Individualizing characters

This is the last one where I’ll suggest you bookmark and come back if you’re NaNo-ing. Good luck as you finish!

This is my last post on broadly editing the story you’ve written. This is not the end of such self-editing, but I feel like it’s important to thoroughly check your story’s structural pieces – setting, plot, character – before you start thinking about the nuts and bolts of language in copy editing. Beta readers can sometimes help you with these things, but you need to think about these carefully, too. If a scene is useless to the plot or a character is acting completely out of character, no amount of moving commas, inserting periods, or changing around the order of words in a sentence is going to fix it.

Today’s topic is about making sure your cast of characters are as individual as possible. So many things make us individuals: how we were raised, how often we moved, where we lived and where we played, where we went to school, what subjects we liked, what games we played (both figuratively and literally), and our family dynamics (siblings and even extended family relationships) made us individuals – the tiniest bits different from everyone around us, both in how we view situations and solve problems.

These individualizations will come out in dialogue and body language.

Dialogue

The first way we recognize people are individuals is by the words they speak, the cadence and patterns of their words and the diction, or particular words they use. Some of this is influenced by education, but that also brings up where were they educated? Another part of a character’s word choices comes from their family background – the words, phrases, idiomatic and exclamatory speech they’ll use because that’s what they heard growing up around people using it. A bilingual or multilingual person will do the same. And it’s super-situational! Nicknames, expletives, self-censoring, abrupt cuts in thoughts, changes in topic, the kinds of details they use to plead their case, versus arguing one.

You should know your characters’ personalities well enough to differentiate and identify who is speaking and need very few dialogue tags. So, test that. Search out the quotation marks. Read the dialogue aloud. Do not read the tag if there is one.

• If you were reading this aloud to someone else, would you need to explain who was speaking?

Are there a lot of people in the conversation? Simplify it down with an isolating maneuver – grasping the shoulder of the person they’re talking to, for example.

Do something with “blocking” (positioning the characters or their attention in the space) by exchanging the dialogue tag for an action sentence (see “body language” below)

• Or why the character said that?

Consider adding in the context earlier. Where – earlier in the story – can you provide this background detail?

• Could someone else in the story have said the same thing?

If someone else could have said the same thing, why did this person say it? Is the point of the dialogue to show how this character is (now) thinking like the other character? If so, great. If not, if there’s no exclusivity to the dialogue being from this person, then replace the direct quote with an indirect one:

“Let’s go down the back chute,” Marla said.

becomes

Marla suggested taking the back chute.

or change it to descriptive narrative entirely:

At Marla’s suggestion, we went down the back chute.

The less dialogue is broken up with dialogue tags and lengthy explanations, the more it will flow like a real conversation between people in a real physical interaction (everyone moving and active).

This is also the chance to personalize dialogue, so that it can’t sound like it comes from anyone else. Add in the unique tics of speech for your character:

1. a hesitation ellipse
2. an “um”
3. an em dash for self-interrupted speech
4. an expletive (or a self-censor from saying an expletive), appropriate idiom, etc.

Body language

The second opportunity for individualizing your characters is to show their unique body language. Are they talking with their hands, touching someone else to get their attention, rolling their eyes, pursing their lips, doing a rolling tap with their fingers, tapping their foot impatiently, pacing, jumping up from their chair, or maybe even tripping over “lint” on the floor because they’re so caught up in what they’re saying?

The more you can help readers envision your character speaking and moving, the more likely the reader will start to differentiate the way the characters sound in their head and you’ll get rave reviews that praise your characters as “OMG I love Quail they’re so intense,” or “Willow’s so fun” and have them sympathizing or empathizing with their situations in your story.

~ Lara

As always, if you are looking for professional assistance to bring your story up to snuff for querying or publication, I offer manuscript evaluations, coaching, and developmental editing for assisting with the big elements of your story’s development. I am currently booking clients for 2024.