In my quest to differentiate the dialogue in my WIP, I came across many sites that listed the differences between a man’s speech and a woman’s speech and so I decided to compile them into an easy reference. Before you read these lists, please note that there are as many sites that refute  these points as there are ones that make them so you know, grain of salt and all that stuff. And here we go…

Men

1. Use commands more than questions (“Do this” not “Can you do this?”).
2. Don’t use tag questions (e.g., …, is it?) as softeners but will use them as confirmation.
3. Less likely to speak at the same time as someone else but more likely to interrupt someone else speaking. 
4. More likely to ignore someone else’s comments/questions.
5. Don’t use adjectives, fillers, adverbs.
6. Resist commands or implied commands, especially from women. (For example, “We should” is seen as a command).
7. Look for solutions or actions in other’s speech.

Women

1. Use more lexical hedges or fillers, (e.g. you know, sort of, well, you see).
2. Use more tag questions, (e.g. she’s very nice, isn’t she?) as softeners.
3. Use more empty adjectives (e.g. divine, charming, cute) and emphatic stress (e.g. it was a BRILLIANT performance),
4. Are more precise with adjectives such as colors (e.g. magenta, aquamarine).
5. Use more intensifiers, such as just and so (e.g. I like him so much).
6. More likely to be polite (e.g. indirect requests) rather than commanding.
7. More likely to avoid strong swear words.
8. More likely to speak at the same time as another women, but wait their turn with men.
9. Look for sympathy, understanding, relationship building.
10. Less likely to use humor.

For further reading on this subject, there are some great posts from Traci Marchini and Lynne Kelly.

Let me start this post by admitting that I’m a bit of a geek. In my “normal” life, I have to find ways to convert print documents into an XML format with a very strict DTD and, well, I know I’ve lost you already so I’ll go back to speaking to a writer.

I’ve been working on trying to differentiate the dialogue of the many characters in my WIP and I came up with this really cool way to manage it. Now I realize that most of you will hear nothing but “blah blah blah” as soon as I say the words Microsoft Word, but for those of you who don’t, here it is:

1) Open your manuscript in Microsoft Word. Depending on your version, click either Format/Styles and Formatting or click the Styles flyout on the Home tab.

2) Follow the steps to create a new style for each of your characters. Make sure you name the style after them. Also make sure the style is based on “Normal” or whatever you call your regular text so you won’t have to read your manuscript in 12 different fonts. Well, unless you want to read your manuscript in 12 different fonts. In that case, skip to step 3.

3) Go through your manuscript and tag every line of dialogue with the speaking character’s style. I KNOW this will be tedious but, trust me, it’s worth it.

4) And now for the good part…once you have determined how you want your character to speak (more on that in another post), change the color for only that character’s style and then read the manuscript for only their speech.

Cool? Yeah, I know. Back to my XML.

I have nothing against the idea of living under a rock, but unless you’ve been doing so for several years, you’ve probably already heard about Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat technique for making a character likeable. What I want to talk about today is how to make a character not likeable. Now you’re probably thinking it’s ridiculous to even consider this a challenge. All you need to do to make a character not likeable is get them to kill a cat in scene one and you’re done right?

Right?

Well, here’s the problem. In romantic arcs, the main character is supposed to grow to like the love interest. So while you do need to give the main character reason to dislike the love interest initially, you can’t make it something she won’t be able to forgive him for later (like, for example, intentionally running over her cat with his car).

So what can you do instead? Well, this is something I personally struggle with so I thought I’d take a look at some Jane Austen’s romantic arcs in order to see if I could find an answer.

1) Pride & Prejudice. In their first encounter, Mr. Darcy refuses to dance with Elizabeth and then calls her ugly. Later, he also calls her family a bunch of trailer trash (I paraphrase, of course!) This is what I’m going to call Insulting the Cat.

2) Sense and Sensibility. Elinor discovers that Edward is engaged to some self-centered skank from down the road. This is what I’m calling Saying you don’t have a cat when you really have 12 cats, 4 dogs and a donkey named Steve.

3) Emma. Mr. Knightly yells at Emma after she plays a bad game of chess with a bunch of people’s personal lives. This is very similar to #1 in that it is insulting the cat, however it’s not as strong as #1. So while #1 would be like saying, “Your cat is the ugliest, laziest SOB I’ve ever seen and I bet his mother grew up in a ditch,” this is more like, “I don’t dislike your cat. I dislike cats in general.”

And now to work some cat insults into my latest WIP…