How You Say: some thoughts on finding a character's voice.

Sep 12, 2010 08:26

This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and maybe some of you out there will find something useful in my thinkfulness ( Read more... )

discuss, meta

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Comments 84

deixis_dyad September 12 2010, 00:45:45 UTC
This was really helpful! I for one kind of suck at making characters distinguishable in their speech (mostly I think of them by their clothing styles which is probably the worst way to go about things haha). I'll be sure to keep this in mind as I work on my own original projects! <3

(I will also constantly refer to your Hetalia voices chart to make sure I am Doing It Right. xD)

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pyrrhiccomedy September 12 2010, 00:51:03 UTC
Ah, I'm so glad this was useful to you! =D It's something I used to be really bad at, to be honest, but over the past two years or so I've been trying to improve. Hetalia makes it easy, I think--we all have these fixed ideas in our heads of How English People Talk, How Germans Talk, etc. XD

(I will also constantly refer to your Hetalia voices chart to make sure I am Doing It Right. xD)

Hahaha, well, these are just my opinions, obviously! But, I think, by and large, the above holds true for most characterizations of the nations. =D

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deixis_dyad September 12 2010, 01:20:09 UTC
Ngl I am constantly terrified that I'm not characterizing the Hetalia nations properly when I write or storyboard. For some reason I can't get in their heads, ahaha.

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pyrrhiccomedy September 12 2010, 01:47:46 UTC
Gosh, I haven't gotten that impression from your writing! Maybe it's just a matter of building up confidence with practice? =D

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pyrrhiccomedy September 12 2010, 01:00:04 UTC
I'm so glad you found something useful in it! =D

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nym_aulth September 12 2010, 01:02:09 UTC
Good to see this, thanks for sharing ♥
Your thoughts are interesting. I'm not sure I'm this far along as a writer but the charts definitely help as a systematic way to think about it. Maybe I need to practice writing different characters reacting to the same thing to get a better handle on the differences.
Anyway, I know what I'm doing with my spare time this afternoon now-trying out the artist version you mention XD Facial silhouettes I could maybe handle but I need full body silhouette practice badly.

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pyrrhiccomedy September 12 2010, 01:07:01 UTC
Maybe I need to practice writing different characters reacting to the same thing to get a better handle on the differences.

That's actually a really good exercise! Sometimes I assemble my OCs and I'm like, "Okay, describe a trip to the grocery store." Just a long chain of narration, you know? Forcing them to string sentences together about a subject they don't feel especially invested in, and seeing how differently they put things.

The only danger is if any of your characters are truly chatty bitches, you may have 700 words of rambling about the grocery store at the end of it. XD

Facial silhouettes I could maybe handle but I need full body silhouette practice badly.

Me too. x_x

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nym_aulth September 12 2010, 01:12:33 UTC
I'll give it a try with some fandom characters I feel like I have a relatively good handle on in theory. Hetalia, mayber, or people from the Harry Potter universe. I never even know where to start if I was gonna do OCs-kind of a case of 'overwhelmed by choice', yknow? XD

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pyrrhiccomedy September 12 2010, 01:14:52 UTC
Oh, totally. I started thinking about this because Emily and I are coming up with so many new OCs for Gilded Souls, you know? And there's always that danger of making everybody sound alike, if you don't think about it first, because otherwise there's just too many choices. At least, that's how it works for me.

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didgeridoodle September 12 2010, 01:22:00 UTC
Awesome meta!

It certainly helps in my case; I do write a lot of Australia!fic, so this will definitely help gauge his characterization a little bit better, since uhm, there isn't exactly one in the first place. It's definitely risky - playing something by ear and not waiting for any canon material - but when you love a character, you just gotta write him! ;P

Thanks for sharing this!

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pyrrhiccomedy September 12 2010, 01:48:35 UTC
Oh, absolutely. Australia pretty much is an OC, band-aid on the nose or not. I'm really glad this helped! =D

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Oh, your icon. <3 didgeridoodle September 12 2010, 01:55:42 UTC
To be objectively fair, Himaruya did give us little snippets here and there of his character. It can be inferred from Wy's profile that he's pretty much generous, and fun/freedom loving - but for his mannerisms and quirks and flaws, we got next to nothing. ||OTL I just go with RL!experience with Australians and you guys are beautiful people, man.

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FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS ♥ pyrrhiccomedy September 12 2010, 01:58:30 UTC
Hahahaha, actually I'm an American! But I married an Australian and I live in Australia now. But it's a great country. So long as you keep Aussie's totally relaxed-about-everything attitude and his secret hyper dickishness, I support Oz-tan. XD

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erueru_2d September 12 2010, 01:22:57 UTC
Thank you so much! This is really helpful.

And thus I defined the topic of my future term paper. :) Starting next week, I'm going to take the Psychology Of Speech classes, but honestly, with this post I already feel a little bit educated in this field. ♥

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pyrrhiccomedy September 12 2010, 01:49:39 UTC
Oh my God, that class sounds fascinating, I wish I could take it.

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