There are different ways to make your characters talk in a story. The essence of this is to create a realistic character voice and have a window through which your readers can peek into the personality and thoughts of your characters. 

This is one of the areas most new writers find challenging. Thus, sometimes they shy away and hide behind narrative and descriptive writings, skipping the totality of the main actions which bring their characters to life.

To make your characters talk, you need to work first on character creation. You need to create and develop characters who feel real like humans in real life.

Good character creation is a major required skill for every writer who wants to someday have a best seller story out there, possibly on Amazon kindle or other popular online book sites.

Knowing how to develop believable characters in a story, is a prerequisite to making your characters talk in a story. It will expose you on the way to assign real life personalities to your characters, in order to flesh them out and make them to be easily relatable to by your readers. 

Ways to Communicate a Characters’ Voice

When you make your characters talk, you try to aid them to voice out – air their views, thoughts, emotions, challenges, dreams and interact with one another.

A character voice can be communicated through a dialogue, monologue, body language, thoughts, sign language, etc

To successfully communicate a characters’ voice, you need to know who your characters are, then you can properly determine the voice they will talk with.

Strategic Ways to Make Your Characters Talk

Define Your Characters

While working on your character development in a story, before you proceed to make a character talk, start by defining who your characters are. Create each of their personalities and note it down to avoid a mix up of personalities.

Become the Characters

Then assume the states of your characters, bearing in mind the personality of each of your characters. Imagine yourself in the character’s body and experiencing all the plot of your story.

Think in the way the character with such a personality should think and pour out “your” thoughts. Express your ideas, thoughts, emotions in that style. 

Do the above for each of the characters to develop their voices. This will be easier for you if you are good at observing and listening to people in real life. From experiences you will find it less difficult to coin voices. You can pay attention to how people talk in real life, then imitate the trend in your interactions, or dialogue to sound real. 

Create a Voice

Based on the assigned personalities, the character voice can be developed. Individual voices and talks would vary based on an individual’s personality. An illiterate would sound differently from a literate, a male would sound differently from a female. A rich man wouldn’t sound the same as a middle class, or low class. Also, the topic and trend of their discussion would differ. Consciously come up with a unique appropriate voice pattern for each of your characters.

Bear in mind that different characters are bound to have varying opinions and wouldn’t always agree, just as is applicable in real life situations.

Create Dialogue

Create a dialogue between your characters. This gives off more details to a reader about your character and their personality. What they encounter and struggle with. How they think, talk and react to situations.

Add Body Language

You can also make your characters talk through body language. This act alone speaks volume more than even voice. Don’t forget the saying that actions speak louder than voice.

Revise

Revise by reading to see what the voices sound like. Do they sound real? Can you relate them to the real people you know, or have met? Make some adjustments where there are excesses of actions, reactions and wordings.

Conclusion

Don’t be in a hurry when working on character creation and character development, because this is one of the most important foundation of any successful interesting story. Building this creative writing skill right, would increase your authority in story writing be it fiction or non-fiction.

What other ways do you apply in making your characters talk in a story? Kindly share in the comment section below.