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| Eye Contact |
Long before stories were written, they were spoken. So you
would think writing dialog would come as easily as talking. For many authors,
it does not. Dialog is consistently mentioned as one of the hardest aspects of
the craft for a writer to master. Why?
Well, there’s a dirty little secret underlying dialog. It
isn’t really the way people talk at all. It’s a graceful illusion, a shorthand
for the way people actually speak. It’s convenient stand-in, a body-double. A
doppelganger.
Don’t believe me? Listen to how people actually talk to one
another. I mean really listen. People pause, they stumble, they interrupt, they
insert random asides. They er, they uhm, they use the wrong words, they leave
sentences dangling without completing them. In general, they use a shorthand
that relies on the others in the conversation to interpret what they really
mean, more so if their co-conversationalist is well-known like a friend or
family. If you want a really good example of this, listen to only one half of
someone’s telephone conversation.
Yes, people are lazy even in the way they speak. It’s an
evolutionary advantage. Never use more energy than you absolutely have to. Save
it for something important like survival.
A writer cannot survive by being lazy. The last thing a
writer wants is for her readers to have to infer what her characters really
mean, what they are really trying to say. So mimicking speech is unlikely what
she wants to do if she wants to be clearly understood. No one wants to slog
through an unedited transcript of an actual conversation.
Learning to listen to the way people talk is a lot like
learning to draw. First, you have to train your mind to see what’s really in
front of it, not the symbolic shorthand it uses to quickly categorize items it
sees everyday to save time. Don’t believe me, picture a chair, quick, right
now. Odds are you just pictured something like a simple, straight-back chair
without arms or even a padded seat. Whatever it was, compare it to the chair in
your office, the chair in your living room, the chair at your dining room
table, the chairs in your twelve-step program. Chances are they look nothing
alike other than in the most basic, symbolic ways. They both have backs, they
both have seats, they both have four legs (or maybe five with wheels). In order
to draw one of those real chairs, you must cast that symbolic one aside and
actually see the unique chair in front of you. Otherwise, your mind will
continue to try and force that symbolic chair into your drawing which will mar
the results. It’s the same with faces, or shoes, or anything other common item
you want to draw.
And it’s the same with listening to people in conversation.
Your mind filters out the ers and uhms, the pauses and stumbles, the wrong word
choices and interruptions you don’t always know you make. But only after you
learn to hear what’s really there can you capture the essence underneath.
What a writer wants to do is make her readers think she’s
captured authentic speech, at least the way people hear it in their heads.
People are very good at filtering out those odd little speech ticks and filling
in what’s missing. A good dialog writer captures what comes out the other side
of that black box in people’s heads. What they think they hear, not what is
actually said. And if you only employ the front-end filter, you’ll end up with
perfectly acceptable dialog. Kind of like listening to the neutral Ohio
or California accent of a
newscaster, it works well if the main point of your dialog is to convey
information and emotion. Master that alone and your dialog will be generally
well received. For many applications, that’s enough.
But if you want to use dialog to reinforce a character,
there are further choices to be made. The first, just like writing in first
person, is finding the voice of that particular character. For me, a great deal
of that revolves around word choice.
First, a quick aside about phonetic spelling to reinforce a
character or his accent. This used to be quite common. I still run across it
now and then. I don’t favor it and never really have. Mainly because I find it
very difficult to read and slow to sort out. If I do it at all, it tends to be
once with one or two words (or an explanation in exposition) to set the example
then let it go.
Colloquial or regional speech is different, though here
again, I try to be careful. While a few choice words can immediately set where
you are (say “wicked” around Boston, or “y’all” in the South), it’s easy to
overdo it and have it sound like a parody (or worse, an offensive stereotype,
cuz). There are more subtle constructions, phrasing and patterns of speech that
tend to lend better affect. In the South, phrases like “God love her” or
calling someone Mister Edward (for me), or Miss Karen (for my wife), depending
on the speaker and the context. And that’s before you get into the alternate
regional choices of words for things like cola, soda and pop. The best thing to
do again is listen and mimic what you hear, lightly. Like salt or Tabasco,
a little flavor goes a long way.
Perhaps best way to illustrate that is with foreign accents.
Many non-native English speakers tend to initially speak English based on the
rules of their native language. Where English tends to construct its sentences
in the order of subject-verb-object, other languages do not. Welsh prefers
verb-subject-object. As does Hebrew. That construction sounds odd to an English
speaker because of the word order (which may explain why the Bible has a
particular cadence at times like, “spoke God to Moses” rather than “God spoke
to Moses”). It’s the same with languages that don’t use articles (a, an, the),
languages that put the adjective after the object, languages that don’t use
contractions, languages that have gendered nouns, and a host of other features
you might hear if you listen.
As an example, having a character not use contractions can
make him sound formal or authoritative or foreign depending on the context of
the other word choices around that tick.
Word choice and phrasing can vary depending gender, too. As
I’ve read it, part of gender speech patterns are socially derived, but perhaps
an equal part are evolutionary. They are a bit tough to pull apart. In broad
strokes, there are different patterns to male and female communication evoked
by word choice and style. That’s not to say all men or all women speak in a
particular way, just that there are tendencies a writer can exploit or reverse
for either resonance or effect. Having a female character speak with a
distinctly male style might make her strong in some reader’s eyes or come off
as a bitch in others. Just as having a male speak in a female style can make
him seem either empathetic and charismatic or weak and effeminate, depending as
much on the reader as the writer. Or they might not notice at all.
Another aspect of word choice that is more unique to English
derives from its history. For many words, we have a choice of two equally
weighted synonyms, one that derives from Old English, another that derives from
Norman-French (from the days of the Norman Conquest). We use most
interchangeably but there is sometimes a subtle difference between them. Old
English words tend to have more impact (often, though not always, they tend to
be shorter). Norman-French words tend to soften the impact (and sometimes tend
to be longer). An example might be cunning (Old English) and guile (Old
French). Cunning has a meaner, more raw connotation to me, where guile comes
off as more artfully manipulative. Compare your reaction to weird (Old English)
and strange (Old French). Or freedom (Old English) and liberty (Old French via
Latin).
It’s the same with Old English and Latin directly. As an
extreme example (because of variants in recent news stories), think of the words
vagina (Latin) and cunt (Middle English). Or fornicate (Latin) and fuck (Old
English, or just old). One of each pair probably sounds more jarring and
profane to your ear. If your character is educated, of a certain status or a
certain morality, she might prefer one over the other. And, yes, many of our
English curse words come down from Old English (bitch is another but bastard
isn’t). That alone should demonstrate their power.
Which segues to a broader point about profanity. It’s not
something I avoid if it fits the character, but it’s also not something I throw
in gratuitously. It can be an effective tool in revealing character, by its
absence as well as its presence. Consider a soldier who does not curse like the
others in a hard-bitten company. That might say he is naïve. Or innocent. Or
religious. Or aristocratic (so not acceptable language). None of which you have
to call out but all of which might resonate with other word choices to
reinforce the trait. But the same word of caution: profanity, like most other
aspects of dialog, is very easy to overdo.
As is slang, which can be even more fraught with danger.
True youthful slang ages and morphs at lightning speed. Words that sound hip
and edgy today can totes sound outdated and overused literally overnight.
Also note that the same person tends to speak in different
ways depending on their audience. They might choose different words or phrases
when talking to their wife, their children, their coworkers, or the cashier at
the grocery store, never mind giving a formal address or being dead drunk in a
bar. In other languages, this trait can be even more pronounced with separate
words, endings or forms used to address subordinates, peers or superiors. The
trick in fiction, if you choose to represent the way we casually do this in
English, is to somehow keep the character consistent.
Which brings up tag lines, phrases a character repeats like
a touchstone to establish and reinforce who they are. I’ve used them at times
to anchor a character, especially in stories within a series. But, again, a
light touch or you risk being read as a Simpsons parody. Doh!
All of which is a very weighted way to say that your word
choice can reinforce your character. Educated, common, urban, rural, formal,
casual, foreign, regional, all of these can be represented without resorting to
phonetics. A writer’s word choices can resonate with a reader even if they
don’t consciously understand why.
Beyond word choice, the essence of what a character says (or
doesn’t say) is critically important. Why are they speaking? Does the content
sound natural or artificial? More importantly, is the conversation necessary?
Is it furthering the plot or revealing and developing character, or is it
extraneous? Do these things need to be said at all? The answer, at least for
me, can be more of an art than a science.
With the exception of using dialog as exposition (having a
character deliver information to reader by talking to another character). Think
of the data dumps in science fiction, massive chunks of exposition disguised as
dialog used to convey either the science or the setting. Basically, if you
could add the words “as you know” to a piece of dialog and it doesn’t sound out
of place then you’ve drifted into exposition. And just deleting those words
won’t change that. Unless it’s subtle and well done, it sounds clunky or
stilted. Unless there’s no other good choice, it might be best to say it
outside of dialog.
This leads into a final touch point about dialog:
attributions. For the most part, I find “said” covers most of what I need. He
said, she said. While there are times that other verbs would work (yelled,
droned, drawled, whispered), said is reliable, generally inconspicuous and
inoffensive. While, for the most part, using very specific verbs is a hallmark
of good writing, in attributions they can scream for attention where you don’t
really want it. Or they can come off as redundant if your word choice makes it
clear a character was, say, being sarcastic, dude. So I find said to be my
go-to. Usually but not always without an adverb. Said quietly and whispered are
almost but not quite interchangeable. Though, like many things in writing, it’s
a style choice you can make work if you want to.
Attribution also lends to another subtle shading of dialog,
pacing. Where you put that he said, she said in a sentence, or whether you do
at all (with two people in conversation, I find I only occasionally need to
re-anchor who’s speaking), breaks up the speech pattern and can add a short
pause that you don’t always have to call out. It also gives you a chance to
move characters around the scene as they speak, which implies other, perhaps
longer pauses. It can illustrate that a character is distracted, or thinking as
he examines something in the scenery you might want to draw attention to, say
as he picks up and reads the spine of a book before he answers a question.
As well, it gives you a chance to intersperse a few
non-verbal cues (head shakes, sighs, frowns, furrows, gestures, glares, grunts,
sidelong glances) that comprise a huge portion of human communication.
So how can you tell if you’ve succeeded? The easiest way for
me is by reading my dialog aloud. I focus on a few questions. First, do I run
out of breath trying to get a sentence out? If I don’t find easy, natural
breaks, it’s unlikely a real person wouldn’t say it the way I’ve written it.
Second, are there words or phrases I consistently trip over? If so, they likely
need to be smoothed and revised. Especially to remove any unintentional rhyming
or alliteration. Third, does it sound like something I might hear on
television, or in a movie or a play? A good trick is to pick a couple favorite
actors and imagine them doing a reading with the lines. If it comes out
sounding like a B-movie they’d probably try to purge from their IMDB listings,
there might still be work to do.
Which circles back to the key point of dialog. Listening.
That’s what dialog is all about, capturing what you hear in words yet stylizing
it to make it flow smoothly in the reader’s ear. Perfecting it requires
practice and patience. But when you get it right, it sounds like an exercise in
creative eavesdropping, which is what your readers really want
© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III
