Here are some things I’ve learned from studying Story Craft, as well as some personal observations from reading a wide variety of novels. The suggestions below are not hard and fast rules and are mostly my personal opinions.

• Reflect the character’s social status, beliefs, goals, and flaw.
  • Social status or geographic region—one way to create color and depth within your world is to capture how someone within a certain social class speaks. For example: differentiate between how someone who is working class would speak verses how a professor speaks verses how a politician speaks.
    • Working Class—or blue collar—more direct, will violate certain grammar rules, and often will use more vulgarity. Tend to say exactly what they think without couching their words. This can be refreshing but can get your character in trouble if they say the wrong thing to the wrong person. Lots of potential here. Educated elite—the professor—seamless grammar, more technical speak, more analytical world view. Politician—silver tongue. Knows how to turn a phrase to get people to like and follow him. Rhetorically smooth and charismatic.
    Beliefs
    • What is your character’s world view? In each scene, the characters in that scene will view the same situation differently. These differences will come from their core belief or world view.
  • Flaw: Their beliefs also stem from their wound which has created the lie that they must overcome.
    • Your character’s fatal flaw is a result of the lie they believe (Lie–the false belief they have about themselves, their world, or others). This is what trips them up every time they try to attain their goal. This will influence how the speak the things the notice or bring up in a conversation.
• Background
  • Geography will play a large role in how your character speaks. Different regions of a country have different phrases they use or accents that affect certain pronunciations. It’s probably not a good idea to write in your character’s colloquial like Mark Twain. Though his novels are literary classics full of universal themes and authentic and timeless characters, writing in broken English, or more specifically with Southern drawl, makes it difficult to read. It’s better to use a few words or phrases to get a sense of your character’s linguistic patterns. We already touched on level of education an occupation. But these are important to how your character speaks
  • Upbringing–the people who raised your character will instill their beliefs and fears into your character and influence their own fears and beliefs.
    • Wound—if their wound had made the sad or angry or withdrawn, this will be reflected in how they speak tonally as well as how they choose to engage with others.
• Dialogue should also reflect your character’s goals: scene and story.
  • Your characters should reveal their goals and desires when they speak. They may push the conversation in a specific direction to gain or disseminate information.
• Body language
  • You should limit your character’s physical reactions. If you are constantly relying on your characters to react bodily, your readers may see this a melodrama and find it tiring. The reader should be able to see their reaction in the actions surrounding the dialogue, their verbal tone when speaking, and the indirect dialogue. Variation here is key. Often, their words communicate more than writers think and the gesticulations are not necessary to indicate mood or tone.