So, you want to find your character’s voice. Do you know your character well enough is the question. Do you know anyone well enough to mimic (or picture) their voice?
Start with people you know best. Write a dialog with your mom, BFF, or current/former lover. Let them speak about something you hear a lot: their job, religion, culture — let them ride their favorite horse.
Start with someone close and see what happens: read it a couple of times, let it stew in a drawer and then read it again. Read closely, feel the tone, pulp the wording, rhythm, texture — is that it? Do you believe that? Have you captured them? Their little pauses, favorite words, phrasing, discourse, arguments, and rhythm. Do they let the other one finish a thought? Do they listen? Do they try to seem funny? Do they like to speak? What is special about their tone and voice? What is different in their manner? Is that on the inside or outside?
If you struggle with that, do the unspeakable and record a conversation for personal use. Study their speech like they’re FDR, MLK, JFK, or any other three letters you can come up with. What distinguishes them from others is what you seek. First, you need to develop an ear, your mind and heart will follow. Listen to the music of their voices first and then you’ll learn to decipher their souls.
When you’re comfortable with that, write about their personality. Who are they? What makes them tick? Guess, if you don’t know. Have you seen an artist paint with oil? Creating form, light, and feel with layers of colorful blobs. If the layer is wrong, no problem, another one will cover it. So do studies of people and correct the portraits as you write.
“Playing” a character is one of the ways to study them, but you can approach it analytically or you can imagine a character sitting in front of you and answering your questions. It can feel awkward, but such as life. There are islands of hope and happiness but the sea of awkwardness licks their residing shorelines.
Change subjects with time, give your characters a palette of topics and emotions. Let them cry and laugh and be cruel and talk about private parts, torture them with uncomfortable situations and play with them. Can you pick up a conversation you’ve overheard? Can you create a believable dialog between two imaginary people?
Analyze every scene and every line. What works and what doesn’t and why? A true craftsman is willing to tinker with his mess. When something doesn’t work try writing the same scene over and over again, creating different versions and you’ll find the right one.
However, you should know that people are there to steal lines and manners from them, certain peculiarities and habits. You need to enrich your people pallet, you need to collect your herbarium of tempers and spirits. But the real work happens inside of your head and there is no way around it. Chekhov wrote, “Everything that I know about human nature, I learned in the process of studying myself.” He is showing off here, but there is some truth to it. Studying others is often a form of self-study.
And now, after I fed the Cerberus of your conceptual self, let’s have a heart-to-heart. Why do you think your characters have no voice? Who told you that? If you’re the source of that criticism I urge you to get a second opinion.
You know that everything happens in context, no one says words out of a blue. Even Tourette syndrome is a context. It’s hard to have a voice in a vacuum. Maybe on a notebook’s margins, your character seems small and awkward, but in a suitable story, he will sound confident and unique.
If you write to break the spell of loneliness, as many writers do, then your characters will sound like you because it is you who wants to speak. Why deny yourself that chance?
According to Ray Bradbury’s precise calculations “You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium.” A lot exactly. What if these are words accumulated over the years of silence when nobody listened? What if that’s something you concealed from the therapist, hid from the priest, didn’t broach to a random fellow on the train? What if that’s your duty, the debt that you need to speak out before someone else can have a turn on your page?
You don’t like that? Perhaps, Mendeleev wanted to dream about unicorns, but we don’t choose our ghosts. They do. Respect them, at the very least listen to what they have to say and maybe you will become more of a writer and more of a person at the other end of the experiment.