I read a review once where the reader said they loved a certain author’s stories, except when the author’s voice shone through. Okay, that makes sense. I’m reading this story from a character’s POV, and suddenly the author slips in something as themselves.

Except their elaboration didn’t agree with what I thought voice was. They continued to say ‘for instance, when the author uses their character to convey person political views.’

To me, that’s not the same thing. Voice is how someone verbally expresses their thoughts, not what those thoughts are. It’s not a distinct line, there’s room for bleed over, but voice is more about a personal dialect to me.

Everyone has words they overuse. As an overall writing rule, there’s words like ‘that’ and ‘was’ and ‘starting’, adverbs, etc. The point being, can the message be delivered without the word, or can the message be rephrased to paint a more vivid picture?

But there are words we overuse as individuals as well. I usually know what mine are. I go through phases where I like ‘so’ or ‘well’ or ‘though’. They don’t need to be there, but I like to insert them randomly in sentences.

The ones I don’t recognize on my own are the ones that convey my voice. The way I talk and communicate as an individual. For instance, most people I’ve worked with know that ‘awesome’ is a standard exclamation for me. It’s versitile because it can be sincere or sarcastic with just the slightest twinge of inflection.

But awesome is an obvious word, and it doesn’t really make it’s way into my writing. My characters prefer things like ‘epic’ or ‘wicked’. I’ve been called on a much more benign word recently.

Much.

Apparently this is part of my daily speech pattern and I don’t notice it. Since I don’t notice it, it slips into my character dialogue as well, and suddenly my characters sound like me, not like themselves. For instance:

“Stupid much?”
“Grabby much?”
“Needy much?”

See how versitile it is? And since it’s such a tiny little four letter word, I don’t notice it when I edit. Until a reader calls me on it. Which has happened more than once. Predictable much?

So now whenever edits are done, I need to do a search for ‘much’ and correct most instances to make sure my characters don’t sound like me. Except the ones who are allowed to. Just not so much.

Ever find your own dialect creeping into that of your characters?