Episode 131 - The Color Wheel of Characterization with Jeff Elkins
May 3, 2022
Jeff Elkins, the Dialogue Doctor, discusses THE COLOR WHEEL OF CHARACTERIZATION. He discusses the building blocks of character voice, getting past physical description, the musicality of character voice, letting modulation happen, bolstering scene tone with character voice, and creating the emotional journey.
Do any of those topics pique your interest? Check out my YouTube playlist 2 MINUTES OF INDY, where over the week following the airing of the episode, I’ll be posting brief video clips from the interview on each of those topics! You can also catch up on some highlights of previous episodes there.
Do any of those topics pique your interest? Check out my YouTube playlist 2 MINUTES OF INDY, where over the week following the airing of the episode, I’ll be posting brief video clips from the interview on each of those topics! You can also catch up on some highlights of previous episodes there.
Jeff Elkins is a novelist, ghostwriter, and editor with more than 10 novels on the market. During the day, he leads the writing team for a company that simulates difficult conversations for professionals to practice. He also helps authors improve their dialogue to engage readers more fully through one-on-one consulting and through his podcast The Dialogue Doctor.
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"Part of what the reader comes to your book for is an emotional journey. And the emotional journey that your reader perceives comes from the interaction between the characters. So it is the friction between the characters metaphorically rubbing up against each other that gives different emotional feels. And so what we're looking for when we talk about how do we create this emotional journey is, we're taking these characters on this step wise process of interaction." —Jeff Elkins
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Links
Jeff's links:
dialoguedoctor.com
The Dialogue Doctor Podcast
https://twitter.com/Jffelkins
https://www.facebook.com/JeffElkinsWriter
Other episodes with Jeff:
Inbetweenisode 116 - Creating Community, Content, and Creative Energy with Jeff Elkins
Episode 111 - Using Engines, Anchors, and Hazards to Define Character Voice with Jeff Elkins
Episode 048 - Building Great Protagonist and Antagonist Voices with Jeff Elkins
Episode 082 - Perspectives on Writer's Block
dialoguedoctor.com
The Dialogue Doctor Podcast
https://twitter.com/Jffelkins
https://www.facebook.com/JeffElkinsWriter
Other episodes with Jeff:
Inbetweenisode 116 - Creating Community, Content, and Creative Energy with Jeff Elkins
Episode 111 - Using Engines, Anchors, and Hazards to Define Character Voice with Jeff Elkins
Episode 048 - Building Great Protagonist and Antagonist Voices with Jeff Elkins
Episode 082 - Perspectives on Writer's Block
For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Jeff Elkins, the Dialogue Doctor. Hey Jeff!
[00:00:06] Jeff: I'm good. Hi everybody. It's so nice to be back on.
[00:00:10] Matty: It is always nice to have you back and as the listeners and viewers will hear in a moment, you are a multi-time guest, but just to give our listeners a little reminder of you, Jeff Elkins is a novelist, ghost writer, and editor with more than 10 novels on the market. During the day he leads the writing team for a company that simulates difficult conversations for professionals to practice. He also helps authors improve their dialogue to engage readers more fully through one-on-one consulting and through his podcast, "The Dialogue Doctor." And I'll add to that, now the Dialogue Doctor Dialoggers Slack community, if you are a patron. And there'll be a link in the show notes to anyone who would like to join that community by becoming a patron of Jeff's.
[00:00:47] And Jeff has been previously on Episode 116, "Creating Community, Content, and Creative Energy." 111, which was "Using Engines, Anchors, and Hazards to Define Character Voice." 48, which was "Building Great Protagonist and Antagonist Voices." And then he was part of the all-star cast of Episode 82, "Perspectives on Writer's Block."
[00:01:08] And before we got started, I said to Jeff that normally, I come into these interviews with lots of notes and bullet points about things to talk about. But today, I'm just going to say the topic and then Jeff and I are going to have a conversation about it. And so the topic is Color Wheel and Characterization. And I'm a sucker for any time a writer finds lessons that apply to the writing craft in a seemingly very different area, like in this case, the art world.
[00:01:35] So Jeff, with that introduction, let the listeners and viewers know what we mean by color wheel and characterizations.
[00:01:42] Jeff: Yeah, well so, that's very funny. Matty, I've been long enough, that you can just give me a word and wind me up and let me go.
How to best define and build character voices
[00:01:52] Jeff: So in the Dialogger community for the Dialogue Doctor, we have been thinking a lot over the past year and a half of how to best define and build character voices. Because one of the overarching problems that I find authors have is that all of their characters sound the same. So all their characters sound like them.
[00:02:11] And the question is, how do you get away from that? How do you break out of that? How do you break out of it in a way that is easy to use and controllable for you? And then how do we also think about the philosophy behind character voice in order to empower you to better consider how you're building and then writing and then editing character voices.
[00:02:32] So all of those questions kind of swirl around. And when I talked to authors, they use a lot of different tools. Some authors will be like, well, I think about the movie that I just watched, and then I get a picture in my head of that actor or actress, and then I write the voice to match that actor or actress's voice, which, if that works for you, is a fantastic way to do it.
[00:02:51] I know a lot of authors will actually print up like a voice sheet where they've got all the different pictures of the characters in the movie that they're thinking of and writing to that voice sheet. Again, if that's working for you great, but I know a lot of writers that doesn't work for. They print up those pictures, they put those things up there and then they just go ahead and write their own voice anyway. And their voice sounds the same.
[00:03:11] And I think part of what that tool is doing is that tool is short cutting the process. There are things that are happening internally in you when you pick that actor to represent your character. You've listened, your brain has processed what that voice sounds like, and then you're taking that actor and you're like, oh, this is the representation. So part of what I'm trying to do for Dialoggers is break down what's happening in between you liking that voice and you picking that picture.
[00:03:46] For those of us that doesn't work for, we can take a step back from it and go okay, what's actually happening here and let's break down the process.
How does Matty design character voices?
[00:03:52] Jeff: I'm curious, Matty, what do you use when you're designing character voices? Do you have any kind of like trick or system that you use to remember character voices across the book?
[00:04:01] Matty: The thing that popped into my head is less that, but it will give me time to think about it. And that is that when one of my books was being narrated by the audiobook narrator, she had sent me a sample and one of the characters didn't sound anything like she sounded in my head. And so I realized that what I hadn't told her was that it was basically Kathy Bates, not "Misery" Kathy Bates, but you know, Kathy Bates is as I think Kathy Bates really is. You know, she was that age, she looked like Kathy Bates, she had that kind of sense of presence that Kathy Bates has. And that was really helpful for my audiobook narrator to find a voice that was more similar to the one that I had in my mind.
[00:04:46] And I've gone back and forth, and I've experimented with picking a celebrity, mainly so that I remember what they look like, and I don't describe them as having blue eyes in one place and hazel eyes in another place. But it's interesting because right now in the process of framing up Ann Kinnear Six, there's a character that, I have a pretty clear sense of all the characters except this one. And I'm casting about for what the underlying voice of the character's going to be. So I obviously don't have a failsafe method, or I probably would have figured that out by now.
[00:05:16] Jeff: Well, I love your Kathy Bates example, because that gets down to where we're talking about it and that you know, you have in your head a way that Kathy Bates sounds, and you chose Kathy Bates based on her appearance. But like describing her age and her appearance, this is what we do as authors, right? We're like, oh, this character looks and generally is of the age and of the social dynamics that I'm looking for, so I'll pick them for the sound of my character, but the look of that actor, the age of that actor, isn't actually the sound of the character.
[00:05:50] Matty: It's more of a sense of presence.
[00:05:52] Jeff: It's more their sense of presence, but we know internally in our brains, we know how that character sounds, and instead of describing how the character sounds, or like working how we're using the page to make the character sound that way, we're dependent on the physical description.
Getting past the physical description
[00:06:07] Jeff: And so the question that we're trying to answer in the Dialogger community is, how do we get past being dependent on this physical description and get into. So here's where the color wheel comes in.
[00:06:21] So Seurat did a pointillism painting, which is this really fascinating theory that I was reading about months ago and obsessing over a little bit, because that's how I roll, where he believed because of a theory of light at the time, a scientific theory of light at the time that we won't get into, he believed and tested that if he put different colored dots close enough together on a page, then when you moved away from those dots, they would mesh together in your eyesight and form a particular color. So he did like three different colored browns and a blue. If you move back, that actually looked purple to your eye. And so for him, it was about like, oh, I can paint with dots and manipulate how the eye sees things in order to create a specific image in a viewer of his paintings' mind.
[00:07:17] And so, inspired by that idea and playing with that idea, part of what we've done in the community is we've broken character voice down into four things. So if you've got four dots to make up your character, you're going to put four dots on the page to make up your character, and when the reader steps back and reads the work, those four dots are going to meld into the image of the character. Is that making sense? I don't know if this illustration makes sense. Makes sense in my head.
[00:07:45] So the four dots are going to meld into the image of your character. Those four dots that we're looking at are the words the character uses, meaning the topics the character chooses to discuss, and the language the character chooses to use.
First dot: The words they are using
[00:07:59] Jeff: So if you want a narcissistic character, the character needs to be talking about themself. If you want an altruistic character, the character's always talking about whatever cause they're passionate about, right? Like the topics the character's choosing to talk about is driving how we perceive the character.
[00:08:15] And then, when we talk about the words the character's using, we're talking about like educated words or simpler words. Does the character use big words or minuscule words? What's the character using when they speak, making the choice. So that's that first dot you're going to put on there, what kind of words are they using? Are they using colloquialisms? Do they not use colloquialisms? What kind of topics are they choosing to talk about? That's that first dot.
The second dot: Body language
[00:08:38] Jeff: The second dot you're going to put to form the image of this character is the body language. How does the character take up space in the world? Are they constantly crossing their arms with tight body language to demonstrate that they don't want to be noticed? Do they speak with their hands, are they gregarious to illustrate that they're trying to engage the room and draw attention to themselves? Are their hands in their pockets all the time? Again, trying to make themselves smaller. Do they look down a lot, in order to draw attention away from themselves or do they make eye contact all the time, in order to engage and draw people in, right? Are they looking up to show that they're thoughtful a lot that they're thinking about things? What is that body language you're using for the character, especially in the dialogue tags, when you're indicating the body language they're using? Are they playing with things all the time to show that they're kind of a fidgeter and have that like nervous energy? What are they doing?
[00:09:31] So words, body language.
Third dot: Cadence
[00:09:34] Jeff: That third dot you're going to use to form the painting of your character, combining these different colored dots together to make that color of your character that the reader is going to see, the third dot is cadence. And by cadence, we used the word cadence because it has that inference of musicality, and we're really talking about the musicality of your character's voice. So with cadence, we're talking about the length of the sentences, the punctuation that's used, the amount of sentences spoken at a time.
[00:10:04] So for example, an uncertain character, a character that doesn't have a lot of self-confidence, may speak in short sentences with periods to end their participating in the conversations quickly. A rambly character that talks a lot, may speak in a lot of sentences, separated by commas, so that those sentences stretch out and go on and on.
[00:10:25] So we're manipulating that dot to communicate how the character engages with the world, with the musicality or the cadence of the sentences they use. One sentence versus three sentences at a time, periods versus question marks, so that they seem uncertain about everything, and that they're trying to invite people into dialogue. Or those like rambly commas that just keep going, that don't seem to ever stop, that repeat themselves a little bit in one long run-on sentence, allows us to change that color of our character as it comes out on the page.
Fourth dot: Pacing
[00:10:59] Jeff: And then the last thing is pacing, and pacing has to do with how they engage with the other characters around them. Are they talking first? Are they talking last? Are they jumping in? Are they pulling out? What does that look like?
[00:11:09] And that all stems from your character's personality, right? If your character is a leader and a commanding character, they're not going to speak first. They're going to listen to everybody else talk, and then they're going to give the final word in every conversation, that determines how things go. If your character is more a manipulator, we're going to find them jumping in all the time in conversation, whenever there's an open spot and there's open air, they're going to jump into kind of assert their opinion. If your character is a shy person, they're going to avoid talking until they're called on, right? This is all pacing and has to do with like the character's relationship with another. So we got our four dots.
[00:11:42] Matty: Tell me if you're about to address this question, but early on, because I think I heard an early thought about this color wheel concept. And at the time, the focus was pairing of characters. So the examples I heard you talking about were, if you have two characters and you're trying to create a comedic situation, then you pair them and up close, each of them is this way, and then you step back and you get a different effect, which is pretty cool.
[00:12:12] What I'm wondering now is that if each of the points is one of those four components or each of the points is a character, it's starting to sound very complicated.
[00:12:21] Jeff: Yeah, and it doesn't have to be, so what we're going to do is keep backing up. So we got to look at the individual character first, and then we can back up again and look at the whole cast.
Having limitless voice options for a character
[00:12:30] Jeff: What I tell writers that I'm editing with now is, the goal of breaking down the character voice into those four components is to give you limitless options in voice. So that you don't have to be like, oh, I want this character to sound like Kathy Bates because she sounds like an old woman, but to be like, okay, I want this character to have the confidence of Kathy Bates and when I hear confidence, I hear them just speaking in one sentence at a time with a period at the end, where they're going to say the thing they want to say and say it. They're also going to listen a lot, so their pacing is going to be, they're only going to say something when they actually have something to say. And maybe I can play with their body language a little bit so that they have more confident body positions.
[00:13:14] Once you have that defined for the character, you don't have to touch it again. And when you're going to write that character, if I'm writing a paragraph and a half to that character, it better be a big emotional moment where that character is moving out of their character voice to make a point, right? But most of the time, this character is going to enter the conversation when they have something really to say, otherwise I'm just going to be describing their body language and they're going to speak in one sentence. And so I've taken those three little dots and I've made a blue color for my Kathy Bates character.
[00:13:44] And then let's say, okay, I want another character. And I want this character to come off as super happy and really excited about life, they’re vivacious, they love life. So I'm going to change their cadence, and I'm going to make sure I'm always giving them like two to three sentences at a time. And those sentences are going to be a little bit longer. I'm going to start to use commas. And then I'm going to make sure that their topics are always optimistic. So I don't need all four dots to paint that character. I just need to take two of those dots and put them together, and now I have a bright green color. Does that make sense? Because I've taken that like yellowish, sunshiny optimism, and then I've taken that more like light green, the colors are just an illustration, they don't actually matter, light green, rambly pace and I put them together and now I've got my blue Kathy Bates color and my green vivacious, excited color.
[00:14:37] And I know practically how to put those on the page.
[00:14:42] I'm not trying to imagine Kathy Bates every time I write that character. I know that I just need a sentence for when they speak. The sentence needs to be a little bit declaratory, and it needs to have a period. And then the other character, I know two to three sentences with commas, rambly. Now I have two very different voices and I don't have to go to my audio person or future actors and say, hey, this character is supposed to sound this way because they can see it on the page. Just reading the character's voice is going to make it sound different.
[00:15:12] And when you have your character voices separated out that way, so they all sound different, what you can start to do is stop using the he said, she saids that we all hate because the reader will be able to tell when your character is speaking. When there's two to three sentences, they're all separated by commas versus my blue Kathy Bates color, that's that one sentence with a period. We know which of those characters they are, because they physically look different on the page and we're taking the tools that we already use in real life and we're translating them into our brains.
[00:15:44] So that's defining the individual character voices, which is super important before we start talking about a cast. So before we move to the cast and back up another level, we're starting to talk about these different types of components of character voices as like Legos. You can use a two block Lego or a three block Lego or a four block Lego that's squared to build whatever it is you want to build.
[00:16:08] And so like you're saying, there's endless options for character voices. You can design as many characters as you want. The question is taking your components and be like, okay, which of these feel strongest to me for this character that I'm imagining? Visualizing your character speaking. When you visualize them speaking, going like, all right, how do they sound? What words are they using? What's their cadence? When are they talking? How are they holding space in the world? How are they moving around in the world? And then getting two or three of those, or even just one or two of them that are really strong for that character. And then being like, okay, I know that when I write this character, I have to write their voice in this way. Or when I go back to edit this character, I have to edit that voice in this way. Does that make sense?
[00:16:53] Matty: It does.
Don't plan modulation. Let it happen.
[00:16:53] Matty: And I think that the part for the pointillism analogy works especially well is this idea of being close and then stepping back. And the way I can imagine that working out at the character level is that you've taken the four components that make up the Kathy Bates like character and they may be a light blue, dark blue, I don't know. But stepping back, you see them as dark blue, let's say. But at some point, the Kathy Bates character is thrown into a situation that's unfamiliar to her or makes her angry or whatever it is, and then you could insert a different color into one of those points so that it stands out from the rest of the painting you've done of the character.
[00:17:33] Jeff: And that's great. We call that in the Dialogue Doctor community, modulation. So as the internal emotional state of the character changes, their voice is going to modulate.
[00:17:45] The Kathy Bates character will never go from blue to green, but like you're saying, she'll go from blue to dark blue, right? And thinking about how that looks, maybe that we add two sentences instead of one. Like I said earlier, if she's going to speak in a paragraph, there needs to be a reason for it. It's that emotional state transition that is that reason that modulates that voice.
[00:18:08] I encourage authors just to say, because this does start to feel complicated and overwhelming, I encourage authors not to plan modulation, but just let it happen as you write. Because as you empathize with your characters, if you know their voice, you know how you're writing them, there's going to be a moment in the conversation where they break out of what your norm for them is. And then that's natural modulation, and then I say, now go write that down. Go write down somewhere like, oh, this is how she modulates when she feels this way. When she's feeling wounded, maybe she stops speaking in sentences altogether, and she just uses one or two words.
We are wired to interpret speech and modulation
[00:19:19] Jeff: Here's the great thing. Our brains, as humans, are wired to interpret how people speak and the modulations in their voice, how those modulations change, to interpret emotional state. So we're constantly interpreting how people feel by listening to them talk and watching their body language. That's part of what we do.
[00:19:38] So when your reader comes to the page and they're imagining what you've put on the page, when your Kathy Bates character goes from blue to dark blue, you don't have to tell them that Kathy is sad. They will feel it in the change of the way Kathy's cadence sounds because that's what their brains are wired to do anyway.
[00:19:59] So what we're doing is we're breaking down what happens in reality, the reason that we're drawn to these actor pictures, and we're saying like, okay, let's define how that actually looks on the page. So that, by defining how that looks on the page, we can have more power and control over our characters, and we can escape mono mouth in this way. And then when we get to the cast of characters, that actually becomes really fun, because then we can start creating kind of emotional states for our books. Yeah.
[00:20:26] Matty: So I had one more character-specific question before we move on to the cast, and that is that in a couple of examples you've given, like Kathy Bates being dark blue and then the effervescent optimist being green or whatever, it totally makes sense to me. Like it just intuitively it makes sense to me.
Character voice building-blocks
[00:20:40] Matty: Is there actually some sort of actual color wheel where you're saying a character that has this type of language-use, topics, body language, cadence, pacing, think of them as orange, or think of them as gray?
[00:20:55] Jeff: We are building it now.
[00:20:57] Matty: Yeah, ok.
[00:20:57] Jeff: So what we're doing is, we're building the Legos. So when I talk to writers I'm working with, I'm editing their work, I'm always like, okay, these characters all kind of sound the same. And usually a writer doesn't need to be told that. They come to me, they're like, all my characters sound the same. I'm like, okay. So what's the personality of this character? How do you want this character to feel? When the reader reads this character, they'll be like, oh, they're shy.
[00:21:21] So shy is one quality of a character. You can get shy. You don't need all four things to get shy, right? You don't need all four dots. You can just use two, right? Like cadence, a few words, one sentence at a time, one or two sentences at a time, like small sentences or a few at a time, because they don't want to talk. Pacing. Don't let them talk very often. And then if you want to throw in some body language, like body language that makes them feel small, hands in pockets, looking down, arms crossed, now you have a shy character, right?
[00:21:55] Let's say that you want a shy character who is also a narcissist. So narcissists, we know will talk about themselves when the topic comes up. And they're not afraid to brag about themselves as well. So if you have a character who has a pacing of a shy character and the body language of a shy character, but when they do talk, they're constantly complimenting themselves, the words that they're choosing to use are about themselves. And maybe you say like, well, the cadence of a narcissist is someone who, when they get the chance, makes big statements about themselves, or maybe a sentence about themselves. Like, just one sentence at a time, but maybe we're going to give them a couple more words, instead of the three or four words, maybe they have a complex sentence about themselves. Now you have a narcissistic shy person.
[00:22:43] So you can start to take these Legos and put them together to create this different color of a person.
[00:22:48] Because we said Kathy Bates has this confidence and we said confidence would be in these declaratory statements. And then Kathy Bates tends to come off as like the wise elder. So that's the wise elder is a pacing issue, right? She's going to listen a lot, and then insert her wisdom after she's listened. Her cadence is going to include questions, because the wise elder's always asking questions. So you can see how we start to put these Legos together naturally to form the picture that is Kathy Bates.
[00:23:18] So when we talk about the color of a character, we haven't sat down and defined it yet, but we're working on it. It's one of those things of Hey, here's a kind of a cheat guide to use, to figure out, oh, you want a character that's super excitable. A character that's super excitable is going to jump in pacing a lot. So they're going to jump into the conversation, especially when the topic is something they want to talk about, their pacing is going to be like, all talking all the time. And they're probably going to have these explosive sentences that are a lot of words all at once in one sentence that kind of like ramble on and a comma, like we were talking about with that green character.
[00:23:56] Or another character I always hear people talk about it as oh, I have a lone wolf. I have a lone wolf who's snarky and who makes funny jokes all the time, kind of to themselves. So those are three different Lego pieces we're using to build that character. The snarky character, they're going to choose words and topics, they're going to talk about what's going on without directly addressing it. That's what snark is. It's commenting on what's happening without directly addressing the people around you. So that's a words thing, right? Like you're choosing specific topics and language that the character talks about.
[00:24:33] It can also be a pacing thing where you're waiting for something to happen before the character talks. Now, the lone wolf issue is also a pacing issue, because lone wolves don't talk to other people a lot, right? Like they're the strong, silent type character. But you can start to see how we're taking these Legos and we're piecing them together. You could also have a lone wolf that's super excitable. So then the pacing is going to be the same, but you're going to change the cadence a little bit.
[00:24:59] And again, I'm just shifting the color of dots that I'm putting on the page for my character. And that brings out a different color for the reader to enjoy. The reader isn't going to see the individual dots. They're just going to see the color of the character. And that's what we're going for is like, oh, as an author, if I can latch onto one or two dot colors for each character, then I can really start to diversify my cast and all my cast will sound different from one another.
[00:25:27] Matty: Which then leads to cast.
Emotionality of the story is a chain
[00:25:29] Jeff: Yeah. So part of what the reader comes to your book for, like when we talk about diversifying your cast's voices and why that's important, part of what the reader's coming here for is an emotional journey. And the emotional journey that your reader perceives comes from the interaction between the characters. So it is the friction between the characters metaphorically rubbing up against each other that gives different emotional feels. When two characters fight, we get a certain feel. When two characters fall in love and they have like a connection moment, we get a certain feel.
[00:26:07] And so what we're looking for when we talk about how do we create this emotional journey is, we're taking these characters on this step wise process of interaction. So if you think of each scene as a character interacting, characters interacting with each other, and then your story is a chain of all of those scenes, of these inner character interactions going all the way through, each of those interactions has a feeling to it. And then the whole chain develops a feeling.
[00:26:35] So if you really want an easy way to perceive this, Vonnegut gave a talk on story structure that's on YouTube. It's really great, it was part of his thesis, where he draws a graph and he's got positive emotions at the top negative emotions at the bottom, beats of the story along the side. And he's like, hey, tragedies start high and go low. And feel-good stories start low and go high. And he's like, you know, Man in the Well, starts high, loses everything and comes back up high. He's describing the emotionality of the story and to build the emotionality of that story, we're just linking a chain together.
[00:27:09] So in each link of the chain, we're going to have cast members that we're putting together. And let's say we want those cast members to fight. The Guardians of the Galaxy fight all the time, and it's hysterical. When they're arguing with each other, it's really funny and we love it. They have some very vibrant personalities in that group. There's Rocket, who is the snarky loner, who's forced into the group, but doesn't want to be there. There's Groot, there's the kindhearted, compassionate altruist who doesn't speak much. There's Drax, the intense narcissist, who is also oblivious to language and the things going on around him.
[00:27:47] But you can hear me describing the different dots of their personality as I'm talking about each character. I'm not getting down into like how Drax sounds, but you can feel like, oh, the narcissist, he talks about himself all the time and his own desires and goals who doesn't understand context. We're talking about the words he uses. He takes everything literally, so he's constantly questioning how things are literal. And he speaks in declaratory statements. So we've got these differently colored characters. When we put those different colored characters together in an argument or in a fight, it becomes humorous.
[00:28:22] But if you have the same fight and you remove some of those characters, and let's say we move to the "Endgame" movie, where we have a same fight, but we've pulled out Rocket and we've pulled out Groot and we've put in Spider-Man and we've put in Iron Man, Dr. Strange, who are all different colored characters, now we have a very different feeling from the conversation and it's much more confrontational. And there seems to be some stakes to it.
[00:28:49] And it still has a little bit of humor because you still have that humorous colored character in Drax thrown in there, and you still have the Star-Lord character who is the kind of falsely confident leader who also has the heart of gold. So if we're going to talk about like how he sounds, the falsely confident leader, in his pacing, he always tries to speak first. In his topics, he's always trying to put plans together, even when he doesn't have one. So he's always talking about his plans and he's always jumping into the conversation as soon as he can. He's always trying to take the microphone from everybody else. But he also has a heart of gold, so in his topics, he's quick to relent and apologize. And in his cadence, he never wants to turn over control of the conversation, so he has sentences that are separated by commas and semicolons because he doesn't want them to end. So he's constantly adding, he's going to use a lot of ands, right? So we have this character who also brings in some comedy to it, but then you have these serious characters on top of it, and all of a sudden, the scene looks very different and feels very different to the reader.
[00:29:53] So as we start to think about our scene construction, and we start to think about okay, if we're going to back up again and use the pointillism illustration of using different colors to create a specific feeling, as we start to think about our scene construction, we can start thinking about alright, what characters can I put in this scene to create this feeling? I want my story to feel like a tragedy. So I'm not going to put in a scene, a critical scene where I really want to rip the heart out of the reader, I can't use comedic characters. If I know my characters and how they feel, and I started thinking about okay, what's the friction, what's the energy created between these characters, when I put them in the scene together, I can't write a tragedy with those characters.
Choose the appropriate characters for the type of scene emotion
[00:30:35] Jeff: So if you're writing a tragedy, you need characters that are going to collide with each other and create angst and create worry. So asking about your character voices, like if I put these two character voices in a scene together, do they create worry? So for Romeo and Juliet, for example, we take Romeo and we put him in a scene. He's an optimistic dreamer, right? If we put him in a scene with Juliet, another optimistic dreamer, the feeling of the scene heads upwards because they're both optimistic dreamers. If you're staying true to their voice, it doesn't matter what kind of conversation they have, it's getting in this, like everything's going to be great.
[00:31:14] So we need to put Romeo in scenes with realists and pessimists. So an optimistic dreamer focuses their topics on the future. They're always talking about the future. And an optimistic dreamer in his pacing, tends to not pay attention to what other people are saying necessarily, but selecting topics that they want to follow up on. So you can tell the optimistic dreamer or oh, it's raining outside and it's cold. It's going to be a terrible day for a picnic. And the optimistic dreamer is going to be like, but what a picnic, right? Like it's picking up on the parts that they want in that pacing and moving forward. So you put two optimistic dreamers in a scene, and you just build this energy of positivity.
[00:31:55] But if you could take one optimistic dreamer and then throw them in with a pessimist who is constantly waiting for the optimistic dreamer to talk in their pacing, and then inserting the negative after the optimistic dreamer gives the positive, and then the topics they're choosing are negative. So they're waiting for someone else to talk and then commenting on what's been said, that's pacing. And then in their topics, the topics are always negative and they're always pointing out the downside. Now you've got a scene that's going to go downhill, and it's going to give them a negative feeling. And that's how you create a tragedy, is you have more scenes with optimistic dreamer paired with pessimists, where the pessimists win the conflict, as opposed to optimistic dreamer.
[00:32:39] So if you're thinking about the tone, what you want, it's going back to the illustration. You want to paint a picture of a Sunday in a park, which is what a Seurat's great pictures. You want to paint a picture of Sunday in the park, think about the different color dots you need to give that feeling of calm and peacefulness, to create that image. And then you want to put those characters in scenes together, to drive that calm feeling of that scene.
Comedic relief makes the tragedy even clearer
[00:33:08] Matty: The other thing that makes me think of is, I jump to interior decorating. And the idea that if you have a monochromatic room, let's call that the tragedy, and you put one orange pillow in it, then it doesn't suddenly make the room colorful. It highlights the monochromatic-ness of the room, in the same way that, I think I'm remembering this correctly, Juliet's nurse in "Romeo and Juliet" is obviously there for comedic relief, kind of like the orange pillow. You put the orange pillow in there and it makes the rest of the room, the monochromatic-ness clearer in the same way that that comedic moment with the nurse makes the overall tragedy of the story more clear.
[00:33:53] Jeff: Yeah. And if you want to write a scene that's going to rip the heart out of your reader and make them sad, don't put the pillow on the couch. Don't bring that bright orange pillow into the monochromatic room. Don't put that character there, because that character's voice is going to mess up the feeling that you want in that scene.
[00:34:11] Matty: it's interesting because we've talked about the character, we've talked about the cast, and then there's even larger story that if you step back far enough to see "Romeo and Juliet" as a story, it's going to be the tragic color and you're going to lose the pop of orange that the nurse provided. It's only as you step close to it, like when you're in that scene, then you're experiencing that orange, and when you step way back to see the whole story, the overall sense of the story, no one would ever think back to "Romeo and Juliet" and think that it's a comedy because of the nurse scenes.
Plot points vs character voice
[00:34:40] Jeff: Yeah, and I think, part of what I'm doing sneakily behind the scenes, I think a lot of times when we approach our story, we think about okay, what are the plot points? What are the beats? I know I did, when I first started writing, I was obsessed to "Save the Cat." Like I got to have the right beats at the right time at the right moments. It's great, it's fantastic. I'm not questioning whether or not you should use that, but I don't think that works for every author.
[00:35:06] I meet a lot of authors who's like, that doesn't fuel my writing. That doesn't make me excited. So trying to help those authors find a different way to be excited, rather than asking about the plot points, let's ask about how the scene makes somebody feel, and then giving you tools to create that feeling. Because plot points can create that feeling, but the plot point itself is not what the reader feels. The reader feels the engagement of the characters. So if you're a pantser and you want to ride by the seat of your pants and you don't want to define a plot point, man, I need a scene here that feels this way, then another tool you can use to create that feeling is deciding what characters you want in that room, the room being the scene that you're writing. But before you can get to what characters you want in that room; you have to know how to build a character voice.
[00:35:52] So it's that we have to start small and talk about okay, how do we create a specific color of character? And then we can start talking about how do I combine those colors to give a certain feel or like a certain aura of the scene?
[00:36:03] Matty: I think there's the whole, you know, you talk about mono mouth and monochromatic-ness of a story or a scene or a character would be similarly, I think, a red flag. A red flag!
[00:36:13] Jeff: And my theory, my unproven theory, is that the reason we have specific plot structures for genres is not because the reader loves that plot, but because the reader loves how that plot makes them feel. So my theory is that we can start playing with the plot structure if we can create those feelings with the right characters in the right scenes. So it can free you up from plot structure because you can still give the reader that feeling by messing with the characters that you're bringing around.
[00:36:46] Because the goal is to like, give us as authors the tools we need to do the job. I want you to have the tools you need in order to build the house that you want to build. And so if you need a specific miter saw, let's make sure you have that saw. So one of those tools is knowing how to build a character voice, right? These are the four components. You use this tool however it is helpful to you, how to create the emotional texture of a scene, has to do with the characters that are talking to each other in that scene.
[00:37:18] You use this tool now to go and play and design whatever beautiful piece of artwork you want to design.
[00:37:25] Matty: So if a writer wants to experiment with this and I'm thinking back to Georges Seurat working on his painting, and I imagine that he stepped close to it with his tiny brush and he put on the one dot of color and then he stepped back and he saw what that did. I imagine he did many experiments with this before he launched into the giant paintings for which he became famous. Is there any analogous, actual exercise that a writer should go through? Would the analogy be, you write the character and then in some way you step back to see how that character's behaving among the other characters that they're next to?
[00:38:00] Jeff: Yeah, so I want you to learn in a productive way. I started off writing short stories. I wrote a short story every night for a year when I first started writing. And a lot of those short stories turned into my books. They became books later. So we want to write in a way that's not going to be wasted words. Because who has time to sit around and you know, exercise short stories? So let's exercise in a productive manner.
[00:38:23] That being said, you're probably working on a book. You probably have some characters in your mind for that book. The first exercise I would do to learn to write character voice is I would take those characters and I would put them in different settings and write a short story about that setting. Write 500 words on your character ordering coffee, and then take the character you just wrote, pull them out, and put your next character in. 500 words on that character ordering coffee. So you're starting to get the comparing and contrasting of how character voices change, how those colors look different when you put them in small situations. And ideally, you're going to come up with something that you're like, oh, I might actually be able to use this in a book.
[00:39:09] But use the characters that you're currently trying to write. You know, a character, is in a fender bender, and has to get out of the car and talk to the other person in the car. Now substitute the characters out or trade them and see how it sounds there. And thinking about what are the components of this, the one, two or three components of this character's voice that I need to focus on while I'm writing, to make sure I'm staying in character voice.
[00:39:32] Once you start to get the feel of like how to write a character voice, and it'll happen faster than you think, once you start getting the feel of how to write a character voice, then you can start getting the feel of okay, when I put these two characters together, what does it feel like? And then you're going to be like, okay, I'm going to put these two characters together in a cafe talking about what they have to do tomorrow. And now you've got your two character voices down, because you know the points you're using to build those character voices, and now, you know how that value can start to feel, how that putting those characters together in a cafe feels.
[00:40:06] And then write the same scene but take one of those characters out and substitute another one. And you'll notice the feeling starts to change. You're like, oh, if I put these characters in, it's funny. If I put these characters in, it's serious. If I put these characters in, it's boring. Never have these two characters together. So it's that kind of piecing them together that way and just taking them in and out and playing with them until you start to get a feel for it.
[00:40:27] And use characters that you're currently writing for your book. Use characters that you're currently trying to write. I don't recommend doing this as a free-form exercise of just like, I'm going to play with character voices because, I don't know, maybe if you have the time to do it, but I find the hardest thing for me is finding time to write. So I don't want to waste one minute of that time. If I'm playing with characters that I'm actually using in a book, it makes it easier for me. I feel justified. I could justify the time spent.
[00:40:55] Matty: Jeff, I will use that as an opportunity to just say, I appreciate you so much allocating the time to talk on the podcast again.
[00:41:02] Jeff: Anytime, this is great!
[00:41:04] Matty: Always fun to talk with you and love the advice, the practical advice you're giving to let people use their words as productively as possible. So please let the listeners and the viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:41:15] Jeff: Yeah. So just come to DialogueDoctor.com. That's where you'll find me hanging out, where you'll find an entrance to the group, you can click on that. If you want to come, we do writing prompts toward this kind of practicing character voices. We do a writing prompt every Tuesday and then an editing prompt every Friday. You can come join us in the Dialogger community through Patreon. It's Patreon.com/JeffElkins. You can jump into our Dialogger, it's a dollar a month, and you can start practicing with us, trying to get that practice in. But yeah, and everything else you'll find at DialogueDoctor.com. There's so much over there, I'm not going to take the time to describe it. Just go look.
[00:41:53] Matty: We will send people there. So, Jeff, thanks again. That was so much fun.
[00:41:56] Jeff: Yeah. Thanks Matty.
[00:00:06] Jeff: I'm good. Hi everybody. It's so nice to be back on.
[00:00:10] Matty: It is always nice to have you back and as the listeners and viewers will hear in a moment, you are a multi-time guest, but just to give our listeners a little reminder of you, Jeff Elkins is a novelist, ghost writer, and editor with more than 10 novels on the market. During the day he leads the writing team for a company that simulates difficult conversations for professionals to practice. He also helps authors improve their dialogue to engage readers more fully through one-on-one consulting and through his podcast, "The Dialogue Doctor." And I'll add to that, now the Dialogue Doctor Dialoggers Slack community, if you are a patron. And there'll be a link in the show notes to anyone who would like to join that community by becoming a patron of Jeff's.
[00:00:47] And Jeff has been previously on Episode 116, "Creating Community, Content, and Creative Energy." 111, which was "Using Engines, Anchors, and Hazards to Define Character Voice." 48, which was "Building Great Protagonist and Antagonist Voices." And then he was part of the all-star cast of Episode 82, "Perspectives on Writer's Block."
[00:01:08] And before we got started, I said to Jeff that normally, I come into these interviews with lots of notes and bullet points about things to talk about. But today, I'm just going to say the topic and then Jeff and I are going to have a conversation about it. And so the topic is Color Wheel and Characterization. And I'm a sucker for any time a writer finds lessons that apply to the writing craft in a seemingly very different area, like in this case, the art world.
[00:01:35] So Jeff, with that introduction, let the listeners and viewers know what we mean by color wheel and characterizations.
[00:01:42] Jeff: Yeah, well so, that's very funny. Matty, I've been long enough, that you can just give me a word and wind me up and let me go.
How to best define and build character voices
[00:01:52] Jeff: So in the Dialogger community for the Dialogue Doctor, we have been thinking a lot over the past year and a half of how to best define and build character voices. Because one of the overarching problems that I find authors have is that all of their characters sound the same. So all their characters sound like them.
[00:02:11] And the question is, how do you get away from that? How do you break out of that? How do you break out of it in a way that is easy to use and controllable for you? And then how do we also think about the philosophy behind character voice in order to empower you to better consider how you're building and then writing and then editing character voices.
[00:02:32] So all of those questions kind of swirl around. And when I talked to authors, they use a lot of different tools. Some authors will be like, well, I think about the movie that I just watched, and then I get a picture in my head of that actor or actress, and then I write the voice to match that actor or actress's voice, which, if that works for you, is a fantastic way to do it.
[00:02:51] I know a lot of authors will actually print up like a voice sheet where they've got all the different pictures of the characters in the movie that they're thinking of and writing to that voice sheet. Again, if that's working for you great, but I know a lot of writers that doesn't work for. They print up those pictures, they put those things up there and then they just go ahead and write their own voice anyway. And their voice sounds the same.
[00:03:11] And I think part of what that tool is doing is that tool is short cutting the process. There are things that are happening internally in you when you pick that actor to represent your character. You've listened, your brain has processed what that voice sounds like, and then you're taking that actor and you're like, oh, this is the representation. So part of what I'm trying to do for Dialoggers is break down what's happening in between you liking that voice and you picking that picture.
[00:03:46] For those of us that doesn't work for, we can take a step back from it and go okay, what's actually happening here and let's break down the process.
How does Matty design character voices?
[00:03:52] Jeff: I'm curious, Matty, what do you use when you're designing character voices? Do you have any kind of like trick or system that you use to remember character voices across the book?
[00:04:01] Matty: The thing that popped into my head is less that, but it will give me time to think about it. And that is that when one of my books was being narrated by the audiobook narrator, she had sent me a sample and one of the characters didn't sound anything like she sounded in my head. And so I realized that what I hadn't told her was that it was basically Kathy Bates, not "Misery" Kathy Bates, but you know, Kathy Bates is as I think Kathy Bates really is. You know, she was that age, she looked like Kathy Bates, she had that kind of sense of presence that Kathy Bates has. And that was really helpful for my audiobook narrator to find a voice that was more similar to the one that I had in my mind.
[00:04:46] And I've gone back and forth, and I've experimented with picking a celebrity, mainly so that I remember what they look like, and I don't describe them as having blue eyes in one place and hazel eyes in another place. But it's interesting because right now in the process of framing up Ann Kinnear Six, there's a character that, I have a pretty clear sense of all the characters except this one. And I'm casting about for what the underlying voice of the character's going to be. So I obviously don't have a failsafe method, or I probably would have figured that out by now.
[00:05:16] Jeff: Well, I love your Kathy Bates example, because that gets down to where we're talking about it and that you know, you have in your head a way that Kathy Bates sounds, and you chose Kathy Bates based on her appearance. But like describing her age and her appearance, this is what we do as authors, right? We're like, oh, this character looks and generally is of the age and of the social dynamics that I'm looking for, so I'll pick them for the sound of my character, but the look of that actor, the age of that actor, isn't actually the sound of the character.
[00:05:50] Matty: It's more of a sense of presence.
[00:05:52] Jeff: It's more their sense of presence, but we know internally in our brains, we know how that character sounds, and instead of describing how the character sounds, or like working how we're using the page to make the character sound that way, we're dependent on the physical description.
Getting past the physical description
[00:06:07] Jeff: And so the question that we're trying to answer in the Dialogger community is, how do we get past being dependent on this physical description and get into. So here's where the color wheel comes in.
[00:06:21] So Seurat did a pointillism painting, which is this really fascinating theory that I was reading about months ago and obsessing over a little bit, because that's how I roll, where he believed because of a theory of light at the time, a scientific theory of light at the time that we won't get into, he believed and tested that if he put different colored dots close enough together on a page, then when you moved away from those dots, they would mesh together in your eyesight and form a particular color. So he did like three different colored browns and a blue. If you move back, that actually looked purple to your eye. And so for him, it was about like, oh, I can paint with dots and manipulate how the eye sees things in order to create a specific image in a viewer of his paintings' mind.
[00:07:17] And so, inspired by that idea and playing with that idea, part of what we've done in the community is we've broken character voice down into four things. So if you've got four dots to make up your character, you're going to put four dots on the page to make up your character, and when the reader steps back and reads the work, those four dots are going to meld into the image of the character. Is that making sense? I don't know if this illustration makes sense. Makes sense in my head.
[00:07:45] So the four dots are going to meld into the image of your character. Those four dots that we're looking at are the words the character uses, meaning the topics the character chooses to discuss, and the language the character chooses to use.
First dot: The words they are using
[00:07:59] Jeff: So if you want a narcissistic character, the character needs to be talking about themself. If you want an altruistic character, the character's always talking about whatever cause they're passionate about, right? Like the topics the character's choosing to talk about is driving how we perceive the character.
[00:08:15] And then, when we talk about the words the character's using, we're talking about like educated words or simpler words. Does the character use big words or minuscule words? What's the character using when they speak, making the choice. So that's that first dot you're going to put on there, what kind of words are they using? Are they using colloquialisms? Do they not use colloquialisms? What kind of topics are they choosing to talk about? That's that first dot.
The second dot: Body language
[00:08:38] Jeff: The second dot you're going to put to form the image of this character is the body language. How does the character take up space in the world? Are they constantly crossing their arms with tight body language to demonstrate that they don't want to be noticed? Do they speak with their hands, are they gregarious to illustrate that they're trying to engage the room and draw attention to themselves? Are their hands in their pockets all the time? Again, trying to make themselves smaller. Do they look down a lot, in order to draw attention away from themselves or do they make eye contact all the time, in order to engage and draw people in, right? Are they looking up to show that they're thoughtful a lot that they're thinking about things? What is that body language you're using for the character, especially in the dialogue tags, when you're indicating the body language they're using? Are they playing with things all the time to show that they're kind of a fidgeter and have that like nervous energy? What are they doing?
[00:09:31] So words, body language.
Third dot: Cadence
[00:09:34] Jeff: That third dot you're going to use to form the painting of your character, combining these different colored dots together to make that color of your character that the reader is going to see, the third dot is cadence. And by cadence, we used the word cadence because it has that inference of musicality, and we're really talking about the musicality of your character's voice. So with cadence, we're talking about the length of the sentences, the punctuation that's used, the amount of sentences spoken at a time.
[00:10:04] So for example, an uncertain character, a character that doesn't have a lot of self-confidence, may speak in short sentences with periods to end their participating in the conversations quickly. A rambly character that talks a lot, may speak in a lot of sentences, separated by commas, so that those sentences stretch out and go on and on.
[00:10:25] So we're manipulating that dot to communicate how the character engages with the world, with the musicality or the cadence of the sentences they use. One sentence versus three sentences at a time, periods versus question marks, so that they seem uncertain about everything, and that they're trying to invite people into dialogue. Or those like rambly commas that just keep going, that don't seem to ever stop, that repeat themselves a little bit in one long run-on sentence, allows us to change that color of our character as it comes out on the page.
Fourth dot: Pacing
[00:10:59] Jeff: And then the last thing is pacing, and pacing has to do with how they engage with the other characters around them. Are they talking first? Are they talking last? Are they jumping in? Are they pulling out? What does that look like?
[00:11:09] And that all stems from your character's personality, right? If your character is a leader and a commanding character, they're not going to speak first. They're going to listen to everybody else talk, and then they're going to give the final word in every conversation, that determines how things go. If your character is more a manipulator, we're going to find them jumping in all the time in conversation, whenever there's an open spot and there's open air, they're going to jump into kind of assert their opinion. If your character is a shy person, they're going to avoid talking until they're called on, right? This is all pacing and has to do with like the character's relationship with another. So we got our four dots.
[00:11:42] Matty: Tell me if you're about to address this question, but early on, because I think I heard an early thought about this color wheel concept. And at the time, the focus was pairing of characters. So the examples I heard you talking about were, if you have two characters and you're trying to create a comedic situation, then you pair them and up close, each of them is this way, and then you step back and you get a different effect, which is pretty cool.
[00:12:12] What I'm wondering now is that if each of the points is one of those four components or each of the points is a character, it's starting to sound very complicated.
[00:12:21] Jeff: Yeah, and it doesn't have to be, so what we're going to do is keep backing up. So we got to look at the individual character first, and then we can back up again and look at the whole cast.
Having limitless voice options for a character
[00:12:30] Jeff: What I tell writers that I'm editing with now is, the goal of breaking down the character voice into those four components is to give you limitless options in voice. So that you don't have to be like, oh, I want this character to sound like Kathy Bates because she sounds like an old woman, but to be like, okay, I want this character to have the confidence of Kathy Bates and when I hear confidence, I hear them just speaking in one sentence at a time with a period at the end, where they're going to say the thing they want to say and say it. They're also going to listen a lot, so their pacing is going to be, they're only going to say something when they actually have something to say. And maybe I can play with their body language a little bit so that they have more confident body positions.
[00:13:14] Once you have that defined for the character, you don't have to touch it again. And when you're going to write that character, if I'm writing a paragraph and a half to that character, it better be a big emotional moment where that character is moving out of their character voice to make a point, right? But most of the time, this character is going to enter the conversation when they have something really to say, otherwise I'm just going to be describing their body language and they're going to speak in one sentence. And so I've taken those three little dots and I've made a blue color for my Kathy Bates character.
[00:13:44] And then let's say, okay, I want another character. And I want this character to come off as super happy and really excited about life, they’re vivacious, they love life. So I'm going to change their cadence, and I'm going to make sure I'm always giving them like two to three sentences at a time. And those sentences are going to be a little bit longer. I'm going to start to use commas. And then I'm going to make sure that their topics are always optimistic. So I don't need all four dots to paint that character. I just need to take two of those dots and put them together, and now I have a bright green color. Does that make sense? Because I've taken that like yellowish, sunshiny optimism, and then I've taken that more like light green, the colors are just an illustration, they don't actually matter, light green, rambly pace and I put them together and now I've got my blue Kathy Bates color and my green vivacious, excited color.
[00:14:37] And I know practically how to put those on the page.
[00:14:42] I'm not trying to imagine Kathy Bates every time I write that character. I know that I just need a sentence for when they speak. The sentence needs to be a little bit declaratory, and it needs to have a period. And then the other character, I know two to three sentences with commas, rambly. Now I have two very different voices and I don't have to go to my audio person or future actors and say, hey, this character is supposed to sound this way because they can see it on the page. Just reading the character's voice is going to make it sound different.
[00:15:12] And when you have your character voices separated out that way, so they all sound different, what you can start to do is stop using the he said, she saids that we all hate because the reader will be able to tell when your character is speaking. When there's two to three sentences, they're all separated by commas versus my blue Kathy Bates color, that's that one sentence with a period. We know which of those characters they are, because they physically look different on the page and we're taking the tools that we already use in real life and we're translating them into our brains.
[00:15:44] So that's defining the individual character voices, which is super important before we start talking about a cast. So before we move to the cast and back up another level, we're starting to talk about these different types of components of character voices as like Legos. You can use a two block Lego or a three block Lego or a four block Lego that's squared to build whatever it is you want to build.
[00:16:08] And so like you're saying, there's endless options for character voices. You can design as many characters as you want. The question is taking your components and be like, okay, which of these feel strongest to me for this character that I'm imagining? Visualizing your character speaking. When you visualize them speaking, going like, all right, how do they sound? What words are they using? What's their cadence? When are they talking? How are they holding space in the world? How are they moving around in the world? And then getting two or three of those, or even just one or two of them that are really strong for that character. And then being like, okay, I know that when I write this character, I have to write their voice in this way. Or when I go back to edit this character, I have to edit that voice in this way. Does that make sense?
[00:16:53] Matty: It does.
Don't plan modulation. Let it happen.
[00:16:53] Matty: And I think that the part for the pointillism analogy works especially well is this idea of being close and then stepping back. And the way I can imagine that working out at the character level is that you've taken the four components that make up the Kathy Bates like character and they may be a light blue, dark blue, I don't know. But stepping back, you see them as dark blue, let's say. But at some point, the Kathy Bates character is thrown into a situation that's unfamiliar to her or makes her angry or whatever it is, and then you could insert a different color into one of those points so that it stands out from the rest of the painting you've done of the character.
[00:17:33] Jeff: And that's great. We call that in the Dialogue Doctor community, modulation. So as the internal emotional state of the character changes, their voice is going to modulate.
[00:17:45] The Kathy Bates character will never go from blue to green, but like you're saying, she'll go from blue to dark blue, right? And thinking about how that looks, maybe that we add two sentences instead of one. Like I said earlier, if she's going to speak in a paragraph, there needs to be a reason for it. It's that emotional state transition that is that reason that modulates that voice.
[00:18:08] I encourage authors just to say, because this does start to feel complicated and overwhelming, I encourage authors not to plan modulation, but just let it happen as you write. Because as you empathize with your characters, if you know their voice, you know how you're writing them, there's going to be a moment in the conversation where they break out of what your norm for them is. And then that's natural modulation, and then I say, now go write that down. Go write down somewhere like, oh, this is how she modulates when she feels this way. When she's feeling wounded, maybe she stops speaking in sentences altogether, and she just uses one or two words.
We are wired to interpret speech and modulation
[00:19:19] Jeff: Here's the great thing. Our brains, as humans, are wired to interpret how people speak and the modulations in their voice, how those modulations change, to interpret emotional state. So we're constantly interpreting how people feel by listening to them talk and watching their body language. That's part of what we do.
[00:19:38] So when your reader comes to the page and they're imagining what you've put on the page, when your Kathy Bates character goes from blue to dark blue, you don't have to tell them that Kathy is sad. They will feel it in the change of the way Kathy's cadence sounds because that's what their brains are wired to do anyway.
[00:19:59] So what we're doing is we're breaking down what happens in reality, the reason that we're drawn to these actor pictures, and we're saying like, okay, let's define how that actually looks on the page. So that, by defining how that looks on the page, we can have more power and control over our characters, and we can escape mono mouth in this way. And then when we get to the cast of characters, that actually becomes really fun, because then we can start creating kind of emotional states for our books. Yeah.
[00:20:26] Matty: So I had one more character-specific question before we move on to the cast, and that is that in a couple of examples you've given, like Kathy Bates being dark blue and then the effervescent optimist being green or whatever, it totally makes sense to me. Like it just intuitively it makes sense to me.
Character voice building-blocks
[00:20:40] Matty: Is there actually some sort of actual color wheel where you're saying a character that has this type of language-use, topics, body language, cadence, pacing, think of them as orange, or think of them as gray?
[00:20:55] Jeff: We are building it now.
[00:20:57] Matty: Yeah, ok.
[00:20:57] Jeff: So what we're doing is, we're building the Legos. So when I talk to writers I'm working with, I'm editing their work, I'm always like, okay, these characters all kind of sound the same. And usually a writer doesn't need to be told that. They come to me, they're like, all my characters sound the same. I'm like, okay. So what's the personality of this character? How do you want this character to feel? When the reader reads this character, they'll be like, oh, they're shy.
[00:21:21] So shy is one quality of a character. You can get shy. You don't need all four things to get shy, right? You don't need all four dots. You can just use two, right? Like cadence, a few words, one sentence at a time, one or two sentences at a time, like small sentences or a few at a time, because they don't want to talk. Pacing. Don't let them talk very often. And then if you want to throw in some body language, like body language that makes them feel small, hands in pockets, looking down, arms crossed, now you have a shy character, right?
[00:21:55] Let's say that you want a shy character who is also a narcissist. So narcissists, we know will talk about themselves when the topic comes up. And they're not afraid to brag about themselves as well. So if you have a character who has a pacing of a shy character and the body language of a shy character, but when they do talk, they're constantly complimenting themselves, the words that they're choosing to use are about themselves. And maybe you say like, well, the cadence of a narcissist is someone who, when they get the chance, makes big statements about themselves, or maybe a sentence about themselves. Like, just one sentence at a time, but maybe we're going to give them a couple more words, instead of the three or four words, maybe they have a complex sentence about themselves. Now you have a narcissistic shy person.
[00:22:43] So you can start to take these Legos and put them together to create this different color of a person.
[00:22:48] Because we said Kathy Bates has this confidence and we said confidence would be in these declaratory statements. And then Kathy Bates tends to come off as like the wise elder. So that's the wise elder is a pacing issue, right? She's going to listen a lot, and then insert her wisdom after she's listened. Her cadence is going to include questions, because the wise elder's always asking questions. So you can see how we start to put these Legos together naturally to form the picture that is Kathy Bates.
[00:23:18] So when we talk about the color of a character, we haven't sat down and defined it yet, but we're working on it. It's one of those things of Hey, here's a kind of a cheat guide to use, to figure out, oh, you want a character that's super excitable. A character that's super excitable is going to jump in pacing a lot. So they're going to jump into the conversation, especially when the topic is something they want to talk about, their pacing is going to be like, all talking all the time. And they're probably going to have these explosive sentences that are a lot of words all at once in one sentence that kind of like ramble on and a comma, like we were talking about with that green character.
[00:23:56] Or another character I always hear people talk about it as oh, I have a lone wolf. I have a lone wolf who's snarky and who makes funny jokes all the time, kind of to themselves. So those are three different Lego pieces we're using to build that character. The snarky character, they're going to choose words and topics, they're going to talk about what's going on without directly addressing it. That's what snark is. It's commenting on what's happening without directly addressing the people around you. So that's a words thing, right? Like you're choosing specific topics and language that the character talks about.
[00:24:33] It can also be a pacing thing where you're waiting for something to happen before the character talks. Now, the lone wolf issue is also a pacing issue, because lone wolves don't talk to other people a lot, right? Like they're the strong, silent type character. But you can start to see how we're taking these Legos and we're piecing them together. You could also have a lone wolf that's super excitable. So then the pacing is going to be the same, but you're going to change the cadence a little bit.
[00:24:59] And again, I'm just shifting the color of dots that I'm putting on the page for my character. And that brings out a different color for the reader to enjoy. The reader isn't going to see the individual dots. They're just going to see the color of the character. And that's what we're going for is like, oh, as an author, if I can latch onto one or two dot colors for each character, then I can really start to diversify my cast and all my cast will sound different from one another.
[00:25:27] Matty: Which then leads to cast.
Emotionality of the story is a chain
[00:25:29] Jeff: Yeah. So part of what the reader comes to your book for, like when we talk about diversifying your cast's voices and why that's important, part of what the reader's coming here for is an emotional journey. And the emotional journey that your reader perceives comes from the interaction between the characters. So it is the friction between the characters metaphorically rubbing up against each other that gives different emotional feels. When two characters fight, we get a certain feel. When two characters fall in love and they have like a connection moment, we get a certain feel.
[00:26:07] And so what we're looking for when we talk about how do we create this emotional journey is, we're taking these characters on this step wise process of interaction. So if you think of each scene as a character interacting, characters interacting with each other, and then your story is a chain of all of those scenes, of these inner character interactions going all the way through, each of those interactions has a feeling to it. And then the whole chain develops a feeling.
[00:26:35] So if you really want an easy way to perceive this, Vonnegut gave a talk on story structure that's on YouTube. It's really great, it was part of his thesis, where he draws a graph and he's got positive emotions at the top negative emotions at the bottom, beats of the story along the side. And he's like, hey, tragedies start high and go low. And feel-good stories start low and go high. And he's like, you know, Man in the Well, starts high, loses everything and comes back up high. He's describing the emotionality of the story and to build the emotionality of that story, we're just linking a chain together.
[00:27:09] So in each link of the chain, we're going to have cast members that we're putting together. And let's say we want those cast members to fight. The Guardians of the Galaxy fight all the time, and it's hysterical. When they're arguing with each other, it's really funny and we love it. They have some very vibrant personalities in that group. There's Rocket, who is the snarky loner, who's forced into the group, but doesn't want to be there. There's Groot, there's the kindhearted, compassionate altruist who doesn't speak much. There's Drax, the intense narcissist, who is also oblivious to language and the things going on around him.
[00:27:47] But you can hear me describing the different dots of their personality as I'm talking about each character. I'm not getting down into like how Drax sounds, but you can feel like, oh, the narcissist, he talks about himself all the time and his own desires and goals who doesn't understand context. We're talking about the words he uses. He takes everything literally, so he's constantly questioning how things are literal. And he speaks in declaratory statements. So we've got these differently colored characters. When we put those different colored characters together in an argument or in a fight, it becomes humorous.
[00:28:22] But if you have the same fight and you remove some of those characters, and let's say we move to the "Endgame" movie, where we have a same fight, but we've pulled out Rocket and we've pulled out Groot and we've put in Spider-Man and we've put in Iron Man, Dr. Strange, who are all different colored characters, now we have a very different feeling from the conversation and it's much more confrontational. And there seems to be some stakes to it.
[00:28:49] And it still has a little bit of humor because you still have that humorous colored character in Drax thrown in there, and you still have the Star-Lord character who is the kind of falsely confident leader who also has the heart of gold. So if we're going to talk about like how he sounds, the falsely confident leader, in his pacing, he always tries to speak first. In his topics, he's always trying to put plans together, even when he doesn't have one. So he's always talking about his plans and he's always jumping into the conversation as soon as he can. He's always trying to take the microphone from everybody else. But he also has a heart of gold, so in his topics, he's quick to relent and apologize. And in his cadence, he never wants to turn over control of the conversation, so he has sentences that are separated by commas and semicolons because he doesn't want them to end. So he's constantly adding, he's going to use a lot of ands, right? So we have this character who also brings in some comedy to it, but then you have these serious characters on top of it, and all of a sudden, the scene looks very different and feels very different to the reader.
[00:29:53] So as we start to think about our scene construction, and we start to think about okay, if we're going to back up again and use the pointillism illustration of using different colors to create a specific feeling, as we start to think about our scene construction, we can start thinking about alright, what characters can I put in this scene to create this feeling? I want my story to feel like a tragedy. So I'm not going to put in a scene, a critical scene where I really want to rip the heart out of the reader, I can't use comedic characters. If I know my characters and how they feel, and I started thinking about okay, what's the friction, what's the energy created between these characters, when I put them in the scene together, I can't write a tragedy with those characters.
Choose the appropriate characters for the type of scene emotion
[00:30:35] Jeff: So if you're writing a tragedy, you need characters that are going to collide with each other and create angst and create worry. So asking about your character voices, like if I put these two character voices in a scene together, do they create worry? So for Romeo and Juliet, for example, we take Romeo and we put him in a scene. He's an optimistic dreamer, right? If we put him in a scene with Juliet, another optimistic dreamer, the feeling of the scene heads upwards because they're both optimistic dreamers. If you're staying true to their voice, it doesn't matter what kind of conversation they have, it's getting in this, like everything's going to be great.
[00:31:14] So we need to put Romeo in scenes with realists and pessimists. So an optimistic dreamer focuses their topics on the future. They're always talking about the future. And an optimistic dreamer in his pacing, tends to not pay attention to what other people are saying necessarily, but selecting topics that they want to follow up on. So you can tell the optimistic dreamer or oh, it's raining outside and it's cold. It's going to be a terrible day for a picnic. And the optimistic dreamer is going to be like, but what a picnic, right? Like it's picking up on the parts that they want in that pacing and moving forward. So you put two optimistic dreamers in a scene, and you just build this energy of positivity.
[00:31:55] But if you could take one optimistic dreamer and then throw them in with a pessimist who is constantly waiting for the optimistic dreamer to talk in their pacing, and then inserting the negative after the optimistic dreamer gives the positive, and then the topics they're choosing are negative. So they're waiting for someone else to talk and then commenting on what's been said, that's pacing. And then in their topics, the topics are always negative and they're always pointing out the downside. Now you've got a scene that's going to go downhill, and it's going to give them a negative feeling. And that's how you create a tragedy, is you have more scenes with optimistic dreamer paired with pessimists, where the pessimists win the conflict, as opposed to optimistic dreamer.
[00:32:39] So if you're thinking about the tone, what you want, it's going back to the illustration. You want to paint a picture of a Sunday in a park, which is what a Seurat's great pictures. You want to paint a picture of Sunday in the park, think about the different color dots you need to give that feeling of calm and peacefulness, to create that image. And then you want to put those characters in scenes together, to drive that calm feeling of that scene.
Comedic relief makes the tragedy even clearer
[00:33:08] Matty: The other thing that makes me think of is, I jump to interior decorating. And the idea that if you have a monochromatic room, let's call that the tragedy, and you put one orange pillow in it, then it doesn't suddenly make the room colorful. It highlights the monochromatic-ness of the room, in the same way that, I think I'm remembering this correctly, Juliet's nurse in "Romeo and Juliet" is obviously there for comedic relief, kind of like the orange pillow. You put the orange pillow in there and it makes the rest of the room, the monochromatic-ness clearer in the same way that that comedic moment with the nurse makes the overall tragedy of the story more clear.
[00:33:53] Jeff: Yeah. And if you want to write a scene that's going to rip the heart out of your reader and make them sad, don't put the pillow on the couch. Don't bring that bright orange pillow into the monochromatic room. Don't put that character there, because that character's voice is going to mess up the feeling that you want in that scene.
[00:34:11] Matty: it's interesting because we've talked about the character, we've talked about the cast, and then there's even larger story that if you step back far enough to see "Romeo and Juliet" as a story, it's going to be the tragic color and you're going to lose the pop of orange that the nurse provided. It's only as you step close to it, like when you're in that scene, then you're experiencing that orange, and when you step way back to see the whole story, the overall sense of the story, no one would ever think back to "Romeo and Juliet" and think that it's a comedy because of the nurse scenes.
Plot points vs character voice
[00:34:40] Jeff: Yeah, and I think, part of what I'm doing sneakily behind the scenes, I think a lot of times when we approach our story, we think about okay, what are the plot points? What are the beats? I know I did, when I first started writing, I was obsessed to "Save the Cat." Like I got to have the right beats at the right time at the right moments. It's great, it's fantastic. I'm not questioning whether or not you should use that, but I don't think that works for every author.
[00:35:06] I meet a lot of authors who's like, that doesn't fuel my writing. That doesn't make me excited. So trying to help those authors find a different way to be excited, rather than asking about the plot points, let's ask about how the scene makes somebody feel, and then giving you tools to create that feeling. Because plot points can create that feeling, but the plot point itself is not what the reader feels. The reader feels the engagement of the characters. So if you're a pantser and you want to ride by the seat of your pants and you don't want to define a plot point, man, I need a scene here that feels this way, then another tool you can use to create that feeling is deciding what characters you want in that room, the room being the scene that you're writing. But before you can get to what characters you want in that room; you have to know how to build a character voice.
[00:35:52] So it's that we have to start small and talk about okay, how do we create a specific color of character? And then we can start talking about how do I combine those colors to give a certain feel or like a certain aura of the scene?
[00:36:03] Matty: I think there's the whole, you know, you talk about mono mouth and monochromatic-ness of a story or a scene or a character would be similarly, I think, a red flag. A red flag!
[00:36:13] Jeff: And my theory, my unproven theory, is that the reason we have specific plot structures for genres is not because the reader loves that plot, but because the reader loves how that plot makes them feel. So my theory is that we can start playing with the plot structure if we can create those feelings with the right characters in the right scenes. So it can free you up from plot structure because you can still give the reader that feeling by messing with the characters that you're bringing around.
[00:36:46] Because the goal is to like, give us as authors the tools we need to do the job. I want you to have the tools you need in order to build the house that you want to build. And so if you need a specific miter saw, let's make sure you have that saw. So one of those tools is knowing how to build a character voice, right? These are the four components. You use this tool however it is helpful to you, how to create the emotional texture of a scene, has to do with the characters that are talking to each other in that scene.
[00:37:18] You use this tool now to go and play and design whatever beautiful piece of artwork you want to design.
[00:37:25] Matty: So if a writer wants to experiment with this and I'm thinking back to Georges Seurat working on his painting, and I imagine that he stepped close to it with his tiny brush and he put on the one dot of color and then he stepped back and he saw what that did. I imagine he did many experiments with this before he launched into the giant paintings for which he became famous. Is there any analogous, actual exercise that a writer should go through? Would the analogy be, you write the character and then in some way you step back to see how that character's behaving among the other characters that they're next to?
[00:38:00] Jeff: Yeah, so I want you to learn in a productive way. I started off writing short stories. I wrote a short story every night for a year when I first started writing. And a lot of those short stories turned into my books. They became books later. So we want to write in a way that's not going to be wasted words. Because who has time to sit around and you know, exercise short stories? So let's exercise in a productive manner.
[00:38:23] That being said, you're probably working on a book. You probably have some characters in your mind for that book. The first exercise I would do to learn to write character voice is I would take those characters and I would put them in different settings and write a short story about that setting. Write 500 words on your character ordering coffee, and then take the character you just wrote, pull them out, and put your next character in. 500 words on that character ordering coffee. So you're starting to get the comparing and contrasting of how character voices change, how those colors look different when you put them in small situations. And ideally, you're going to come up with something that you're like, oh, I might actually be able to use this in a book.
[00:39:09] But use the characters that you're currently trying to write. You know, a character, is in a fender bender, and has to get out of the car and talk to the other person in the car. Now substitute the characters out or trade them and see how it sounds there. And thinking about what are the components of this, the one, two or three components of this character's voice that I need to focus on while I'm writing, to make sure I'm staying in character voice.
[00:39:32] Once you start to get the feel of like how to write a character voice, and it'll happen faster than you think, once you start getting the feel of how to write a character voice, then you can start getting the feel of okay, when I put these two characters together, what does it feel like? And then you're going to be like, okay, I'm going to put these two characters together in a cafe talking about what they have to do tomorrow. And now you've got your two character voices down, because you know the points you're using to build those character voices, and now, you know how that value can start to feel, how that putting those characters together in a cafe feels.
[00:40:06] And then write the same scene but take one of those characters out and substitute another one. And you'll notice the feeling starts to change. You're like, oh, if I put these characters in, it's funny. If I put these characters in, it's serious. If I put these characters in, it's boring. Never have these two characters together. So it's that kind of piecing them together that way and just taking them in and out and playing with them until you start to get a feel for it.
[00:40:27] And use characters that you're currently writing for your book. Use characters that you're currently trying to write. I don't recommend doing this as a free-form exercise of just like, I'm going to play with character voices because, I don't know, maybe if you have the time to do it, but I find the hardest thing for me is finding time to write. So I don't want to waste one minute of that time. If I'm playing with characters that I'm actually using in a book, it makes it easier for me. I feel justified. I could justify the time spent.
[00:40:55] Matty: Jeff, I will use that as an opportunity to just say, I appreciate you so much allocating the time to talk on the podcast again.
[00:41:02] Jeff: Anytime, this is great!
[00:41:04] Matty: Always fun to talk with you and love the advice, the practical advice you're giving to let people use their words as productively as possible. So please let the listeners and the viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:41:15] Jeff: Yeah. So just come to DialogueDoctor.com. That's where you'll find me hanging out, where you'll find an entrance to the group, you can click on that. If you want to come, we do writing prompts toward this kind of practicing character voices. We do a writing prompt every Tuesday and then an editing prompt every Friday. You can come join us in the Dialogger community through Patreon. It's Patreon.com/JeffElkins. You can jump into our Dialogger, it's a dollar a month, and you can start practicing with us, trying to get that practice in. But yeah, and everything else you'll find at DialogueDoctor.com. There's so much over there, I'm not going to take the time to describe it. Just go look.
[00:41:53] Matty: We will send people there. So, Jeff, thanks again. That was so much fun.
[00:41:56] Jeff: Yeah. Thanks Matty.
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Jeff! What part of Jeff’s theory about THE COLOR WHEEL OF CHARACTERIZATION most struck your fancy, and how do you plan to use it in your own writing?
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