On Writing: We can do this better than King!

[hobbsyoyo]

So let's talk about writing. We can help each other edit specific passages (please don't post entire works here unless they are microfiction or poetry) and talk about the mechanics of writing.

__________

I'd like to start with a problem posed by Winner and others in my own piece. I'll approach it in general terms rather than quoting passages or anything. The problem is one of accents - how should they be approached?

Accents are definitely the uncreative way of differentiating a character. There are lots of ways to show the readers how a character acts, who they are and what they are about and even though accents are one of the tools you can use to do that, in the hands of a novice like myself you can wind up with really hackneyed dialogue. So the problem isn't really whether or not they should be done, it's how to do them right.

So I have a character that's supposed to be a rough-around-the-edges kind of guy who doesn't pull his punches and tells it like it is. He's from the UK and I've actually modeled him after a character in Prometheus. In that movie, there is a British geologist with a Mohawk that has that kind of attitude. When I hear my character speak in my head, he sounds like that guy in Prometheus. One of the reasons why I went with an accent in the first place is because the story is a short-story, so I don't have pages to dedicated to his backstory nor a lot of time to show the reader how he reacts in different situations. Every situation, every page and every line of dialogue have to directly serve the plot.

I wanted him to stand out, I don't want to end up with a story with 3 or 4 indistinguishable characters in it and an accent was an easy way to do it. Now I've been told that my treatment of his accent is heavy-handed and that's probably a fair assessment. One thing that came up however that I want to address and discuss is the spelling employed to show that accent. In particular, he says 'th' sounds like an 'f', for example: 'nofing'.

Now I've been told I should walk that back and cut out some of the misspellings. The problem I see, (and maybe I'm totally off) is that the accent is either-or. He either has one and it's accompanying pronunciations or he doesn't. In my head, he actually pronounces words like nothing as 'nofing'. So I don't know how to show that without the actual misspellings really. I could add a few lines of narration where I state that his pronunciation is like that without having every word misspelled. But that's sloppy I think and it will likely mean that the reader will forget that and read his dialogue in a normal manner.

Similarly, I can't misspell some words sometimes and then correctly spell them other times. I can't have him say 'nofing' in one paragraph and then half a page later have him say 'nothing'. It just doesn't work like that and will lead to confusion.

So how should I approach this problem?

I think one issue I may be having is that I shouldn't use an accent that I myself am not intimately familiar with. I'm quite sure I'm actually mixing up several British accents all at once and that's certainly my fault and an issue if I'm doing it. But let's go with the premise that I've got the accent right - how do I work that into my dialogue without going too far?

One other issue I can see with it (possibly) is that as a reader myself, confronting an accent at first can be jarring. It takes me a while (usually a few pages at the very least of solid dialogue) before I accept a heavy accent. Before I get used to it, I hate it and I automatically think it's a dumb treatment of the character and useless. It's only later that it 'clicks' and I am able to effortless work through the accent because I've kind of figured out in my head the voice they are going for and I don't have to mentally translate things. So *maybe* there is some of that going on in that my audience has so far had one or two pages worth of reading this guys voice and as such haven't mentally adjusted for it, if that makes sense. I will not deny however, that I could just be wrong and the accent is awful and no amount of dialogue will fix it.


What do you all think about this problem?

____________

Dialogue, as I've said before, has always been my weak point. It's only just now that I feel like I can do an okay job at it without feeling total revulsion at the words I put on the page. I also think I'm only okay at it for this one piece that I'm working on and that's simply because I've been thinking about the piece and the characters for literally years so I kind of know them pretty well. So I'm really looking forward to any advice people have on the mechanics of writing dialogue, how to make it good, what to avoid and so on.

I'd also like to help out PlutonianEmpire with his fiction. In his piece he has a character that is very nervous, scared and unsure of himself. PE wrote the dialogue with lots of ... (ellipses, are what I want to say they are called) to show that. I suggested he could use st-stu-stuttering for the same affect and that he could use non-verbal queues like having the character stare at his feet or avoid eye contact to show his mental state. What advice do you all have?

 

[Winner]

I'll ad a shorter, but ultimately much more difficult question - how to write an interesting dialogue between characters, one that doesn't feel too "bookish", i.e. unrealistically articulate/in depth/long/monologue-like/etc.?

It occurred to me that when I try to write a dialogue, it's basically two Winners talking with each other. I am not sure I even can write words of someone who thinks differently from me, has different sense of humour, different little idiosyncrasies, different values, and so on. Every time I try it seems extremely fake.

As for the problem I mentioned, i.e. dialogue being too "literary", what I mean is that people in books do not generally talk like normal people. The level of unrealism ranges from low in books which are focused more on the plot and drama to absurd in some of the more artistic creations, where the things characters say often have many layers of symbolic meaning and are full of hidden allusions and whatnot.

This is not wrong - dialogue in written fiction needs to be unrealistic, because otherwise it would be a terrible bother to read. I've done some discourse analysis in college, and you're just stricken by the messy and disorganized nature of natural dialogues. People are constantly repeating themselves, rapidly shifting between topics, talking at the same time, and using speech for many purposes which are not readily apparent from the actual words that are being uttered. It's chaos.

So, since I do not generally want to write any philosophical/allegorical/artsy stuff, I want my characters to communicate in a reasonably believable manner. Are there any tricks and tips to learn how to write it? Or is this something you just somehow have to "get", as in "have the talent"?

 

[Winner]

@hobbs:

A way of conveying accent I've often seen was something like this (now imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking):

"Get to the chopper!" he shouted, his thick German accent twisting the consonants so that what she heard sounded more like to ze choppah.

(just an example of the method, I can't do it properly on such short notice ).

Then your write what the character says, without stressing the accent all the time. Maybe drop some hints in the form of dialect words (because that's what the character *said*, not just pronounced differently) and observations of the other character who *would* note the accent.

It's not a huge problem, more like my personal little gripe. Also, the following isn't at all directed at you, consider it my generalized observation: I feel that authors from English speaking countries tend to overstress accent when they want to show their characters are "foreign", as in "not American". It's not that jarring if it is done subtly and not too much. But you know, not every Russian says "we drink wooodka in moooother ruuuusssia" and not every German speaks like a stereotypical Nazi "Ve must konkah ze vorld". Often times their accents are hard to place and subtle. The same goes for native English speakers - there are of course markers which, if you're trained, place a particular person pretty accurately on a dialect map, but if you're just an ordinary person, you can't assume all Australians will sound like stereotypical Australians, and you definitely can't assume all British will sound like Benedict Cumberbatch or something.

So, less focus on the accent, more on the character's more relevant features is welcome

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I know exactly what you're talking about when you say your two characters are essentially you talking to yourself. That's inherent in fiction and the only way I know of to get around it is to really 'know' your characters.

Really spend some time thinking about who they are and what they think like. I know some writers even do little write-ups, kind of mini-biographies on each character. It helps them (the writer) organize their thoughts at the very least on their background and their life experiences, even how they think. It also leaves behind a tangible list of traits that you can refer back to when you're confronted with a situation that you're unsure of how they will react to. When you're headed into uncharted waters with a character, refer or think back to that list of life experiences and traits and try and piece together a plausible reaction based on who they are and try and leave out (as much as is possible) what you would do in that situation.

I even had a writing professor friend who showed me a set of dolls he used. He'd try and dress them as his characters, even that little bit informed their personality. He also used a set of mini GI Joe dolls to physically see how a character looks when s/he's moving around in a space. For example, in a fight scene, it's really easy to get mixed up on which limb is where and if you aren't paying careful attention to the details of it, you're going to lose your readers as they can't figure out who threw what punch where. The GI Joes help with that a lot.

As for the dialogue itself, you really should think out a strong voice for the character in your head before you write anything down. I don't just mean the physical sound of their voice (though that alone can be immensely helpful - a squeaky voiced character is going to have to really shout for attention in a bustling crowd in a way that a deep-voiced character won't, for example) but instead how they talk and their mannerisms. As long as you know who they are, you aren't going to have as many problems when your character is confronting something and they deal with it or speak in a way you wouldn't. It'll just come out of the keyboard because you *know* how'll they'll deal with it.

If you don't have a strong basis for their character traits and personality, then you will end up talking to yourself. That's been my issue as well; I'll have an idea for a story and rough outlines of characters and I'll tear through fifty pages before I realize that the characters are all just narrow facets of myself (or just cardboard cut-outs) and not individuals in their own right.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

On the title of the thread:
There's a book called On Writing by Stephen King and despite what your personal feelings on his writing may be, it's full of top-notch advice and anecdotes. It's a very short read (less than 150 pages I think, maybe closer to 100) and it goes very fast. Definitely worth a look-see if you are thinking about writing seriously, even as a hobby. The two things I took away from the book over all the other helpful comments:

It takes practice. An insane amount of practice. Expect to write a lot and for most of it to be really awful, before you get good. Even when you are good, you have to keep at it as often as you can if you want to avoid getting stuck in a rut where you're producing the same dribble all the time.

The other thing echoes what Winner wrote to elsewhere, to be an author you just have to put words on paper and have someone paid for it. There are no real accolades that matter in the end and the measure of how 'good' you are is always going to be subjective. Once you've put that money in the bank, even if it's just writing stuff for a job, then you've cleared the 'author bar'. Don't obsess over whether or not you stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of them because at some point their writing resumes were just as short as yours may or may not be.

__________

Winner, I have to figure out a way to square this away:

A way of conveying accent I've often seen was something like this (now imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking):

"Get to the chopper!" he shouted, his thick German accent twisting the consonants so that what she heard sounded more like to ze choppah.

with this:

I could add a few lines of narration where I state that his pronunciation is like that without having every word misspelled. But that's sloppy I think and it will likely mean that the reader will forget that and read his dialogue in a normal manner

I'm not saying your wrong, mind you. I just have to figure out a way to do it consistently and carefully enough that I'm not heavy-handed with the narration. I also fear sucking some of the personality out of my character by having the narrator show us how he talks, instead of just showing directly how he really talks. Then again, if I'm worried that not showing off his accent negatively effects his characterization, I'm not sure it's a strong character to begin with!

 

[downtown]

I think the key to being able to write interesting characters is to get outside your own head a little bit.

I would never be able to write anything worth reading if I hadn't spent time as a journalist, which focuses you to go to events you normally wouldn't, talk to people you normally wouldn't, and most importantly, *listen*. Take special notice of the cadence of other people's speech, their inflections, how they answer questions, and then try to transcribe that into your characters. You'll probably still have a little bit of yourself in each character, but if you find your own voice dominating every character's conversation, I think that's either a sign you should put down the pen and try reading some more, or that should step out of your house and do a few non-writing things, and focus on having experiences, or just listening.

Writing dialogue is probably the part of fiction writing that I think comes easiest to me, in part because I also do something similar to what Hobbs had suggested, sketching out mini bios of my characters. They have to be more than a set of boilerplate "facts" or stereotypes. You have to get an idea for how they'll sound, and what they'll actually think.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I'm especially bad at cadence and inflections. Sure, the words that my characters are saying aren't something I personally would use, but they're still using my voice. :\

 

[Kyriakos]

I am afraid i cannot really help much to the specific issue of how to make intricate secondary characters. I ALWAYS place a main character, my work in always in the first person narrative, and all secondary characters just appear through the more or less biased viewpoint of the narrator. This did not happen by chance, but exactly because around 15 years ago i decided i could not do anything other than that, partly also due to my belief that no one really can present a different person in a way which would be significantly distanced from elements of his own self.

So i can't help, since you asked me how to climb an unsteady ladder, and i replied that you just should find a way around it.

 

[Winner]

I'm especially bad at cadence and inflections. Sure, the words that my characters are saying aren't something I personally would use, but they're still using my voice. :\

The only time I successfully managed to write other characters' dialogue was when I wrote a short BSG fanfic. People praised my portrayal of Baltar, saying stuff like "I can totally imagine him talking like that/acting like that". I suppose the reason for it is that I had been translating that series for years, so I got a feel for the characters.

And that what irks me, in a way. Making your own fictional characters interesting, non-stereotypical, yet believable is hard as hell.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

So let's talk about writing. We can help each other edit specific passages (please don't post entire works here unless they are microfiction or poetry) and talk about the mechanics of writing.

I'd like to start with a problem posed by Winner and others in my own piece. I'll approach it in general terms rather than quoting passages or anything. The problem is one of accents - how should they be approached?

Accents are definitely the uncreative way of differentiating a character. There are lots of ways to show the readers how a character acts, who they are and what they are about and even though accents are one of the tools you can use to do that, in the hands of a novice like myself you can wind up with really hackneyed dialogue. So the problem isn't really whether or not they should be done, it's how to do them right.

A basic technique I use is to "drop the 'g'". Many, if not most, North American English speakers tend to do this when speaking casually. "I'm goin' to the store", for example, is something almost all of us have said at some point in our lives. Another common example of casual speech is the word "gonna", as in "I'm gonna go to the store now." It's interesting to note how my spell checker handles these; "goin'" was flagged, and "gonna" wasn't. Of course I might have added "gonna" to the dictionary some time ago and forgotten...

Dialogue, as I've said before, has always been my weak point. It's only just now that I feel like I can do an okay job at it without feeling total revulsion at the words I put on the page. I also think I'm only okay at it for this one piece that I'm working on and that's simply because I've been thinking about the piece and the characters for literally years so I kind of know them pretty well. So I'm really looking forward to any advice people have on the mechanics of writing dialogue, how to make it good, what to avoid and so on.

Some people are better at dialogue, and some are better at action. Dialogue is one of my strong points (in my opinion; others might not agree). Part of the dialogue issue is that of "said." It's necessary to use it, but can be really annoying when used too much. If you don't have a thesaurus, get one. You will find it very handy when you want to use different words to mean the same thing.

I'd also like to help out PlutonianEmpire with his fiction. In his piece he has a character that is very nervous, scared and unsure of himself. PE wrote the dialogue with lots of ... (ellipses, are what I want to say they are called) to show that. I suggested he could use st-stu-stuttering for the same affect and that he could use non-verbal queues like having the character stare at his feet or avoid eye contact to show his mental state. What advice do you all have?

Writing out the stuttering is better than ellipses, both for visual appeal, and to avoid "William Shatner Syndrome."

I'll ad a shorter, but ultimately much more difficult question - how to write an interesting dialogue between characters, one that doesn't feel too "bookish", i.e. unrealistically articulate/in depth/long/monologue-like/etc.?

It occurred to me that when I try to write a dialogue, it's basically two Winners talking with each other. I am not sure I even can write words of someone who thinks differently from me, has different sense of humour, different little idiosyncrasies, different values, and so on. Every time I try it seems extremely fake.

As for the problem I mentioned, i.e. dialogue being too "literary", what I mean is that people in books do not generally talk like normal people. The level of unrealism ranges from low in books which are focused more on the plot and drama to absurd in some of the more artistic creations, where the things characters say often have many layers of symbolic meaning and are full of hidden allusions and whatnot.

This is not wrong - dialogue in written fiction needs to be unrealistic, because otherwise it would be a terrible bother to read. I've done some discourse analysis in college, and you're just stricken by the messy and disorganized nature of natural dialogues. People are constantly repeating themselves, rapidly shifting between topics, talking at the same time, and using speech for many purposes which are not readily apparent from the actual words that are being uttered. It's chaos.

So, since I do not generally want to write any philosophical/allegorical/artsy stuff, I want my characters to communicate in a reasonably believable manner. Are there any tricks and tips to learn how to write it? Or is this something you just somehow have to "get", as in "have the talent"?

You need to expose yourself to different kinds of writing, and listen to different kinds of characters on TV. When you're out in public, just find a place to sit and watch people. Watch how they move, how they act with each other, and listen to how they speak. Are they formal, casual, or a mix of the two?

I even had a writing professor friend who showed me a set of dolls he used. He'd try and dress them as his characters, even that little bit informed their personality. He also used a set of mini GI Joe dolls to physically see how a character looks when s/he's moving around in a space. For example, in a fight scene, it's really easy to get mixed up on which limb is where and if you aren't paying careful attention to the details of it, you're going to lose your readers as they can't figure out who threw what punch where. The GI Joes help with that a lot.

That's interesting. I don't have any GI Joes, and Barbies aren't much help. But I do literal character sketches. When I have an idea for a character, one of the first things I do is reach for a pencil and paper and start drawing. It sometimes takes a lot of drawing to come up with what feels right.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I drop the g and go with gonna quite a bit myself. With North American characters you almost have to or your dialogue will sound stilted and academic. We seem to excel at butchering our own language with speech, we almost revel in it it seems.

As for the GI Joes, if he had been as good at drawing as he was at writing, he probably would have gone with that. The man couldn't draw a stick figure to save his life.

I'm curious, given your expertise in dialogue, what you think of the second passage I posted over in the other thread.

 

[Zelig]

I don't like accents indicated by misspellings. I don't sub-vocalize people talking when I read, so I have no mental sound of any character's voice, and the only effect misspellings have is to slow me down.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

How do you treat accents when you write?

 

[Zelig]

I don't.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I read a lot of Star Trek stories, both pro and fanfic. The easiest character to write, in my opinion, is Spock. He's almost always formal, and is in fact the basis for my own posting style and way of speaking (yes, I really do tend to speak like this in person).

One of the most difficult characters to write well is Chekov. I've seen his dialogue absolutely butchered because some writers want to include his Russian accent, but don't know how to do it. This is an excellent example of a character the writers should listen to, before trying to write dialogue for him. It's critical to get a handle on the "v" and "w" sounds without mangling them, or ending up with too many sentences full of juxtaposed v and w sounds. It might be authentic for the character, but it can be horribly distracting to read - especially for readers who don't "hear" the different voices in their minds as they read.

One of the best examples I can think of where an author uses different dialects in the same story is C.J. Cherry's novel Angel With the Sword (the first story of the shared-world "Merovingen Nights" series). When she writes dialogue for some of the "canal-rat" characters, such as Altair Jones, the apostrophes really get a workout!

 

[hobbsyoyo]

If ther'e's on'e thi'ng I can't' stand, it's lot's of un'nece'ssary apostrophes. I hate it and when I see a Fantasy/Science Fiction story where every other character/place name has fifteen apostrophes in it, I stop reading, that's how badly it disrupts the flow of words for me.

 

[Kyriakos]

M-O-O-N: that spells "apostrophe" (stephen king allusion)

 

[Valka D'Ur]

When I finish unpacking my books, I'll post a bit of Cherryh's dialogue to show you what I mean. Altair Jones' dialogue is full of apostrophes, but that's to show that she is young (16 years old) and uneducated. She does have basic literacy skills (as in being able to read and write her name), but never went to school, and doesn't possess either books or writing implements. She's too busy running a skip (small freight-hauling boat) on the canals of Merovingen, trying to earn enough money to stay alive, to worry about proper speech. Later in the series, though, another character tries to teach her. He's nice about it, letting her know that she couldn't be expected to know the rules of grammar if nobody had ever taken the trouble to tell her what they are. Most of the other canalers are in the same situation.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I may or may not know what you're talkin' 'bout. <----If you mean apostrophes for a purpose (here, to connote uneducated speech) then I have no issues with it. What grinds my gears is the superfluous over-use of them in Fantasy/Sci Fi for no real reason. Example:

Kal'naga didn't know where on Kem'to'chek she could find some good B'gash.

It drives me up the wall. I understand it can mean a guttural stop, but let's be real, 99.999% of writers don't bother to completely invent a new Klingonian dialect (ie a new fictional, but complete language) for their characters and world. They just make up some words and they think that if they throw in lots of apostrophes that will thematically link them all and make the reader say 'gee whizz this universe is so detailed!'. It's not, it's hackneyed writing in my opinion.

And for the writers who do make up an entire languages, well they had a choice to add in all those apostrophes. They choose poorly. Everything but actual Klingon needs to go.

 

[Dachs]

If ther'e's on'e thi'ng I can't' stand, it's lot's of un'nece'ssary apostrophes. I hate it and when I see a Fantasy/Science Fiction story where every other character/place name has fifteen apostrophes in it, I stop reading, that's how badly it disrupts the flow of words for me.

lol the godawful apostrophes problem

is it just that fantasy/scifi people like to have something, anything, differentiating their prose from the Way It's Done Now? or are they just addicted to glottal stops or some janx

one of the nice things about Chiss names is that they might have a goofy long-ass given name like Mitth'raw'nuruodo or Ina'sa'miurani, but those names are almost always shortened to their 'core names', i.e. "Thrawn" and "Asami"