This isn't so much a question as an idea. Last night I was reading a short story from George Saunders collection, The Tenth of December. The story I was reading was The Semplica Girl Diaries, which is written in an abbreviated note form. The guy is an American dad, in a not-too-distant future. For some reason, I hear his voice very clearly. His pitch is on the high end for a man, and there's always a note of anxiety in his voice.
This gave me an idea. I feel I have a problem getting my characters to sound really distinct. I think about their forms of speech and the words they choose, and I do try to read their dialogue out loud, to see if it seems like a plausible thing for anyone to say. I would think about the way they speak - like if it's abrupt, sugary etc, But I'd never really thought about their actual voice - I mean like whether it's high, low, whispery, loud, hoarse, penetrating. I feel this might really help me when I'm imagining my character's talking to each other - not that I'll mention it in the writing necessarily, the high, loud or whatever, I mean; but I'll hear it in my head, and hopefully I'll hear distinctly different ways of speaking.
Do any of you already do this? Does it help?
I have occasionally been writing a character and imagined an actor saying the words. For a real upper-class accent, you can get no better than imagining John Guilgud (is that spelt right?) reading the words. A refined Cockney is of course, Michael Caine, while a rough cockney is Bob Hoskins.
But this has been mainly for my own amusment, however, I cannot honestly say if by doing this it did not have an influence upon the characters developement. Maybe on an unconscious level, it did!
I've been struggling with the same problem myself. My list of characters are all birds, mainly Raven, Owl, Chicken, each with their own inflections and colloquialisms. The Raven's are akin to knights, with a code of honour and a command hierarchy and talk like klingons ;)
The hens too have a pecking order and remind me of a cackle of dinner-ladies, with the hen-pecked cock trying to make sense of it all.
The problem is the owls, in particular one who is magical and mystical and talks sort of backwards (Yoda with foresight). But the narrative for each reflect these difference too and readers all comment how difficult it is to read the owl sections and regularly lament the badly constructed sentences, Still trying to find the right balance.
Do you know, I'd never thought about it but I think I hear my characters' voices first. It seems to be a quite automatic thing for me and it tends to be their faces that are more of a problem. On occasion, when I've completely lost what my main character looked like, I've resorted to picturing a similar actor until his own face returned to me. I don't know if that would help you with voices. I got the idea from the Roald Dahl museum. There is an area there where children are encouraged to cut different parts of faces out of magazines to make up their own characters and it occurred to me selecting actors, or even different aspects of actors, could help me do the same thing. You could try placing an actor's voice in your character's throat to see if it fits, just so you have a good fix on accent, tone and the words he would use. I never go as far as describing the voices in the text as I don't think it's necessary. Some things do have to be left to the reader's imagination.