Borrowing a Voice 2

One of the questions of the young writer is, how do I make my characters sound, well, characteristic? How do I make them all sound different?

This is a common problem, and shades over into the issue of authorial voice. All Heinlein heroes do sound alike, because they were written by Robert Heinlein. But consider Dickens. There is a specific Dickensian voice; you can recognize a passage written by the great man easily, whether fiction or nonfiction. But all of Charles Dickens’ characters do sou...