The Right Word

[dr_mabeuse]

This is a continuation of a discussion from "The Pornographer's Evening" concerning how much effort should go into writing dialogue and description.

Here is WildSweetOne's last response:
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i understand what you're saying. but i stand by my initial reaction. if you're having to tweak to the point of stopping and thinking or re-thinking the majority of the dialogue or thought processes of your character, then are you happy about that character's existence?

surely if you know your character well enough, then their thoughts and dialogue come almost automatically... mine does and i plot and plan virtually zilch. does this not happen for you?

i am still curious.
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To tell you the truth, few of my characters here are that nuanced that I have to ask myself whether they'd really talk like that. Most of my characters are pretty much caricatures, so I'm not likely to make my female ingenue talk like my menacing male. Most of the changes I make to dialog are to try and make the characters sound more like they're really talking and not like they're reciting dialog that I've written for them.

I do remember having to go back and heavily edit things my private eye said because they just sounded too intellectual for a hard-boiled dick. And I worked pretty hard in the dialog in "The Experiment" because there's so much, and because Zoe was a pretty nuanced character who was hiding a lot of things from herself and had to be shown to change over the course of the story.

My more sophisticated or "complete" characters don't emerge fully developed from my imagination with their own way of talking and walking, and I really doubt that anyone can pull that off. You might copy characters from life, or from movies, or just from some stock character archetypes that we all carry around, but I think it's terribly hard to make up a character out of whole cloth and give them the complexity and depth of a real person.

I happen to know quite well where all my charcaters in "The Croft" came from. The woman is a stock female heroine, the vampire is Lady Chetterly's Lover mixed with a little Frank Langella's Dracula; Ian is based on two friends of mine; and Amy is a stock flower-child caricature. The Vampire is a Scotsman and so I had to work over his language a few times to keep him from sounding like Willy on "The Simpsons". (He ended up with very little accent by the way)

Usually my characters come out talking like me if I don't watch them, with my habits, idiosyncrasies, and vocabulary. What makes that bad is that it sounds so natural to me that I don't notice that it's my own way of speaking. I think this might be true for most people too.

---dr.M.

 

[jfinn]

My more sophisticated or "complete" characters don't emerge fully developed from my imagination with their own way of talking and walking, and I really doubt that anyone can pull that off. You might copy characters from life, or from movies, or just from some stock character archetypes that we all carry around, but I think it's terribly hard to make up a character out of whole cloth and give them the complexity and depth of a real person.

---dr.M.

I think you're right. I know that even though I can honestly say I don't try and deliberately imitate a real person in my characters physical attributes, I almost always have some kind of casting criteria for them. It could be someone I know personally or it could be an actor. Generally I don't use fictional characters because I can't see them.

On the other hand I can hear my own characters. Yup, I'm admitting it, I hear voices. When I write dialogue I can actually imagine the tone of voice, inflections, speech patterns etc. My only problem is translating that to paper, or more accurately MS Word.

As for sweating out individual words, heck I do that all the time. I'm a tweaker. I reread my work dozens, maybe hundreds of times and each time as I read I'll adjust or change words and sentences to flow better or get the meaning across in a smoother style. But that's just me.

Jayne

 

[TheEarl]

Usually my characters come out talking like me if I don't watch them, with my habits, idiosyncrasies, and vocabulary. What makes that bad is that it sounds so natural to me that I don't notice that it's my own way of speaking. I think this might be true for most people too.

Damn straight. A lot of my characters end up speaking like me, simply because I take my way of speaking as 'default' and normal and don't notice.

The Earl

 

[wildsweetone]

am thinking out loud, sorry in advance for waffling

I do remember having to go back and heavily edit things my private eye said because they just sounded too intellectual for a hard-boiled dick. And I worked pretty hard in the dialog in "The Experiment" because there's so much, and because Zoe was a pretty nuanced character who was hiding a lot of things from herself and had to be shown to change over the course of the story.
---dr.M.

with regard to your 'hard-boiled dick' of a private eye, it sounds to me like he didn't arrive as a fully formed character. he changed somewhere within your writing and that meant you had to go back and realign him with your story. i think that would only happen to me if i suddenly decided that my character was going to come from Scotland instead of Sri Lanka (an example only)... obviously there would be cultural, environmental and physical changes, along with the 'voice' differences.

maybe this is one of the differences between us. the only real tweaking and changing i've done is when i was enhancing a theme.

usually when i sit to write, it's because some kind of object has piqued my interest. as soon as i begin writing, the characters arrive and things start happening. the characters are fully formed, i could describe them to the nearest hair folicle and i could detail their emotional attributes without problem.

their dialogue is natural and fits their own persona. my hesitation with using dialogue came from not being able to touchtype the speechmarks, it slowed me down so much it was frustrating. but the dialogue itself flows just as natural conversation flows. i don't have to go back and change anything, it simply comes out as it's meant to.



(nb: to self...just thinking aloud here... i wonder if that's why i have problems thinking up problems for my characters... if that's why i can't plot. they've already had everything happen to them before they arrive at my place. darn, i need to go and think about that.)

 

[gauchecritic]

Oddly enough my reply in the "writing or plot?" thread droned on unintelligibly about characterisation. (I won't repeat it here)

About the speech patterns of characters being as our own; a while ago I critiqued a story, from a thread asking for same, and I think I ruffled an authors feathers.

The story was about a woman who went back to hobby writing after being married for a while (I think) and found herself writing erotica.

The style of the story within the story was of the same style as the story about the storywriter. I don't think I managed to make the correct point with the author as I don't remember hearing back.

I hope you get the point of this, 'cos I've lost the plot, action and every character.

But then I'm

Gauche

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Playing the Devil's advocate again, I've got to ask this of WildSweetOne:

If you can write dialog without having to polish it, shouldn't you be able to write drama at one pass of the pen as well?

To me, fictional dialog bears the same relationship to natural speech as do lines in a play. In fact, dialog in fiction has to be better than dialog in a play because you don't have an actor interpreting what you've written for the audience.

In other words, it's not enough for dialog to be natural. (In fact, if you just transcribe tapes of people talking you quickly find that transcribed speech makes totally unacceptable dialog.) It has to be supernatural, in that it has to seem more natural than natural, and yet convery more information and say it better than normal speech

Now, before anyone goes to my stories and grabs a handful of execrable lines to throw in my face from stuff I've posted here ("I'm coming!" "Oh God me too!" "Oh God" "Oh God" "Oh God") let me say that this is an ideal I rarely if ever achieve, but it is something to aim for just the same.

I've always been a great admirer of Jack Kerouac's writing, and Kerouac was famous for claiming never to revise or edit what he'd written. He claimed to write like a musician improvises. They've senice found out that Kerouac in fact edited and rewrote extensively. He did it during rewrites, so he didn't consider that editing. but we all know what goes on during rewrites.

Another great writer who seemed to write perfectly natural, verbatim prose effortlessly was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Turns out F.Scott would go back and work over his stories sometimes as many as thirty times to make them feel as if he hadn't worked on them at all.

---dr.M.

 

[Guest]

schizophrenia is helpful

I find that I write through the story the first time to capture the tone and plot and then re-write the story at least the same number of times as there are significant characters. Each re-write is done with a particular character's "voice".

I guess it's "method writing", but it is the only way I can stay true to each character throughout the story. Otherwise all my characters sound like and respond like me.

b

 

[English Lady]

I never(or at least very rarily) have a full idea of my character before i start a story. I tend to have a general l impression of them in my mind and they grow as my story develops.

I agree with Dr M you can't make your writing like that of real dialogue because you'd be erm sot of like doing ,doing all this kind of erm stopping and starting kind of thing and it'd be er kind of distracting, yeah distracting after a ,a , a um while.

You have to write supernaturally (i like that Dr M) and i guess that is why dialogue is so difficault sometimes and it can require much going over and over and over again(in my case anyway)

 

[wildsweetone]

Playing the Devil's advocate again, I've got to ask this of WildSweetOne:

If you can write dialog without having to polish it, shouldn't you be able to write drama at one pass of the pen as well?

To me, fictional dialog bears the same relationship to natural speech as do lines in a play. In fact, dialog in fiction has to be better than dialog in a play because you don't have an actor interpreting what you've written for the audience.

In other words, it's not enough for dialog to be natural. (In fact, if you just transcribe tapes of people talking you quickly find that transcribed speech makes totally unacceptable dialog.) It has to be supernatural, in that it has to seem more natural than natural, and yet convery more information and say it better than normal speech

Now, before anyone goes to my stories and grabs a handful of execrable lines to throw in my face from stuff I've posted here ("I'm coming!" "Oh God me too!" "Oh God" "Oh God" "Oh God") let me say that this is an ideal I rarely if ever achieve, but it is something to aim for just the same.

I've always been a great admirer of Jack Kerouac's writing, and Kerouac was famous for claiming never to revise or edit what he'd written. He claimed to write like a musician improvises. They've senice found out that Kerouac in fact edited and rewrote extensively. He did it during rewrites, so he didn't consider that editing. but we all know what goes on during rewrites.

Another great writer who seemed to write perfectly natural, verbatim prose effortlessly was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Turns out F.Scott would go back and work over his stories sometimes as many as thirty times to make them feel as if he hadn't worked on them at all.

---dr.M.

what you see in my writing is what comes straight from the end of the fingertips. i don't think i've actually gone through and done editing on any of my stories except 'Lifeless' and that was merely to keep it as full of unanswered questions as it contained, also to enhance my theme - others might well not see it though. i do check for typos though.

i guess you could turn that around on me and say that well hell, "it shows that you don't tweak and rewrite." i'd deserve that comment, yes.

when i'm writing, there is no conscious thought of actually writing, it just happens. the narration, the dialogue... it just happens.

as you mentioned it, coincidentally, i am going to write the dialogue for a piece of narration i've already written, with the view to having it put to film. i know full well that it will write differently, just how much 'work' i need to put into it will show me the differences. i'll let you know how it works for me.

just a thought though... if your character is the 'um' and 'ah' type, why is it that you feel you can't write their exact words? i haven't actually had a character who spoke in such a manner. hmm maybe there's an exercise in that for me.

 

[Guest]

Ok........I hate admitting I do this, but...

Admittedly, a good many of my "male" characters are me as far as personality or dialect goes. But I've found when I "switch" genders, particularly if I have a strong female character in a story, I let my "feminine" side out. I find myself thinking not as a man necessarily, but wondering, and thus reacting to a scene or situation that I believe a woman might. When I do, I find myself "thinking" in those terms, wondering how to respond and emotionally sensing a response, a reply as it were as though I hadn't actually just written the dialoge as myself.

Gee......I hope that makes a little sense anyway.

Another thing I have done is use personalities from people I know, how they've reacted or spoken during interesting conversations. Give's me great personality, character traits to draw from when keeping some semblance or differences between characters. I'd hate to think both sides were a complete and total projection of myself........

I remain,

 

[dr_mabeuse]

WSO:

If you want to be surprised, turn on a tape recorder while you're having a conversation with someone, then transcribe what's said on the tape to paper. It will be not only unintelligible as dialog, but you'll be amazed at how many woofs, grunts, sighs, non-sequitors, and dropped words are there.

If you don't want to bother with this, see if you can find Kerouac's "Visions of Cody" in the library and look at Part 2. It's a transcription of Kerouac and Neal Cassady goofing around in Cassady's house. The commercial tape recorder was a novelty at the time and a lot of writers thought that tape would do to writing what photography had done to painting. Not hardly. Speech isn't dialog.

For one thing, there just aren't enough punctuation marks to indicate all the pauses, sighs, body language and intonation that goes on in spoken language. Whenever I try to do "narural" speech in a story I end up using so many "...er..."s and "...uh..."s that it irritates even me. A character who has a lot of umms and ahhs in his speech will irritate the hell out of a reader. You just want to slap him and tell him to spit it out already.

---dr.M.

 

[wildsweetone]

i realise we're talking extremes here, but if you get your reader so riled up that s/he wants to slap the hell out of the character, then haven't you done a great job as the writer? isn't any emotion from the reader better than apathy?

i don't do the grunt thing when i talk, but i have sat and recorded conversation. i understand what you're saying. there is, i think, a fine line between how much 'real' dialogue is needed and how much isn't in a story. (recently i listened to half a dozen teenagers with the specific thought in mind of 'hearing' their word useage. god it was funny i highly recommend trying that.)

this reminds me of Alex de Kok's geordie dialogue story, and the consequent discussion. there is a definate line with how much dialect is necessary to portray sufficient information about a character's origins. unfortunately that line is darn thin and it's difficult to tread at times.

 

[jon.hayworth]

I agree with DrM writing dialogue and drama are near as dammit one and the same thing.

Talking to other writers one thing that comes over is that many people are afraid of making fools of themselves by speaking their dialogue out loud. There is a distinct difference between how we receive words read silently and those read aloud. Do not be afraid say your words out loud, give your characters distinct voices record yourself if you want. I will wager you will find a distinct improvement in your dialogue.

A while back I watched a documentary about Charles Dickens - remember he was writing in an era before tape recorders etc. He had a mirror in his study and would get up from his desk go over to the mirror act out an interchange between two characters, return to his desk record what had been said the intonations facial expressions etc. Then repeat the process for the next piece of dialogue.

Remember Dickens was usually writing under pressure - most of his work was first published in magazines of which he was the editor, the length of each episode - chapter being dictated by the space available. With the time constraints he placed upon himself, we know Dickens did not have the luxury of time to rewrite.

jon