7/9/23
Creating Voice
This is number eighteen in the blog series, “My Life In Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.
ONE OF THE THINGS that I struggle with in creating characters is finding that character’s voice. What does he or she sound like, and how do I get that across in my writing? In reading the works of other writers of erotica, I find the problem is prevalent, even if not recognized or admitted.
My editor, Pixel the Cat, drew my attention to this when I was writing the post, ‘Talk Dirty to Me.’ He said,
Something you kinda-sorta addressed, and I don’t know that I’ve seen it in any of these: personalizing characters’ functional vocabulary. Like Bob always describes how he feels using a certain set of words, while his GF Judy Lee has some overlap, but her own way of saying ‘good morning’ while her sister Jolene again has some overlap, but her speech is flavored by her time at college in Maine. That sort of thing. For a lot of writers, if one reads only the words they say, all dialog could be the same person.
As the popular Facebook meme says, “I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.”
I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time working on this, ever since a reader Down Under got so enthused about the Living Next Door to Heaven series that he had his sixteen-year-old daughter read The Agreement. She read it and responded, “Yeah. It’s okay but Brian talks like an old man.”
Ouch.
I thought I had done such a good job of capturing the progression from little boy to teen. But both the content and the vocabulary gave me away.
In the entire series of “Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Adventures,” I struggled to make sure the accent, vocabulary, and tone were distinct between the contemporary character and his or her time-traveling self in the 1800s. I had pages filled with Victorian slang and Old West slang. I read books written in that era for language use. I itemized the differences between a character’s speech in the contemporary world and his or her speech in the 1890s or even the use of Cheyenne words by two of the characters who traveled back as members of that Nation.
And then, making sure other characters around them in either era weren’t mimicking the same speech patterns.
Finding the voice for a character is more important than having a physical description. I might have one character who is a tall strong male and another who is a short buxom female, but if they sound the same then the reader is constantly depending on ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ to follow the dialog.
So, how do you make distinctions?
Many authors choose to spell out dialects. This can work to a certain extent, but you will find readers quickly get tired of it. And when a writer uses spelled out dialect, she needs to be careful that she isn’t spelling out words with a different meaning.
I edited a book about the Pony Express for a friend who confided that there were lines that really gave him fits. At one point, a youngster stubbornly refused to accompany a parent by saying “I ain’t goin’ to come.” The author’s father had read it and wanted it put in a more dialectic language as “I ain’ta gonna cum.” The author had to explain to his father that in much of the world, that phrasing could mean something very different than refusing to accompany the adult.
I prefer to use vocabulary and sentence structure to make distinctions. For example, the kids in Blackfeather (available on Bookapy) are ranchers in the 2010s. They use a lot of slang and contractions, and a little cursing. Their counterparts in the 19th century use almost no contractions and the slang is period slang. Miranda indignantly tells Ramie, riding in her head, to “Remove your hand from my privities,” and constantly reprimands her for taking the Lord’s name in vain. It helps to paint the conflict between the two personalities inhabiting the same body.
Perhaps one of the key items to consider in creating voice is to find the difference between the male and the female. And believe me, don’t depend on porn to teach you how women talk about sex. Porn is primarily (not exclusively) written for male entertainment. The language used is language men would use. Most women don’t refer to their pussy or their tits, for example. Those are male terms.
I always think of a scene in Living Next Door to Heaven 4, Deadly Chemistry, in which Brian has been writing sexy stories for Rose. At one point she says, “Orbs? I have orbs?” In that instance it sets up a nice exchange about what she would call them. “Breasts,” is the answer
There is probably no way you can learn to talk like a person of the opposite sex better than reading the writings of a person of that sex. This is one of the reasons I recommend the website OMGYES. It’s where women talk about their own sexuality. The vocabulary is impressive.
When I was writing Nathan Everett’s Municipal Blondes, I started a blog, stating right up front that I was an older man writing a story from the perspective of a twenty-six-year-old woman named Deb Riley, and was using this blog to try to find her voice. I encouraged women of that age group to respond to me and tell me how I was doing. I got a huge following of women in that age group who corrected me, engaged with me so I would have to talk like them, and gave me feedback.
It was so intense that when I started writing the first draft and posting it daily on that blog, my readers engaged with me as if I was indeed that twenty-six-year-old woman. In December, I took a short break around the holidays because it was a very busy time. A few days into the break a follower wrote a panicked note to me. “Deb, I haven’t heard from you since you took off across Belize with that guy. Are you okay? I don’t trust him. Don’t let your guard down. And please let us know you’re okay!”
Now that’s audience engagement! She’d completely forgotten or intentionally ignored that I was a male author writing this piece and it was fiction. To her I was that young woman named Deb Riley and she was worried about me.
Be warned: It can backfire. When I wrote the short story titled “The First Clue is You Can’t Find Your Coffee Cup,” I modeled the narrator’s voice after a person I knew and had worked for. When it was first published, twenty years after it was written, the editor of Line Zero magazine said, “A new and mildly disturbing voice.” Several years later, when I published it on SOL, I got countless emails decrying the bad grammar, telling me I couldn’t write, and that I needed an editor. They were unable to accept it as the voice of the character.
I guess the sum of this message is to find your character’s voice. Make it as distinct as any person you know. In fact, make notes on how other people talk. Jot down their ‘isms.’ Then put them together in your own writing to make genuine living characters who don’t all sound like each other, or like you.
I’m having way too much fun writing this blog. Sometimes I forget that I’m supposed to be writing a story at the same time. I think I’ll have a little fun with the next post. Is there such a thing as ‘Too Much Sex?’
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
