What Makes Character Voice Memorable: Emotion

Photo by Fernand De Canne on Unsplash

Today’s post is excerpted from the forthcoming book The Sound of Story: Developing Voice and Tone In Writing by Jordan Rosenfeld.

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So much of what makes readers respond to and love a character’s voice is steeped in emotion—from the raw and vulnerable to the fierce and confrontive. Voices that allow us to feel are often the most memorable.

However, emotion isn’t just about characters laughing or crying; it encompasses a much broader spectrum. What truly defines a character’s emotional depth is not just what they feel, but how they express it—the words they choose, the rhythm of their speech and thoughts, and the unique ways they reveal their inner world.

When it comes to consciously shaping character voice, looking at our characters’ emotional depths can help enhance voice. It’s also worth noting that a character who has little to no emotional access can still have a great voice.

Emotional coping mechanisms

We all know people whose emotions are a little louder than other people’s. Their grief or joy gushes forth in gouts of expression—unafraid to wail or rail, these folks do more than allow their emotion—they live it. You also probably know others on the opposite end, whose emotions seem frozen in stone, barely able to be chipped away under the direst of conditions.

Do your characters stuff and suppress what hurts them? Do they live out loud like in the example above? Do they have a healthy relationship to their difficult feelings?  Do they have a dysfunctional one? What do they do with difficult feelings?

In the thriller The Collective by Allison Gaylin, protagonist Camille’s teen daughter was murdered, her killer never found. Camille believes she knows exactly who did it: a young wealthy white man of privilege her daughter was dating at the time, Harris Blanchard. Wracked by grief she is nowhere near to healing, she attends a ceremony where that young man is receiving an award some months later. Notice how Camille handles her emotions in the scene.

Waverly says, “The recipient of the Martha L. Koch Humanitarian Award this year is a young man who exemplifies public service,” and that’s when I finally catch sight of him, standing in the rear corner of the room, his golden curls slicked down, his parents sentries on either side of him. I’d recognize them anywhere.

Harris Blanchard pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolds it. My gaze pings on his mother, just as she mouths, I love you, sweetie, and I have no fucks left to give. The word bubbles up in my throat and escapes as a shriek. “Murderer!” I start toward Harris Blanchard. I don’t get far.

Now contrast this wild, desperate woman and her voice with Camille’s voice the rest of the time in the story (and note why she is this way):

I’m not always this way. That is to say, nine-tenths of the time I’m calm and cool and going about my business. To keep the cocoon tight and the pain at bay, I take pills. In my old life, I had no anxiety that couldn’t be cured by my weekly hot yoga class. Obviously, things have changed since then.

Before her daughter’s death, Camille was not the kind of person who would shout “murderer” in a public space. Before, it only took some “weekly hot yoga” to keep her “calm and cool.” After, she is a feral creature, shaped by grief, and the only thing that keeps Camille calm is pills. This is another good example of how experiences shape our characters, their manner of expression and their voice.

Character cues

Now that we’ve touched upon the ways that different forms of emotional expression can manifest in voice, let’s go a little further into defining expression and emotion as voice. Despite that voice sounds like it is only connected to the spoken word, it’s communicated through many other mechanisms, and so is emotion. In my book Writing the Intimate Character, I explore how to convey a character’s or narrator’s emotions through a series of “character cues.” These cues serve as unique “signatures” that contribute to the character’s voice—essentially, the distinct qualities that express their inner world.

We won’t walk through all these cues, but I wanted to note that several of these can also shape and contribute to voice. The cues we’ll discuss include:

• Physical action cues: Characters communicate emotion through actions and embodiment.
• Sensory cues: Sensory experiences are a powerful way to communicate basic, primal emotion without being explicit.
• Dialogue cues: Characters’ emotions cause them to speak in certain ways.
• Thought cues: Characters think in ways that manifest emotion or mirror a prior emotional time.

Physical action cues

Sometimes there are no words for emotion, or a character is too emotional to speak them. Instead, they enact their emotions, and that conveys a lot about a character. Here’s an example from Alisa Lynn Valdés’s novel Hollow Beasts, in which Latina game warden Jodi Luna confronts a suspected poacher in New Mexico.

Lee looked Jodi up and down like she was for sale and sucked his teeth to dismiss everything she had just said. “You done now, honey?”

Jodi took her pistol out of the holster and, keeping it pointed down at the ground, stepped ever so slightly closer to Lee. Part of her knew that this was reckless, that her temper was getting the better of her, again.

“Sobrina, no,” said Atencio. “Vamos.”

She ignored her uncle, many years of pent-up rage from the classier versions of this same ignorance she’d faced in college and, later, academia, fueling her. She put her face up close to Lee’s, then smiled in a cold and controlled way she could see finally scared him.

“Despite my sweet disposition and appreciation for the important ecological role of bees, Travis, my name is not honey.” She locked eyes with him and let him hear the click of her releasing the safety on her pistol. “It’s Jodi. But only to my friends. For future reference, you can just call me Officer Luna, ma’am, or, as long as you’re in my state, Agente Luna, Señora.”

What I love about Jodi’s body language in this scene is that it reflects her personality in the same way her speech and thoughts do, all contributing to her unique voice. Her body language is bold and unafraid, and so is her personality. She moves closer to the threatening man at first and then even puts her face “up close to Lee’s” and “smiled in a cold and controlled way.” When she drops into her dialogue, “Despite my sweet disposition…my name is not Honey,” her voice is loud and clear. This woman is unafraid.

Contrast this with a passage from Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, in which the character Little Dog is on the school bus in a place where he doesn’t feel safe:

All around me the boys jostled each other. I felt the wind from their quick-jerked limbs behind my neck, their swooping arms and fists displacing the air. Knowing the face I possess, its rare features in these parts, I pushed my head harder against the window to avoid them.

The boys in Gorgeous also pose a threat to Little Dog, an immigrant child in a largely white community where there isn’t a lot of acceptance of people who look different. However, he chooses the path of safety: “I pushed my head harder against the window to avoid them.” (A little note here: I love how the consonance of “h”s in head/harder allows you to almost feel that head pressing action).

Additionally, within the category of physical cues comes what I call embodiment—in which the ways a character inhabits their body, either through internal experience or the author’s description of them, contributes to voice. Through embodiment, we see how characters’ physicality reveals their emotional state, inner struggles, and unique identity. Here are two examples from Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s true crime/memoir, The Fact of a Body:

The architect boys are beautiful. Greg scales the pitched peaks of the roof. His friends climb high ladders over the windows.They cut through the air like dolphins through water…

And:

I stare into the yellow and will myself into flame, into dissolution.

In both, the physicality described—the boys moving fluidly and effortlessly through the air, the narrator’s intense self-dissolution—connects body and emotion, hinting at their embodied experience. This conveys a visceral experience that contributes to voice.

Sensory cues

Sensory cues, or sensory images, are another way to ground your character’s reactions and emotions in the body. These cues filter character’s perceptions of the world and their emotions through the senses—sight, smell, touch, hearing, taste—the body. These avoid “telling” words and pull readers inside your character’s experience, set a tone or a mood, and convey emotion.

From simple sensations that convey emotion, to more complex images, metaphor or simile, these cues are often loaded with the uniqueness that creates voice. Let’s look at a couple of different kinds.

Scent/Smell

Scent is powerful in shaping, revealing and creating voice, because it’s viscerally connected to emotional experience and memory. There’s a certain floor wax that drops me right back into childhood summers at my grandmother’s New York apartment, my shoes squeaking along the tile. The smell of Jasmine flowers conjures an idyll of warm summer days at the pool with my father before he remarried.

Below are two examples of scent imagery that also capture different voices. Again, notice the differences in voice between the authors’ examples.

The first is from Erica Baumeister’s novel The Scent Keeper: “The scent was gorgeous, generous, set off by a series of synthetic surreal scents, bright as searchlights, precise as expertly manicured fingernails tapping against a table.”

This passage is rich with precision and complexity, which aligns with the character of a perfumer. The language here also mirrors the character’s unique relationship with scent, turning it into something almost personal, something with personality and voice. You can imagine this scent as a person—defined, deliberate, and carefully constructed.

Second, from Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel Thrust: “You diseased devil,” he spat, his breath like rotting apples.

Here, scent is used more bluntly, cutting straight to the emotional core. The comparison of breath to rotting apples evokes disgust, revulsion and a deeper emotional bitterness. This imagery is visceral and contributes to the character’s voice in a much more immediate, perhaps even hostile, way. The scent of rot mirrors the speaker’s feelings of contempt or loathing.

In both examples, scent is more than just a sensory detail—it’s an extension of the characters’ emotions and personalities. Through scent, we can sense who they are, what they value, and how they experience the world. These subtle cues enhance their voices, making them more distinct, more alive in the reader’s mind.

Touch

If it seems like a stretch that the way a character engages in contact with others can contribute to voice, think about everything from violence to intimacy and understand the vast lexicon of body language and contact. A tender touch between two people can mean many different things after all, from pity to comfort, just as violence can spring from sources like abuse and fear.

Below is an example from Lauren Beukes novel Broken Monsters, which I’d qualify as horror-adjacent, but not quite straight horror; it also has supernatural elements and reads like a literary novel. In it, the villain, who can shape-shift, is able to bend and twist reality around his/its victims. He comes to his most recent victim not as an aggressor, but as something much softer. I love this use of the unexpected, the juxtaposition of something predatory with something beautiful, an evil that is not a cliché, full of lovely imagery:

What is this?” she murmurs, leaning on the counter. Her legs feel weak.

“A dream,” he says, stepping up to her, cupping his hand behind the base of her head, under her hair, tilting her chin down, while a tropical jungle springs into bloom around her.

The villain’s contact with the victim, a simple, intimate gesture of tilting her chin, carries a profound sense of power and manipulation but it’s framed by an otherworldly beauty. This paradox—where intimacy becomes a tool of control—adds a haunting quality to the character’s voice. Lastly, the juxtaposition of the soft, personal touch with the supernatural bloom of the jungle creates a kind of unease. In this moment, the contact reveals not just the villain’s power, but the chilling unpredictability of his nature, and contributes to the atmosphere of voice.

Dialogue cues

Perhaps the easiest place to “find” voice if you struggle with it, is in dialogue, the place where your characters literally speak for themselves. Some people find it’s easier to channel character voice this way, and to hear all the syntactical magic of word play and mood as it flows off the tongue, through a text channel, or other variation. It can be easier to access the more relaxed, honest, raw versions of your characters this way (though, as my book discusses in a later chapter about code-switching, it can also be the landscape of performance and persona).

One of my favorite recent characters is an example from Julia Haeberlin’s beautiful crime novel, We Are All the Same in the Dark.

What the reader soon learns is that Wyatt is a misanthropic man in a small Texas town whose sister Trumanell went missing eleven years ago. Though no one can prove he killed her, and not everyone thinks he did, that suspicion has always lingered. Rather than trying to prove he’s innocent, he seems to revel in the malevolence their suspicion gives him—it keeps people away. Here, his ex-girlfriend Odette, now a cop, is coming out to his farm because she’s heard a young girl has turned up on his property in bad shape. Every word of Wyatt’s is a challenge, a refusal to give her what she wants in a sparky, tension-filled dialogue.

“Odette, what a surprise.” A smile cracks his face. “Back for seconds?”

“Put up the gun. I have to do my job. I’ve got a tip and I need to follow it. If I don’t, someone else at the station will. You should prefer it’s me.”

He says nothing, still grinning. He’s always been primal, both aggressor and protector, and the danger of not knowing which unnerves me every time. I’m well aware that my uniform squares everything off, rendering my body sexless …

“I want to get this out of the way first. What happened last month was a mistake.” The words rush out of my mouth. “It isn’t happening again. Ever.”

“What did you think I meant by seconds? I’m referring to the couple of squares of peach cobbler left.”

“It was a mistake.”

“Somebody saw a girl in your truck when you rode through town earlier,” I continue steadily. “Do you have a girl out here, Wyatt?” I let my eyes flick to the dress on the line, drying into a brittle scarecrow.

“Are you jealous?” He unlatches the screen and pulls the door shut behind him. His body is thick and impenetrable …

“What are you going to do, Odette?” He’s issuing a challenge. He feels me wavering. Daddy told me never to come back to this town.

Dialogue is a straightforward method of expressing what a character feels. Sometimes characters just say what they’re feeling in direct language. Other times they speak from a place of emotion.

Think of the kinds of things your character might say in their given emotional state. When sad, do they get needy? When hurt, do they lash out in anger? What truths or authenticity might spew forth when they’re emotional?

Thought cues

Finally, I want to touch upon thought cues, those internal reflections that reveal a character or narrator’s state of mind, mood, and emotions. Thoughts may reveal emotional states the character can’t or won’t say aloud or may be used privately to cheer or encourage oneself in an upsetting situation. Emotional thoughts might hark back to memories whose emotional content matches what the character is going through right then.

Here’s an example from Alyssa Cole’s thriller, When No One Is Watching.

It isn’t fair. I can’t sit on my stoop and enjoy my neighborhood like old times. Even if I retreat to my apartment, it won’t feel like home because Mommy won’t be waiting upstairs. I sit trapped at the edge of the disorienting panic that strikes too often lately, the ground under my ass and the soles of my flip-flops the only things connecting me to this place. I just want everything to stop.

In this passage, protagonist Sydney’s thoughts reveal loss and dislocation. The feeling of being “trapped at the edge of disorienting panic” conveys an immediate anxiety but also her deeper sorrow about the loss of her mother and the changes in town. As her grief and panic collide, her vulnerability and longing come through. I also like the way the use of sensory detail (“the ground under my ass and the soles of my flip-flops”) plants the character’s emotional turmoil in the physical reality of their environment.

Thoughts have the ability to expand upon voice that might be limited in dialogue, creating deeper character understanding and giving life to strong voice.

Emotionally reserved or withholding characters

For every character who emotes out loud and with vivid expression there is a quiet stoic, an introverted thinker, someone shy or discouraged from expressing themselves in a big, bold or dramatic way. They may have terse manners of speech, speak less and think more, or be very precise or intentional in their expression. I saved this section for the end so you can see which character cues are being used to show that reserve or withholding.

There are other reasons a character may hold back emotionally, as in Laura Dave’s thriller The Last Thing He Told Me.

In it, Hannah is stepmom to sixteen-year-old Bailey. The book opens with her new husband of a year, and Bailey’s dad, Owen, having disappeared and left only a cryptic note that says Protect her. Bailey has not yet warmed to Hannah anyway, and now they’re thrust together into a confusing scenario. Note the way Bailey responds—or doesn’t—to Hannah in a series of examples (we’re in Hannah’s POV):

I smile at her, my phone cradled under my chin. I have been trying to reach Owen, unsuccessfully, the phone going to voice mail. Again. And again. “Sorry, I didn’t see you there,” I say. She doesn’t respond, her mouth pinched.

“Is that what smells?” she says. She wrinkles her nose, just in case it isn’t clear that the smell to which she is referring isn’t one she likes. “It’s the linguine that you had at Poggio,” I say. She gives me a blank look, as though Poggio isn’t her favorite local restaurant, as though we weren’t there for dinner just a few weeks before to celebrate her sixteenth birthday.

Bailey gets in the car quickly. She drops into the driver’s seat and buckles herself in. She doesn’t say hello to me. She doesn’t even turn her head to look in my direction. “Are you okay?” I ask. She shakes her head, her purple hair falling out from behind her ears. I expect her to make a snide remark—Do I look okay? But she stays quiet.

Bailey communicates a lot with Hannah but not verbally, using physical action cues, as in “She doesn’t respond, her mouth pinched,” or the “blank look” she gives Hannah, and not turning her head to look at Hannah in the car. When she does reply it’s often sarcastic or defensive—and feels relatably like a frustrated teen in a tough emotional spot. Though Bailey’s behavior does hurt her feelings, Hannah is patient because she is still the new stepmother and knows that it’s a tough time for a teenage girl, but she also finds herself working hard to win over the teen. In the premise of the story, they’ll need each other as they try to find out what happened to Owen. Bailey’s voice comes through as aggrieved and frustrated much of the time, but most of that is not even communicated in her dialogue cues.

Note from Jane: if you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out the forthcoming book The Sound of Story: Developing Voice and Tone In Writing by Jordan Rosenfeld.