Dialog: Not just talking to yourself! (Writerly?)

[JamesSD]

So, I've noticed that in a number of things I read, even when there is solid dialog, many times there's a certain homogeneity in the way the characters speak. In movies, Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarrantino, and Josh Wheadon are all guilty to some degree or another of writing lines that sound just like things they would say (assuming they had time to come up with something witty/cool sounding all the time). Web comics frequently have the same sort of deal.

I realize that when I write, my women often talk like men, and frankly talk a lot like me. This is especially true when I don't have a specific "picture" of how the character thinks and sounds.

When you write, do you strive to give each major character their own "voice"? Do you make a specific effort to modify their sentence structure and vocabulary? Or do you just not worry about it and hope it all works out?

 

[English Lady]

I don't tend to worry about it because my characters are all well formed before I write a word, their voice ocmes to me as I go- though some of my ladies *do* sound somewhat like myself *grins*

 

[cloudy]

A lot of my characters have southern accents.

 

[Vermilion]

oh, i say the dialogue out loud to myself, well, murmur it - it helps get the voice for the character. You can only do it, though, if you have a very strong idea of the character in your head, even if that's only how the other character/s sees them...

x
V

 

[MarshAlien]

One of my characters usually gets all the funny lines, so that helps a lot. In the last multi-chapter story I wrote, most of the characters were high school seniors, and I made a real effort to not use anywhere near as many contractions and sentence fragments when I wrote the girls' dialogue, on the theory that most of them are smarter and more mature.

I mean, in the story.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I love to differentiate voices-- sometimes to excess, like when I realise I've been writing dialect

 

[glynndah]

I have a story that I'm never going to be able to write successfully because I can't write the correct dialogue.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I have a story that I'm never going to be able to write successfully because I can't write the correct dialogue.

ask for a technical advisor?

 

[MagicaPractica]

Hmmm, I think I often hear their voices in my head and write down what they would say. This should translate into unique voices. But this doesn't always happen. This is something I'm definitely going to pay attention to in my next story. Thanks!


(Does it count that in the story I started this morning the woman hasn't said one word? The man has done all the talking, though he hasn't said much either.)

 

[MagicaPractica]

I have a story that I'm never going to be able to write successfully because I can't write the correct dialogue.

That sounds interesting. You can do it!

 

[jomar]

I try to make folks sound different, but... In these 100 and 300 word AH exercises everything gets stripped to the bone, so they probably all do tend to sound alike.

 

[BlackShanglan]

I sometimes cheat a little by using accents. I don't like heavily phonetically rendered accents (Ms. Rowling. Ahem!), which always strike me as stagey and corny - but I often to have the characters' voices that I hear in my head assigned different accents appropriate to the story. The accents are, to me, parts of their personalities, and they help me to hear the voices as distinct from each other and to focus on the individual nature of each speaker.

Of course, in many stories the characters wouldn't be likely to vary that much in accent; then, I put more work into hearing and constructing differences. What helps me the most is to sit down and get the voice established in my head before I try to write the dialogue. Knowing the timbre, pitch, speed of delivery, level of confidence, and fine gradations of accent helps me to get a sense of the individual as distinct from the other characters, and it helps guide me in choosing the words the character says. It's sometimes a struggle to get the voice clear and distinct in my mind - the priest is being a real nuisance that way, right now - but once it's really there, it's a wonderful guide. When I don't like my own dialogue, it's inevitably coming from a character whose voice I never heard strong and clear to start with.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

I don't like accents and I don't like dialects. I just feel the author is trying to straitjacket me into their way of thinking and trying to limit my imagination.

If you've got a handle on where your characters are coming from, the dialogue is going to reflect that. In the extreme, take a scene of domestic violence. Drunk husband comes home and starts on sober, cowering wife. Don't tell me you can't write different dialogue for the two protags.

Dialogue is the storyteller's dream. A chance to get inside the head of his character and sound forth. The voices must be different to create tension.

 

[Recidiva]

I try a few different devices to define character, and they're more like acting specifics and backstory. Different motivations and goals go a long way toward defining character and attitude, what someone will or will not say or do.

The three authors I try to emulate, and why:

Robert Heinlein was excellent at portraying multiple viewpoints. He told a story and it was a fun or entertaining story. He didn't preach so much as he tended to have strong viewpoints on every side of an argument.

Thomas Harris is great at research and coming up with facts, plot devices or character models that are fascinating on their own. It's worth reading his stuff just to mine it for the facts he provides.

Both those authors gave me a strong sense of taking inspiration from other people and integrating into the whole.

Another device I use that's an acting method is combining characters from people I already know, and seeing how they interact in ways that create something new.

A character for me is more something I cook up from different elements rather than cut from whole cloth.

 

[cloudy]

I don't like accents and I don't like dialects. I just feel the author is trying to straitjacket me into their way of thinking and trying to limit my imagination.

I probably wasn't clear in what I meant.

When I say that my character has a southern accent, I don't mean that I write the words phonetically. Reading that type of thing gives me a headache.

I meant that the word choice is southern, the expressions used are southern, and I will throw the occasional "y'all" in there.

 

[lesbiaphrodite]

Seems to me that when I write, I rely on intangible qualities to help me develop characters. I'm not very analytical about it during the writing process. But, rather, prior to writing, the characters have already developed in my mind and I hear their voices and get a sense of who they are, so when I pick up the pen, they kind of write themselves. (That's when I write well.) There are other times, however, when I can't hear anything in my mind. Characters sort of come to me out of disparate experiences. Their words just sound right in my mind.

 

[BlackShanglan]

I love to differentiate voices-- sometimes to excess, like when I realise I've been writing dialect

*chuckle* I couldn't help thinking of ...

"The horses of Mr. William Black's phaeton do not soar towards the sun. They merely frighten the sky at evening into violent chromo-lithographic effects. On seeing them approach, the peasants take refuge in dialect."

-- Oscar Wilde, from "The Decay of Lying"

God bless the man. That's the same essay that brings us "Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty" and "M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that he lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, [translated] The man of genius never has wit, is determined to show that, if he has not genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds!"

 

[BlackShanglan]

I probably wasn't clear in what I meant.

When I say that my character has a southern accent, I don't mean that I write the words phonetically. Reading that type of thing gives me a headache.

I meant that the word choice is southern, the expressions used are southern, and I will throw the occasional "y'all" in there.

*nods* Same here. I got some very good advice early on, which was to render any accent as subtly as possible and to focus upon grammar, not phonetic spellings. I like the effect much better.

My happiest moment came when a reader pegged a character as Irish despite it never being mentioned or communicated through any obvious word choice. I just heard her that way, with soft traces of it lingering despite her years living elsewhere.

 

[cloudy]

*nods* Same here. I got some very good advice early on, which was to render any accent as subtly as possible and to focus upon grammar, not phonetic spellings. I like the effect much better.

My happiest moment came when a reader pegged a character as Irish despite it never being mentioned or communicated through any obvious word choice. I just heard her that way, with soft traces of it lingering despite her years living elsewhere.

Funny, how strong regional accents linger.

My family left the south before I was born, and moved to Massachusetts (where I hit the ground running), and then to California. By the time I was in high school, we'd been out of the south for over 20 years, but my mother was still as southern in her speech as she is now.

as a weird aside: things go in circles sometimes. I'd never lived in the south until I went to college, but I now live about an hour away from where my father was born, and grew up.

 

[Guest]

I dunno

The voices on my head start speaking...

... if I write down what they are saying, they shut up.

Maharat

 

[neonlyte]

The characters drive their dialogue in my writing. They tend to carry emotional baggage that defines their personality and relationships, probably derived from my own experiences. I tend to write about places I know and things I've seen and mold the characters to those events. They are rarely described, I prefer for the reader to project an image based upon a characters speech and behaviour. i don't 'do accents' but English is not the first language for many of my co-protagonists and my foreign characters sometimes stumble over phrases in their spoken English. The 'foreigners' ability to speak English immediately places them in an educated class bracket, that allows a fair degree of latitude in setting their status for the reader and avoids tedious explanation, their background can slowly be revealed as the story unfolds.

I do 'dumb' particularly well. The "Yes" response of a foreigner, eyes slightly glazed, who hasn't a clue what is being asked and strives to be polite only knowing the difference between 'yes' and 'no'. And, as a consequence of spending part of my time living outside my native home, I'm quite good at body language, communicating without speaking, an expression, like a picture, can sometimes contain a thousand words.

 

[JamesSD]

I think the best voices besides my own I've done have been when I juxtaposed an ex girlfriend (or girl I knew and wished she had been some sort of lover) and placed her manner of speech on the character.

I'm not a big fan of phoneticizing accents. I prefer ""I park cars in Harvard Yard," he said in a thick Boston accent." over ""I pahk cahs in Hahvad Yahd," he said."

Of course, there's no getting around "Ya'll". It's a southern thing