Differentiating Through Dialogue

While
there’s nothing wrong with making characters sound different by giving them
specific accents, it’s not something you can do for every character in a story.
Not unless your tale takes place at the United Nations.



And while
giving them vocal tics is useful, yeah? It helps identify them quickly, yeah?
It also gets old just as quickly, yeah?



Rather than
using how people speak to make them stand out, it is much easier and more
effective to use what they say rather than how they say it.






If one
person is for the new helipad on the local hospital and one is against, and a
third is only interested in getting the other two to stop arguing, then their
individual positions on the matter is what marks them out.



In order for
this to work you have to streamline the conversation a bit. In real life,
people may go off on tangents or use chit chat to pad out lulls in a
conversation, but doing that in fiction will only undo any work you’ve done to
establish which character is taking which stance.



Obviously,
you can still use dialogue tags and the characters’ names to identify them, but
even if you do that, it can become confusing in dialogue heavy sections  if you allow them to go off-topic.



You don’t
just want a reader to be able to follow who’s saying what if they carefully
read every single word at full concentration, you want them to be able to get
into the flow of things and automatically get a feel for who’s speaking.



By staying
focused on the matter on hand, whether it’s robbing a bank or going shopping
for shoes, and giving each character a distinct objective, who’s speaking will
become much easier to work out.



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