CD - Character Voice (Lesson)
Character Voice
Introduction
“When I first started writing in Chicago, a couple of people that worked in the newspaper said, ‘Oh, this guy just takes a tape recorder and goes onto the bus and records people,’” he says. “I thought, ‘Well, that's a pretty high compliment.’” - David Mamet
David Mamet is a Tony nominated playwright known for his spontaneous sounding characters. He suggests that the writer let the characters write the dialogue. His plays include Glengarry Glenn Ross, and Oleoanna.
Writing specific character voices in your dialogue takes time but can be achieved with the right amount of character study and research. After taking the time to get to know your characters in detail, the voices flow more naturally.
"Enter the minds of your characters. If you’ve done the requisite character development, you should be able to too, and an over-reliance on plotting might sabotage the potential chemistry when your invented personalities meet.” - David Mamet's Top 9 Tips for Writing Dialogue
In this lesson, you will explore various ways to study your character’s inner life for the purpose of creating a unique and justified character voice.
Character Voice
A character’s speech helps illustrate the character’s personality. A pitfall for young playwrights is that all the characters in a play sound the same (often mimicking the playwright's own personal voice).
In the presentation below, we will look at some methods for establishing character voice.
Below the presentation, you will find a link to a presentation guide. Download the presentation guide and fill it out as you follow along with the presentation. The guide is not graded, but will serve as a study tool to help you capture and understand the content of the presentation.
Lesson Self-Assessment
All of this research will help to define a character for a story that is in the early planning stages but sometimes, you simply need to practice creating characters from scratch. This lesson's challenge exercises will teach you strategies that you can use to generate character and character voice from scratch.
The activities outlined in the video below walk you through two methods you can use to generate characters and character voices from scratch. The activities also directly correlate with your assessments for this microlesson.
Use the navigational tools at the bottom of the presentation to pause, fast forward or rewind the presentation as needed. Contact your instructor with any questions.
Guidepost Questions for the Character
One of the activities asks you to use the guidepost questions to answer about your character in the photo. Here is a reminder of those questions:
- Relationship - How do interacts with others? Am I direct, nervous, flippant? Does it change depending on the person I’m speaking to? How?
- Conflict - What am I fighting for? What is my dream and how can I make it come true? If there is no conflict, why don’t you run?
- The Moment Before - What was happening seconds before the scene started?
- Humor - What do I think is funny. How do I use humor in general?
- Communication and Competition - Who are you competing with and how do you communicate with them to get what you want.
- Importance - What specific things will happen if I don’t get what I want.
- Place - What is my relationship with the location. Am I comfortable, formal, public or private? Can people hear me? Do I want them to?
- Mystery and Secret - Do I have a secret that no one knows. What do I want to keep hidden?
IMAGES & VIDEOS CREATED BY GAVS