I finally caught myself using the same character voice for every single dialogue scene

My friend in my writing group pointed out that my gritty detective talks exactly like my bubbly barista and I realized I had been copying my own speech patterns for 3 years without noticing, has anyone else struggled with making different characters sound distinct?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_olivia8d ago

Oh man, this is such a painful but necessary wake-up call (I almost feel like I got called out just reading this). My buddy in my writing group pointed out that my world-weary fantasy king and my excitable twelve-year-old apprentice used the exact same vocabulary and sentence structure. I literally went back and found a scene where the king says "gosh" and I wanted to delete the whole manuscript. The barista vs. detective thing is rough because they're so obviously different archetypes, but our brains just default to "me talking" when we're in the zone. Been forcing myself to write character bios with specific speech quirks now, like one character drops articles (the, a, an) when they're stressed and another uses really long, run-on sentences when they're lying. It feels fake at first but at least it breaks the habit.

blakestone8d ago

and yeah i caught myself doing that too but with descriptions where every character sees things in the exact same weird way.