Capturing a character's voice

This year for the AO3 Chocolate Box exchange I'm writing in a fandom that's new to me, and that means I'm obsessing about getting the characters' "voice" right. It takes me back to the days I started writing the Caffrey Conversation stories, and how I tried to make my version of the characters sound recognizable.

My main trick was watching episodes of White Collar with closed captioning on. Then I could both hear and see the dialogue. It made me more aware of words and phrases common to the characters. In fact, I wrote down lines that sounded like particularly perfect examples of something the characters would say. I'd found in school that I remembered things from my classes better if I wrote them down, and the same held true in remembering lines from the show.

Having immersed myself in the canon dialogue, I tried to work some of the canon lines into my stories. It felt like a game. Not only did it solidify the characters' voices in my mind, but it helped reinforce the voices for readers, too. If they noticed canon lines in a scene, readers could pat themselves on the back for their excellent memories; if they didn't notice, that didn't take away from the scene.

I also think about the characters' backgrounds and styles of speaking, and how to make them sound distinct. For instance, June is elegant and gracious. Peter is the most likely to use sports metaphors, and to reference puzzles. Mozzie is the most likely to make long, erudite speeches and to quote literature or philosophy. Jones is fascinating; I think of him as being down to earth and having an informal style from hanging out with a bunch of guys in the Navy; I also think of him as being deliberate about his comments and word choices because of his training in law school. Diana is impatient, and is likely to have short lines that get directly to the point.

Neal is a chameleon, someone who can pretend to be anyone, and who is trying to decide who he really is. How he talks on a con can be entirely different from his voice in a private conversation with someone he trusts. A convention I used in the early stories was for him to say, "Great," in a sarcastic tone, showing the contrast between what he says and what he means.

With original characters, typically I hear their voices in my imagination and then work to convey their individual styles in their dialogue. If I struggle to hear a distinct voice for a character, casting an actor for the role can help. For instance, in the novel I'm writing, I needed to "hear" the main character's father more clearly. When I decided that Richard Dean Anderson was a good fit for the character of Mitch, I watched several episodes of Stargate: SG1 to solidify that voice in my mind. (Research can be fun!) And then I decided I needed Stargate actor Amanda Tapping as Mitch's sister.

When I get a comment that a reader could "absolutely hear the character saying that" it makes my day. Of course, as the Caffrey Conversation series gets longer and the characters grow further away from their canon selves, I'm aware that they don't sound as much like the source material anymore. That's okay. I like where the characters are going, and embrace the changes they've made along the way.