Realistic Diction is Unrealistic

I looked at the trope page and I looked at a blog for this trope, I wonder has anyone invoked this trope in their own writing? I remember doing something similar to this before I discovered this site in my creative writing class but I'll admit I wasn't very good at writing then. I am not good at writing rapid fire wit, Oratory or with accents although I do hear the voices in my mind, I don't know what the accents, idioms, idiosyncrasies, etc. are so it tends to sound inaccurate to me. Unless you are well read or intellectual, you are probably not going to use Oratory too often unless you are speaking to the public. I had listened to the conversations of my co-workers and random strangers, they don't really sound any of the characters I read about in fiction who more or less speak as if they had practicing oratory for most of their lives.

With that said, I wonder has anyone invoked this trope in their own writing? And could they give some tips on it?

By 'invoked the trope', do you mean writing 'unrealistically' (clean speech) or writing 'realistically' (messy speech)? The former is a use of the trope (invoked means something I'm guessing you don't mean) and it's what most writers do by default. Having people speak like actual people would be an aversion.

I avert it quite a lot, my characters stutter and pause and get confused and tongue-tied all the time, probably because I do. When they do speak in unexpectedly formal, florid or rapid-fire ways, it's probably because I do that too.

In both cases the only advice I can give is try and make it sound natural to you, regardless of how natural or otherwise it is. If nothing sounds natural, you're probably overthinking it. Try giving specific sections to other people to critique.

edited 22nd Dec '12 6:52:12 PM by Kesteven

I tend to write a rough idea of it then go through and say the dialogue aloud to see how it sounds. I try it in various ways a depending on the sort of person the character is and then write in whatever relevant contractions and/or metasyntactic variables would be appropriate.

So it may well start with "I wouldn't have known unless you told me" and become "I wouldn't've known..." or "I wouldn't'a' known..."

This is contrasted with more formal English in the prose. "Tom would not have known what had happened if it were not for the tell-tale sign of..."