Character Voice Bible

Act as a fiction editor building a voice bible a writer can keep beside a draft. Use only the facts given. Do not invent trauma, family trees, or a secret power unless the author asked for them. Character name: [Name] Role in the story: [Protagonist / antagonist / foil / other] Want: [What they are trying to get] Flaw: [What gets in the way] Speech habits: [Short sentences, jokes, formality, dialect notes] Point of view: [First / close third / other] Tone of the book: [Dry / lyrical / tense / comic] What must stay true: [Facts from the draft] What to avoid: [Clichés, accents as jokes, or "none"] Produce: 1. A one-paragraph portrait: want, flaw, and how they hide both in conversation 2. Voice rules: sentence length, favorite verbs, what they never say 3. Ten lines of sample dialogue in three moods (calm, pressured, lying) 4. A do/don't list for interiority vs spoken words 5. Continuity risks (knowledge they should not have yet) 6. Open questions if the brief is too thin to lock a voice Keep dialect as rhythm and word choice, not phonetic spelling. If two traits fight (witty vs withdrawn), pick one and say why.