Voices (not just the ones in my head)

[Hex]

I have a problem which is that my readers, brilliantly intelligent and anxious to please me as they are, have been getting a couple of my characters mixed up.

I don't think I'm introducing too many characters at once, though these two are introduced in the same chapter. I suspect one of the problems is that everyone - pretty much - seems to speak standard English (there are other issues, like not reminding the readers who they are every now and then, and that they both work in the same place).

I don't want to go all fake cockney or anything, and I'm finding it hard not to turn the dialogue into Terrible's from the Stacia Kane Ghost books. I'd like one of the characters to distinguish himself a bit by having a dialect (which I shall call "local"), but I'm finding it surprisingly hard to change existing dialogue into something that sounds vaguely natural.

Does anyone have any tips? Help, please?

 

[chopper]

even standard english can be changed just by word choice. by way of example, a colleague of mine at work would never say "by way of example". he'd say "It's like..."

Arca the Brave, a drunken old soldier, speaks in short, gruff phrases; Malessar the Warlock's rhetoric is heavy on sub-clauses and long words.

Dialogue attribution is the other key issue. if too much of the dialogue is unattributed, the reader can get very confused about who is speaking to whom.

one other option, if the characters are so alike (and you don't have to take this one seriously - it's just off the wall) is to merge the two together. if they're essentially doing the same thing in the mss, why confuse the issue?

 

[Ursa major]

It may be that these two characters are fundamentally too similar to each other.

The temptation is then to add an arbitrary difference. e.g. making one speak in a dialect. This will feel false if that's the only difference between them. You may find more success, and less temptation, by making the characters truly individual, not just in a superficial way. This will allow them to see the world differently and to relate to it in different ways (which should affect their dialogue). Or it could be that you only need (to focus on) one of them.

 

[Boneman]

Give one of them a noticeable physical characteristic when we first meet him, and we'll be able to distinguish more easily between them. I don't mean a scar, or a wooden leg (although that would do it, nicely) but it could be red hair, a lazy smile, eyebrows that meet in the middle, piercing green eyes, a cleft chin, dimples when they smile, crooked teeth, a short neck - anything at all. Mention it once or twice and it's fixed in our minds. Oh, and have someone call them by name now and then...

 

[Hex]

Thank you all very much.

It well may be that they are too similar, but since they stand out from each other clearly inside my head, I'm not very sure why the readers
[*] are having such difficulty telling them apart.

Physically they are already quite distinct: one of them is scarred and gargoyley and the other is blond and gorgeous. I could add a wooden leg, and perhaps a beard (eyepatch?)... but I wonder if that's the issue. They are described and their names are repeated. Sob.

I will have a serious think about getting rid of one of them - as you say, if people are confusing them then maybe it's because they are too similar... but they do play very different roles later on - and then they are quite definitely distinct. These readers haven't read the whole thing, just the first 100 pages (though clearly that doesn't make it OK).

I think perhaps I didn't mean dialect. I'm not going to be making up strange ways of speaking, mainly because I find it a real struggle to read dialogue/ language that's non-standard (I never finished 'How late it was, how late...' for example). I think the short gruff phrases versus elegant poetry ways of distinguishing is the way to go (thank you).

You've really made me think about what the problem is - it isn't that they look the same or have similar names or even appear together much - it's something else. It may be that the readers are having difficulty distinguishing what they do/ have done rather than who they are. Maybe I need to be clearer about that as well. Argh. Thank you.

[*] It's only been read by 5 people so far and two of them are having this problem. These two meet together to talk about it so it's coming up a fair bit.

 

[Ursa major]

Perhaps those two are projecting....