'Cheers' fans—anyone with me?
There's a reason 'Cheers' was so successful—the characters. I can say Sam Malone and we all get the same ladies' man, misogynistic, former alcoholic barkeep running through our head. Heck, all I had to do was bring up Norm and everyone got it, right? They have sticking power because, like most really good characters, they're caricatures, just a little shy of reality. That doesn't mean they're unsympathetic—who here doesn't feel for Carla, somewhere deep down inside of you?—but they're not real people. That's what makes the most recognizable, beloved characters, and there are some real masters out there—Mervyn Peakes comes to mind, for me, as well as Robert Rodriguez and Tetsuya Nomura.
How does it work? I have an exercise (I know, I know—I always have an exercise. Sue me.) to help out with that. We all have at least one character sitting in our brains fully formed, right? Get them clear in your head right now, and then grab your thesaurus. Yes, I said the 'T' word. That little book you've been told to keep shelved for so long is officially allowed out of its cage.
I want you to make a list of, say, three to five words that you would use in a brief description of this character—leave some space between them, though, enough to jot down some words. Now take your first word and—no, don't touch the thesaurus yet!—think about it. How many connected words can you think of that bring the right effect to your character? If you wrote angular, maybe you're thinking sharp or pointed or spiny or carved or harsh—anything you can come up with for that single descriptor on your own.
Once you've done that for all of them, crack the thesaurus and go to what you think the best word is on each aspect's list. It may be the original one, or it may not. What matters is that it speaks to you. Put that on another list and look it up in the thesaurus and list your favorites of those words. That's not to say you'll be using them as descriptors in your work, but you now have a different view of this character, a different, perhaps deeper understanding of them physically, emotionally, and mentally.
Now, you could do it for all of your characters—it sounds like a good bit of fun—but eventually you won't have to. Eventually it will internalize and you'll start pulling things together naturally—and that's when your writing really takes off, in my opinion. When you create these skewed characters, it makes your work look better. It sounds crazy but, in practice, it works. Looks at Miranda Priestly from 'The Devil Wears Prada.' No one is actually like that. Look at Irma Prunesquallor from 'Titus Groan.' No one actually looks like that. El Mariachi from 'Desperado', 'El Mariachi' and 'Once Upon a Time in Mexico', Rorschach from 'Watchmen', Bellatrix Lestrange from 'Harry Potter'—they're not realistic. Everyone says they want realism in their fiction, but they want a semblance of realism, in reality (really).
It might sound crazy, but what's the harm in trying?
Trying to figure out how to make people yell my name when I enter the room,
Voss
Showing posts with label dialogue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dialogue. Show all posts
Monday, April 16, 2012
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Jell-O and the Pudding Pops
Come on, you know you know that guy—it's the Cos. Bill Cosby is one of the most often imitated celebrities of our modern era, because he has very recognizable aspects to his speech. Whether or not that's a real part of his speech, a part of his stage speech patterns, or simply something attributed to him through his characters in 'The Cosby Show' doesn't matter—it's completely and instantly known that certain things are imitations of Bill Cosby.
The same thing has to be true if you're going to use character imitation to great effect. This links directly to having totally different, unique speech patterns and pet phrases for each character. If you're going to have characters imitate one another, there has to be something to latch onto.
I remember distinctly one moment in fourth grade (I remember a lot of moments from fourth grade, actually, but one that's applicable.) when we were reading 'The Wanderer.' It was about these people on an old boat or something like that, and it was told through their journal entries. Now, as they grew closer, they started to imitate each other. There was one character that had a habit of repeating things three times (i.e. Bored bored bored.). Late in the book, another character (Looking back, I'm pretty sure they had some kind of budding romance I didn't pick up on as a fourth grader.) starts to do the same thing.
As people get to know others, they pick up on conversational idiosyncrasies—I do it all the time. It makes your characters that much more real, that they are affected by the people around them. Of course, imitation can also be used as mockery—we all know that. But, to do it properly, you still need that uniqueness of speech pattern. Mockery isn't nearly as easy to pull of as books as it is in speech, so you need to really lean heavily on those speech patterns and such.
As far as I'm concerned, imitation and the techniques that go along with it are quite useful, particularly in romantic situations (where two people sort of start to blend personalities) or with younger people, who have a greater tendency to make fun (it's a cliché, but we all know it's still sort of true. We were all teenagers. Remember how it was.).
Now I'm going to go get the pudding...it works better if you can actually hear my voice, I promise...
Voss
The same thing has to be true if you're going to use character imitation to great effect. This links directly to having totally different, unique speech patterns and pet phrases for each character. If you're going to have characters imitate one another, there has to be something to latch onto.
I remember distinctly one moment in fourth grade (I remember a lot of moments from fourth grade, actually, but one that's applicable.) when we were reading 'The Wanderer.' It was about these people on an old boat or something like that, and it was told through their journal entries. Now, as they grew closer, they started to imitate each other. There was one character that had a habit of repeating things three times (i.e. Bored bored bored.). Late in the book, another character (Looking back, I'm pretty sure they had some kind of budding romance I didn't pick up on as a fourth grader.) starts to do the same thing.
As people get to know others, they pick up on conversational idiosyncrasies—I do it all the time. It makes your characters that much more real, that they are affected by the people around them. Of course, imitation can also be used as mockery—we all know that. But, to do it properly, you still need that uniqueness of speech pattern. Mockery isn't nearly as easy to pull of as books as it is in speech, so you need to really lean heavily on those speech patterns and such.
As far as I'm concerned, imitation and the techniques that go along with it are quite useful, particularly in romantic situations (where two people sort of start to blend personalities) or with younger people, who have a greater tendency to make fun (it's a cliché, but we all know it's still sort of true. We were all teenagers. Remember how it was.).
Now I'm going to go get the pudding...it works better if you can actually hear my voice, I promise...
Voss
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Dialogue, Ye Many-Headed Viper
What sells better, gets more recognition nowadays, books or movies? That's right, movies. Now, I do often prefer a good book, but the appeal of cinema is pretty simple to see. It's all action and dialogue, none of that pesky back story to get in the way of anything else. Personally, I like the back story, but this is about mass appeal, after all—I think I've made that abundantly clear through the course of this blog.
Some writers are afraid of dialogue, since it's not a tool we're often trained in, but dialogue is probably the most important tool we have at our disposal in fiction. Look at it this way—in real life, you most likely can't read people's thoughts, so you only have their dialogue to judge them on. Why should your characters be any different? Especially with such an unclear image of your characters as we have in a book, what they say is of utmost importance.
One would think that we would be good at writing dialogue. I mean, we all speak, after all, so we know how it sounds, right? Not necessarily. People fluent in a language use passive listening rather than active listening, meaning that we enact a sub-conscious mechanism to gather information when we listen to people. Combine that lack of knowledge with the human tendency to, uh, stutter and, um, like, kind of, fumble with words when, uh, we speak, and you have a nightmarish cocktail.
Again, there's always a solution. The most fun is one of my favorite things to pull out of my writer's group—write a scene first without any dialogue, just action and explanation, and then write the exact same scene with just dialogue, and try to make each one viable and believable. At that point, it's closer to writing a script, in which we draw on our osmotic knowledge of scriptwriting gained from watching plays, movies, and operas (Or am I the only opera fan here?).
You can also try your hand with some public speaking lessons. In fact, go to your library and look along with the writing section for books on public speaking. Go ahead. I'll still be here when you get back. I don't think your characters should be constantly giving speeches—trust me, that's really the last thing I want to read. The important thing in those books is the way they dissect human speech. To teach you how to speak the 'right way' in front of a crowd, they have to show you how the average person speaks in a normal situation. Admittedly, it doesn't work for a more historical speech pattern, but I'd bet that, somewhere, you can find a resource for those too.
The other thing that no one ever wants to explain to writers is the differences in character dialogue. We all hear it—your characters should sound different from one another—but no one ever bothers to give us the tools for that. Well, I'm no linguist, but there are certain things you pick up on. Think about the way the different people in your life talk. We all have little idiosyncrasies (personally, I always use 'correct' instead of 'right,' use 'any who' instead of 'anyhow,' and often end long, drawn-out stories and explanations with 'et cetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.') that people take notice of. Some people use choppy sentences, others use long, languid sentences. Multilingual people will sometimes slip between languages. There are colloquial sayings, foreign speech patterns, and all sorts of countless other things that make people's speech more interesting. Go ahead and use those things to mark your characters as unique—but keep them to one character. If every character uses high honorifics when addressing people, it becomes a part of the culture, not a quirk of the individual.
If all else fails, though, go to the old standby (What? You knew I'd mention it at some point, didn't you?) and read your dialogue out loud. If you're really lucky and really nice to your writer's network, you might get people to read your other characters' parts. If you can't, then it's advisable that you at least don't read it in public. I mean, talking to yourself is one thing, but holding conversations with yourself in different voices can garner you a few weird looks.
Peace for now, loves,
Voss
Some writers are afraid of dialogue, since it's not a tool we're often trained in, but dialogue is probably the most important tool we have at our disposal in fiction. Look at it this way—in real life, you most likely can't read people's thoughts, so you only have their dialogue to judge them on. Why should your characters be any different? Especially with such an unclear image of your characters as we have in a book, what they say is of utmost importance.
One would think that we would be good at writing dialogue. I mean, we all speak, after all, so we know how it sounds, right? Not necessarily. People fluent in a language use passive listening rather than active listening, meaning that we enact a sub-conscious mechanism to gather information when we listen to people. Combine that lack of knowledge with the human tendency to, uh, stutter and, um, like, kind of, fumble with words when, uh, we speak, and you have a nightmarish cocktail.
Again, there's always a solution. The most fun is one of my favorite things to pull out of my writer's group—write a scene first without any dialogue, just action and explanation, and then write the exact same scene with just dialogue, and try to make each one viable and believable. At that point, it's closer to writing a script, in which we draw on our osmotic knowledge of scriptwriting gained from watching plays, movies, and operas (Or am I the only opera fan here?).
You can also try your hand with some public speaking lessons. In fact, go to your library and look along with the writing section for books on public speaking. Go ahead. I'll still be here when you get back. I don't think your characters should be constantly giving speeches—trust me, that's really the last thing I want to read. The important thing in those books is the way they dissect human speech. To teach you how to speak the 'right way' in front of a crowd, they have to show you how the average person speaks in a normal situation. Admittedly, it doesn't work for a more historical speech pattern, but I'd bet that, somewhere, you can find a resource for those too.
The other thing that no one ever wants to explain to writers is the differences in character dialogue. We all hear it—your characters should sound different from one another—but no one ever bothers to give us the tools for that. Well, I'm no linguist, but there are certain things you pick up on. Think about the way the different people in your life talk. We all have little idiosyncrasies (personally, I always use 'correct' instead of 'right,' use 'any who' instead of 'anyhow,' and often end long, drawn-out stories and explanations with 'et cetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.') that people take notice of. Some people use choppy sentences, others use long, languid sentences. Multilingual people will sometimes slip between languages. There are colloquial sayings, foreign speech patterns, and all sorts of countless other things that make people's speech more interesting. Go ahead and use those things to mark your characters as unique—but keep them to one character. If every character uses high honorifics when addressing people, it becomes a part of the culture, not a quirk of the individual.
If all else fails, though, go to the old standby (What? You knew I'd mention it at some point, didn't you?) and read your dialogue out loud. If you're really lucky and really nice to your writer's network, you might get people to read your other characters' parts. If you can't, then it's advisable that you at least don't read it in public. I mean, talking to yourself is one thing, but holding conversations with yourself in different voices can garner you a few weird looks.
Peace for now, loves,
Voss
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