Giving your story its voice

Everybody talks about the voice of a successful story, but pinning down exactly what that is is problematical.  One way to think of it as the point of view character's way of speaking and thinking.  His or her choice of words and the way they speak will set the tone for your story.

We have to remember that the voice of our characters isn't our voice as the author.  My ex-Combined Forces character Nic in my Panthera books is about as far away from me as you can get.  He chops off the start of his sentences and thinks in a military way.  I've never had any problems with his dialogue or thoughts, and that's partly due to my working out his personal history before I began to write.  He's been in the military for twenty years and he worked on intelligence projects, so the first thing he is going to notice about a scene is its security aspects.

With Panthera, I wanted to capture the sense of strangeness that Pan feels as a sentient AI trying to make sense of the human world.  So I made him a first person present tense viewpoint, and gave him a  voice that is very personal.  His reflections on and comments about humans and the way they act are often couched in a air of puzzlement.  Pan's lack of understanding of issues allows me to use him to comment on human values as an outsider would.  Pan becomes the bemused alien observer of our culture.

Characters' voices come from their backgrounds.  They're shaped by their education, or lack of it, by his or her position in society, family background, beliefs and values.  And are often powerfully affected by the prejudices he or she has acquired.  These are wrapped up in the way they speak, their vocabulary, their choice of words and the syntax of their speech.  

All these things should show the character's attitude to life and the task they're engaged in.  How they think and feel about the situations they're in should become clear from the way they speak and act.  And the way characters speak and act is your story.   They have their own individual voices, and their voices in turn become the voice of the story.