocal chords and testosterone levels. Women and children, due to having less testosterone in their systems, usually speak at a higher pitch. If someone is transitioning between genders, the change in testosterone in their system would also reflect in a change in pitch in their voice.
Anxiety
A state of nervousness will often pitch a person’s voice up. Their breathing is more constricted and they speak at a higher register.
Veracity
When we’re telling the truth, we usually speak at a lower pitch. It signals that we’re calm and relaxed. When someone’s lying and they’re not very good at it, they tend to speak at a higher pitch. This might make for some interesting changes in your dialogue.
Attraction
Some studies have shown that women speak at a higher pitch when they’re speaking to someone they find attractive. For men, it’s the opposite. Their voice drops as they try to seem more masculine.
Volume
This aspect of voice is probably the one you think of first when you consider how our speaking styles change.
The volume of a character’s voice can communicate to us that they’re confident or shy and tired or energetic. We all talk quieter in a library than we would in a storm outside. A character with things to hide will naturally speak more quietly, used to having a reason to hide their voice.
Making people in a scene lean in to hear what someone has to say can even be a power move. To attest to that fact, here’s what actor Tom Hanks said about his costar Irrfan Khan after their collaboration on a movie in 2019:
As soon as I walked up to him I said, “Irrfan Khan, I’m going to steal from you everything I possibly can. I’m going to start speaking very quietly in films. I’m going to wear very nice suits. And I will draw out the last sound of every sentence that I say.” And by doing that, I will be doing a very pale imitation of the coolest guy in the room.
Something fun to play with as well is how the voices of your characters change based on their emotion.
Ask yourself, do you get louder or quieter when you get angry? Do you hide your emotions? How would this apply to your characters?
When some people are feeling insecure, they clam up and stay near the walls. Other people start blabbing out of nervousness and a need to seem like a part of the moment. Answering these questions is a great way to flesh out your understanding of your characters.
Rate
The final aspect of voice is the rate at which the words come out of someone’s mouth.
There are several factors that play into how fast or slow someone speaks. You’ve probably been told before that you’re speaking too quickly. Rarely do we get told that we’re speaking too slowly, but we can all remember conversations where it seemed like someone was taking an eternity to reach their point.
Let’s unpack a few of those factors and see how they might apply to a character.
- Fast talking is another sign of nervousness. When a kid gets caught for stealing or cheating on a test, the fear pushes the words out of their mouth until there’s a stream of reasons why they were doing it.
- Fast talking is also a sign of someone trying to be persuasive. A character running a scam or trying to make a sale uses slick words in spades. They’re determined to talk faster than the other person can think.
- The most simple reason someone would speak quickly is just that they’re in a rush. This is a great way to show us that someone’s busy rather than telling us.
- Someone speaking slowly might be trying to be careful. Perhaps they’re discussing something delicate and choosing their words wisely. Maybe they’re telling a lie and trying to remember all the parts of it. Whatever the reason, this would slow down their speech considerably.
- Someone unfamiliar with a language would also likely speak slower than a native speaker. There’s a brief delay as their mind communicates the thought in their mother tongue and then translates it over to the other language they’re using.
Each of these reasons would increase or decrease the pace of someone’s speech. These are tools to tune the music of your dialogue. There’s a rhythm to great conversation and you can use all of these as reasons to change that rhythm.
Your story weapon: Know your characters deeply
When you’re writing a scene with two or more characters in conversation, practice reading the dialogue out loud. Not in your head. Out loud, in the room, at the same volume your characters would be using. Give each of them a different voice. The point is not performance. The point is that the ear catches what the eye slides past.
This will help you differentiate between the character’s voices in the scene. You might hear a line that is too long, the speech that goes on three sentences past where it wanted to end, the exchange that reads like a casual tennis match when it should read like a fight.
The way a person speaks is the way they think, and the way they think is who they are. Daisy Buchanan’s voice was “full of money,” as Fitzgerald told us in The Great Gatsby. He did not need to say much else.
Mastering different ways to describe a voice means knowing your characters well enough that their dialogue simply becomes an extension of their inner life.
A nuanced understanding of voice can bring clarity, distinction, and vitality to your characters. Developing this level of control requires both close attention and consistent practice. To deepen your skills and apply these techniques in your own work, I invite you to join one of my next workshops: The 90-Day Novel, The 90-Day Memoir, Story Day.
