* Read your screenplay out loud.
* Imagine each character as a friend or family member whose voice you're familiar with.
* Write each character with a specific actor in mind, and try to hear it in their voice.
* Rewrite like crazy. Don't lie to yourself that something's working if you can hear that it's not.
* Over-write. Exaggerate every emotion, every stance, every statement. Force your characters into extreme views that you, yourself don't hold. You can always pull back from an over-written piece, but you'll find it harder to push forward from a tame one.
* Prime your emotional pump with the kind of voice you want to hear. Read "Trainspotting" or some Jane Austen or Charles Bukowski or whoever's voice you'd like to hear in your own dialogue.
Alan Brooks

A with an Underwood
Dialogue Hard
MWSM FAQ: http://www.panix.com/~mwsm/faq.html
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p.s. If you're not freaking strangers out in public places by talking to yourself, repeating almost the same thing but in slightly different ways, over and over again, you're not working at it hard enough.

Paulo Joe Jingy
"I just couldn't live in a world without me."

p.s.s.s. "...you're with your characters" Arrrggg.

Paulo Joe Jingy
"I just couldn't live in a world without me."

It's very easy to become lost in surface stuff when you're talking about "voice" and by surface stuff I mean things like accent and background rich, poor, Northern, Southern, city boy, country boy.

And yes, obviously those things are going to affect the "voice" of your character to some degree.
But that's not the fundamental stuff.
What I'm talking about is the difference between personality and character.
Personality is the gloss. Character defines the fundamentals.

Let me explain this way.
You could easily write a villain that is dour and aggressive and pugnacious but you could also just as easily write a villainous character that is cheerful and outgoing and loquacious sort of a hail-fellow well met.
You could just as easily write a hero that is either of those two things. That's because those describe "personality" not character.
"Character" within a story describes the fundamental need or more often the conflicting needs that drive a character through the story.

The interplay of someone's fundamental need and what stands in the way of his achieving it that will define his character. That will determine what he does, how he does it what he says, how he says it. It will set his agenda in each scene and cohesively across the story.
I've read countless scripts where you don't know who's who, where you've got scenes where everybody sounds the same.

But the fact is, you walk into a bar in some neighborhood somewhere everybody grows up in the same part of town, they've gone to the same school, they have the same ethnic and cultural background. In that sense, they're all going to have the same sort of *voice.*

What distinguishes between them, when you write such a scene successfully is that they will not have the same reasons for being there in that place at that time. When each person has a clearly defined reason that we understand a need that brings them there and that drives their continued presence in the scene.

That need defines character. That need defines voice.

NMS