Writing a Character's Voice

So I've developed a couple of my characters to the point that I've been filling out first person questionaires to get a better feel of how they would sound. So far, I've had a lot of trouble with it and was wondering if anyone could give me any tips or link to some resources that might help me out with this conundrum.

Like how they would sound speaking do you mean?

I always just go back to their inspirations and think from there, something that would fit their personality.

Yes, that's what I mean

In my experience, character speaking styles have been something that just sort of... comes up. A general tip is to look at your characters' education levels (a high school dropout is probably going to talk differently from a doctorate holder), origins (peasant? noble? former actor? Roman orator?), and overall personalities (warm and friendly? mystical? shy and socially awkward?) and go from there. I have a character who, I determined at random one day, apparently speaks in short, clipped sentences. A lot of fragments. He was actually a pretty nice guy. Fragment speaking didn't make him seem that way. Made no sense, but I couldn't unhear it.

An exercise in defining character voice was proposed elsewhere on this subforum- I can't remember who, sorry -but the basic gist of the exercise involved taking the Gettysburg Address (because it's short, easily understood, and considered to be one of, if not the greatest speech in American history) and rewriting it in your characters' voices.

That's a really cool idea. I'm going to have to try that.

For me character voices are something that has to be developed with time. Exercises can certainly help, but ultimately its something that develops as I work with them. One piece of advice I'd give is to have characters talk to each other. Lots of my first drafts have very long, winding conversational segments that I'd probably cut on revision, but which were helpful, at the time, for working out how they speak.

I also found it helpful trying to read the dialogue out loud after I've written it, to see if it flows like an actual conversation would. If you have a friend who is willing, having someone read your dialogue to you can be even more helpful. Something that sounded very clever and flowed very well in your head might turn out to be choppy and confusing who has no idea what you're writing.

One problem with the Gettysburg Address method - and I say this as someone who advocates it - is that it's best for figuring out how your character talks about serious issues essential to their personality. It's not so useful when applied to random daily conversations with friends.