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advice

how does one describe a voice? like joel madden's? (from good charlotte) i need to know this b/c im writing a story and describing the main character. theres something about his voice that sets him apart from like johnny depp's.

Hey,
Sound characteristics, accent, unusual ways of saying particular words, and words used to display that the character is talking are all ways to convey the way somebody sounds. Mostly, readers will imagine this for themselves, given prompting.

You could;
Have a pair of other characters talk about the character whose voice you want to describe, and have them suggest who it sounds like.

Use different words for "said" i.e. drawled/squeeked/whispered/wailed/urged/barked/growled/shouted/bawled. You don't want to use these words too often, or repeatedly though, because it will annoy readers if the same character always has the same speech marker used for them.

Sound characteristics would usually be narrated: telling the reader things such as "he spoke with a smooth, even tone, his words bubbling over each-other like honey", ok so it could be a crap, clichéd example, but you use descriptive words (or even things like honey/cream/ other food-things, or whatever the sound reminds you of, to get the message across. Toads, Buzz-saws, Dogs, Broken down cars...

You can also (If you're good at phonetics), write accents into characters; "such as if ah was pretendin' to be ah scotts-man", although you have to be fairly convincing, and fairly solid in what the accent sounds like to do this.

Good luck!
-K

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