Thread: Personality conflicts in characters

Hi everyone.

I've been reading the Characterization info in the Writing 101 section of the forum, and it's brought to light some things I was not previously considering, but there are still some questions that linger as well.

For some background on myself: I am not necessarily new to writing, but then I'm still brand new at the same time. Since Jr. High I have written short stories that were mostly a way of letting my imagination ramble to whatever end it would arrive. To this day I still write purely because it helps my mind focus, and forces all the noise into the background where I can ignore it.
My grammar is horrid, my spelling shortly behind that, and I've no formal training of any sort on how to write a story, beyond what they teach in high school grammar classes.

Anyway, with all that babbling out of the way, here's my questions on characters.
I've been told that in my short stories, when I have two characters talking to each other, that it sounds more like a monologue.
I can sort of understand this because I try my best to get "into" the character that is speaking, but my lack of development skill tends to mash things together.

The "Characterization" thread suggests things such as accents, and other verbal cues that make a character stand out as different, but my mind balks at that when I consider having 10 different characters or so. It would appear to me that in order to make each one unique, the differences in their diction would have to be varied enough that you would soon run out of extremes, and thus find yourself limited on the number of characters you can create.
I'm likely wrong there, but I'm trying to see where.

Is there any sort of writing resource that takes, for example, a spoken monologue by a character, and then duplicates it multiple times as if spoken by different character types? Something that easily shows the differences that make each one unique?
From the characterization thread, it would appear that accent, inflection, emotion, and tone are some of the main things that can be changed, but are there other things that a new writer can look at using which can get them started on the right path?

Thanks.

There are different ways to isolate characters. For instance, one of your characters could be Spanish and likes to intermix Spanish words into his/her dialogue: Mierda, vamos, pendejo, et cetera. Another likes to pause (displayed by using ellipses . . . ) during speech at certain points. Another one doesn't pronounce his G's in "ing-ending" words like "going", et cetera. This can be shown by putting an apostrophe in after the last letter: goin'. Another uses street-talk: "Yo, dude, that was rad. Man, I totally wasted that mofo".

It's just a matter of hearing a character's voice in your head. With practice, you'll learn that a sentence or a word would not be said in a certain manner by a certain character.

Your concern is a pretty common one expressed by writers of limited experience. (I said LIMITED EXPERIENCE, NOT LIMITED TALENT!!! THOSE ARE TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT THINGS.) The problem tends to dissipate with practice (and maybe a little bit of luck). (Although now that I think about it, I know plenty of experienced writers who struggle with this issue too.)

In my opinion, instead of spending a lot of time trying to come up with or discover some mechanism or process that'll do your work for you, you would do better just trying to write complete stories. Start a story, write it all out. Make it have a beginning, middle, and end. Think of the dialect issue as something that you can deal with when you edit.

Once the story is complete, you're gonna have a lot better idea of each character's background and personality, and so that will make your editing and polishing a lot easier. And, if your character does not seem to have any recognizable personality after a couple of edits--maybe he or she needs to die, ya know?

It has been my experience that a lot of inexperienced (that's INEXPERIENCED! not TALENTLESS!!) writers will get hung up on some little piece of criticism they've received, and that will sort of siderail them--what you are telling us here is a good case in point.

It would appear to me that in order to make each one unique, the differences in their diction would have to be varied enough that you would soon run out of extremes, and thus find yourself limited on the number of characters you can create.

Au contraire! Anyway, that is only ONE conclusion an inexperienced writer might come to when considering the task of breathing life into characters on the written page.

Another conclusion you might reach, given these factors, is that completing a story with ten distinct, discrete, recognizable characters might be more of a job than you're ready for; perhaps concentrating on creating a believable story with three or four characters might be a confidence-building thing for ya.

Another conclusion you might reach is that you don't really care if your reader can tell who's talking, as long as you can.

To this day I still write purely because it helps my mind focus, and forces all the noise into the background where I can ignore it.

And perhaps that is all you need to worry about for now...? I think that is a wonderful attitude for a writer to have, personally.

If you know your characters' personalities and backgrounds and can keep same firmly in mind as you write, then I urge you simply to WRITE and get the story(s) out of you, and let characterization be a secondary concern for the time being.

And if all else fails, there's always that pesky "real life" thing, to wit:

If you're like most civilized people, you likely walk around every day with one or more gadgets on you capable of audio recording.

Get your recorder out and record some people talking in the lunchroom at work, or in the clubhouse, or whatever; try to make it people you know and are familiar with, your coworkers, your classmates, your teammates, etc. When you are at leisure, listen carefully to your recording. It's not just accent and vocal tone that identify a speaker to your ears! It's the ordering of words they use, the rate of speech, repetitions of words, and--GESTURES. You're the writer, you can give someone distinctive expressions AND describe his/her facial movements during speech:

"This is just horrible!" Molly squeaked with an injured little sniff.

Rubbing his chin thoughtfully, Amado said, "I don't think that's gonna work."

"What part of LOCK AND LOAD don't you understand, Private?!"

(etc)

Though we may all be speaking the same language, each of us has his/her own unique style of speaking. Learning how to pick out those nuances that identify each speaker and put them into words is--don't fool yourself!--a huge accomplishment. (Which means: Don't worry if you're having a problem! Just keep writing.)