From: mdhangton@gmail.com   
      
   On Sunday, January 19, 2014 5:57:44 PM UTC-5, David Friedman wrote:   
   > A recent review of my _Salamander_ on Amazon complains, correctly, that    
   >    
   > my characters all sound the same, with one exception. What's interesting    
   >    
   > is that the exception is the one character to whom I made a deliberate    
   >    
   > effort to give a different voice. He's a farm boy studying at the    
   >    
   > college, and I gave him a watered down version of the speech style I    
   >    
   > (over) used in my first novel.    
   >    
   >    
   >    
   > I still haven't figured out how to do it more generally. Does anyone    
   >    
   > know of a good webbed discussion of tricks that can be used to make    
   >    
   > different characters sound different?    
      
   There is a big collection of pdf files of How To books around that I came   
   across a couple weeks ago.  A lot of them have "Dialog" in the title.  I've   
   looked through these.  Most of them talk about mechanical issues, like syntax   
   and dialog tags.  I looked    
   at two of them that, in places, discuss the issues you're asking about, to   
   some degree.  For what it's worth, they are:   
      
   "SHUT UP!" He Explained, by William Noble   
      
   and   
      
   Write Great Fiction: Dialog: Techniques and Exercises For Crafting Effective   
   Dialog, by Gloria Kempton   
      
   Not everybody still gets something from this sort of book, but they do provide   
   great opportunities to avoid writing.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)