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Sisal Two-Step
May 29, 2006

mom without jaw
dad without wife


i'm taking all the Ls now, sorry

Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:

So I’ve been writing a sci-fi story on and off for the last couple months because covid and I noticed while rereading some of it that I have a bit of a problem with my characters having very similar voices as written. I don’t want to do anything like phonetically written accents or other really jarring ways of differentiating them, so I was wondering: does anyone have any suggestions for books/shorts that do a really good job of distinguishing characters in dialog, so I could get a better idea of how to approach that with some relative subtlety?

This is a problem I frequently have too. Unfortunately, no immediate books come to mind as examples on how to do it well. Maybe it's one of those things that, when it's done right, the reader doesn't really notice.

I usually tweak the dialogue during the revisions. Some things I do is to try and keep in mind the socioeconomic background of the character, their education level, the sort of media they enjoy, the friends and company they keep, and so on. In my last completed novel, I had one character who came from a solidly lower middle-class background but went into higher academia and was now spending time among people who grew up in a higher class bracket. Because he was pretentious and a bit self-conscious about the difference, and because he read more, he spoke a little more proper and used a larger vocabulary. I didn't mention it explicitly in the text; it was just a bit of character building that I used to inform his dialogue.

One thing that keeps me out of writing speculative fiction is I never, ever want to have to come up with slang. I can't imagine anything more difficult.

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