dialogue - avoiding making all your characters sound the same

We surely all have little quirks to our speech. Like my daughter once criticized my writing for using the word "surely" too much. (See, I used it on this post.)

So how do you keep all your characters from sounding the same in dialog? That is, how do you keep them all from sounding just like the writer? It's easy to say, "Pay attention and be careful", but ... pay attention to what? Okay, in my case I've got my eye out for the word "surely". But what else?

There are some obvious extremes. You can make the scientist use a lot of technical language. A 5-year-old should normally talk like a 5-year-old and not like a college professor. In the story I'm working on right now I have a character who lives in another country and who would likely not use English much, so I put some grammar errors into his speech. Etc. Maybe you could give a character some stock phrases that he always uses: "Elementary, my dear Watson", "To the Bat Cave, Robin", etc. But I'd think there are limits to how far you can go with such things without it sounding too gimicky.

Any tips?

Answer

On top of what others gave as excellent advices on getting "in the mind of a character" let me add a few crutchy "dialects" you can give your characters.

• The speaker is using Learner's English. The language is correct, but simple. The sentences are short. Correct sentence structure is used, where native speakers use clauses. The speaker avoids complex constructs. Their list of words is limited. Sometimes the speaker uses words that marginally apply and look awkward.



• Archaic. The person has learnt English from KJV Bible foremost, and is currently striving with proper, modern English.


• Rapid fire speaker speaks in rapid sentences, and abuses conjunctions, like when the message is completed, the person must digress and keep talking about something barely related but this is how one builds the character, isn't it? And the digressions contain random weirdness, and hidden plot clues, or non-sequiturs, which may be funny, or just weird and the style is annoying at times but memorable and energetic, and some love it...


• Laid back. Speaking is a tiring activity. So... Sparsely. Only essentials. Frequent pauses... no? Well... Pauses are good. Sit back and enjoy. It will be fine.


• Concrete. Military style, sir. No redundancies, no ambiguities and only regular amount of courtesy, sir. Reporting facts, staying on topic and hiding emotions. Respectful, but firm.


• Uh... a recluse? Forgetful? Not used to all that... communication. All harder words are there... but building sentences takes... um, effort? Time? These... whatdyacallem... interjections happen often.


• Slangs. I'll skip examples.


• A classy language. You should not use crude contractions. Choosing fabulous flourishes of the language will give aura of elegance, but it is a clear sign of an uncouth upstart to abuse some verbiage where cultured but common words suffice.

You should develop more original and closer to "generic" styles for the main cast, but these are very nice to give some secondary characters some depth and character at low cost.