How Your Characters Speak

I read somewhere that a good writer makes it so you can tell who's speaking just by a line of dialogue, or something like that.

I'm trying to write a comic with a decent amount of characters, and I was wondering, how do some of you figure out how a character will speak? You dialect, word choice, stuff like that. Do you try to work it out before hand, or do you let it arise naturally while your writing? The latter sounds good, except I always thought that it could lead to inconsistencies with your writing when someone views it all at once. I'd really like to make all of my character's dialogue consistent. Any suggestions?

But Don't Forget Knuckles O'Shaughnessy!

I work principles out beforehand and then let it roll.

you can generally tell the level of education and social background of a character by the way they speak, and especially if you have a short snippet of dialogue.

That being said, I recommend you work out general ideas and then experiment. No one speaks identically all the time.

This is this.

I would imagine a combination of both, as in before you start writing, you get a sense of the character and how their personality / upbringing / whatever else impacts how they speak, and during the course of the story, you can expand on it, such as introducing new phrases or words that they'd be likely to repeat, how they address and communicate with other characters, etc.

I go natural. A lot of my characters sound a lot like me, but I try to add the necessary flirtiness, annoyance, naiveté, etc. to make them more differentiated.

Not sure what anyone else who'd read my writing would think of that, but it works enough for me.

edited 6th Oct '10 7:41:00 PM by Keybreak

"I read somewhere that a good writer makes it so you can tell who's speaking just by a line of dialogue"

I'd take exception to that. I mean, if someone has done that, they're a pretty good writer, but it's not really necessary. Different writers have different strengths.

If I'm asking for advice on a story idea, don't tell me it can't be done.

^Naturally. Perhaps we can say a good dialogue writer can do that.

I think it's important to establish beforehand. I have to work carefully at voice or else all my characters just sound goofy and snarky (I wonder why?), so I'm careful to think about what different characters should sound like (seriousness, fluency, formality, verbosity, etc).

Dialogue can definitely be excellent for characterization. Piggy in Lord Of The Flies is easily seen as different from the other boys in his poor speaking.

I personally make dialogue and the way characters talk a very important part of writing any prose. Things like slang, word choice, catch phrases, stuttering, and all kinds of "speech customization" are great for making characters speak in unique ways. Of course, dialogue alone won't write a character you have to use more standard characterization, too.

A good way to look at dialogue writing, at least the way I do it, is to listen to how people in real life talk. During conversations with friends or family, make mental notes of how each person's speech, especially your own, come out. For example, in more awkward situations or amongst less sociable people, sentences tend to be short and vague, like "Yeah", "That's cool", etc.

I find that doing this makes dialogue writing fun.

I write pretty good fanfiction, sometimes.

The only writer I've ever seen effectively differentiate most of his characters by their speech patterns is Charles Dickens. Many of them give one or two characters Verbal Tics, and the better ones give small children different speech patterns from adults, but typically a fifty-year-old American man and a twenty-year-old Iranian woman both speak in the same manner (which probably happens to be how the writer speaks.)

Then again, I've read a lot of hacks in my time—comes with the territory when you keep picking up those new High Fantasy books in the hopes that this one will be more than an anemic Tolkien ripoff.

edited 6th Oct '10 10:01:13 PM by FeoTakahari

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

Dialogue can be difficult. I've found a good thing to remember is...don't try and make your characters talk the way real people do, because it's boring to read. Make them talk like the rest of us WISH we could.

As far as the "who's speaking" question, I think it's just a matter of occasionally reminding the audience who is speaking by actually just saying "(character) said/replied/whatever". That's for novels though.

Establishing a consistent character voice is a challenge; after all, our characters all come from our brains. A good trick I use: Try saying the dialogue out loud. If you keep tripping over it or it doesn't sound natural when spoken, it probably won't read well on the page.

Hope this helps.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

One thing to do is imagine how the character’s voice would sound in your head. For my current project, I have a distinct sound for each of the three lead characters’ voices. It makes their dialogue flow more freely that way. If you don’t concentrate on how their voice sounds, I find it makes dialogue harder to write.

Confirmed Bachelors: the dramedy hit of 1883!

I wouldn't write dialect or verbal tics unless you have a good reason to, since that can get very annoying. I'd stick to things that connect with your character's upbringing or personality: A character with uptight perfectionist parents might use longer sentences, more expensive words and be much less direct than a character that's not keeping in mind what others think of them. A manipulative character will say just the right thing, while someone awkward might have to restart sentences constantly and embarrass himself. Etc.

I definitely agree with this. So much of the way a person acts is because of the way they're brought up it makes sense that this would extend to dialogue. Even then though, there are exceptions (because there are always exceptions). Many people speak differently with their parents than they do with their friends. Personality is a big factor too; someone who's been brought up in a formal environment but is a happy, relaxed personality will be more laid-back and liable to use slang.

Generally speaking, when I write dialogue I think of both personality and background, and then just write. Usually the characters seem to separate themselves. (At least, I'd like to think that they do!)

Too geeky to live, too nerdy to die.

I have been working on a character who's dialouge was inspired by The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight from The Tick. For those who don't know who that is, you should look it up on youtube, it's worth it!

Of course my character is insane, which is why I chose to do it. So far it has been very fun to write such dialogue

Overall however, I simply write based on how the character's personality would determine. If I have a hostile character, he/she will use much harsher words and speak in shorter sentences to maximize the effect of each word. If I have a character who is a genious, I have him/her use more complicated words and longer sentences. If the character is insane, well, that's where the fun starts!

Your characters need to convey their personality with their words, otherwise it simply doesn't feel right, unless their insane.

edited 16th Jan '11 9:19:14 PM by Talann_Zar

My Ideas only need to make sense to me; even if the idea in question involves other people!

I try to differentiate my characters' dialogue, but usually I end up laying it too think with the verbal tics, then cutting back, and wondering if it works.

Though I usually try to remember what slang and swears each character prefers. Though sometimes it seems like the preferred subject makes it obvious who is talking, one of my characters talks about boobs a little too often and describes everything he thinks is cool in terms of manliness or appeal to manly men.

Though verbose people drive me nuts because I prefer comic speech bubbles to be as short and concise as possible and giant bubbles are annoying to fit in and either take up too much space or need to be cut into several panels and argh....

And I have one character who never speaks more than three words at a time because he likes being obfuscating like that... though once in a while it's really hard to decide how to cram complex ideas into three words and sometimes I'm not sure if I want to count contractions.

A good way to convey complex Ideas is to have the character use body language and facial expressions to do it.

Or you could have your character use two three word sentences in a row. Would that work?

My Ideas only need to make sense to me; even if the idea in question involves other people!

Well, it feels like it breaks the three-word thing to use two sentences. I guess the problem is being obfuscating without the answer being impossible to guess with any sane form of logic.

I've studied the way people speak, so I give each of my characters a distnctive voice- a way of talking.

For example, my character Alex will answer questions with a short, one-to-three word answer, before she expounds on the information. Every time. She also has a habit of using longer words; but she doesn't really know what they mean, only having heard the used in context, so she often uses words that don't belong in her sentences. She tries to make herself sound smart, but she invariably gets something wrong, making herself sound stupid in the meantime. She also likes words with a 'w' in them, and will use any words with a 'w' in them in favour of better-suited synonyms.

There are too many toasters in my chimney!

I occasionally give some verbal tics, dammit.

So, like, even if they're a bit too obvious, they can totally help distinguish characters.

And it would be fucking annoying if we all sounded exactly the fucking same, fucktards.

edited 17th Jan '11 6:21:57 AM by MrAHR

Read my stories!

Uhhhh...?

There are too many toasters in my chimney!

Self demonstrating post, Cygs.

Read my stories!

I have one tic that I shove in for people from lower education types.

They'll end sentences with eh or neh. As in "You're sure you parked right past that fence, eh?"

As people get angrier, the slang comes out more forcefully and more often.

<(-_-<)(>-_-)> "FUSION HA"

Oooooh.

You ean your verbal tic is saying 'fuck' a lot?

There are too many toasters in my chimney!

Well, I have one character that does. And he is supposed to say it too much, to the point it becomes meaningless. Like a teenager.

Read my stories!

If it really, really matters, make some of your characters be from other places (I have a Brit in my book — just make sure you do the bloody research if you go that route), sometimes even other planets/universes/dimensions/etc. if the story's setting justifies that (it's easy to tell who's from the World of Myth in my book, because they hardly ever use contractions).

You can have certain characters curse more or less, as well. And Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness is the gift that keeps on giving, since the character who uses it is very easily differentiated from the other characters plus it's freakin' hilarious (especially when other characters call them out on it).

Other posters are right that you should keep background in mind, too... cheerleaders, Valley Girls and the like are far more likely to engage in Buffy Speak than, say, a college professor. Giving a character the wrong Verbal Tic is even worse than writing flat dialogue... you have to know your characters well enough to ask "Would this guy say this?".

Avoid the annoying verbal tics like repetition and stuttering, though. Because you're forced to read them as-is, they really fuck up the flow of the book... it's okay to have a character stammer occasionally when nervousness or fear justifies it, but avoid the Stuttering Bill Denbrough effect at all costs.

No breasts/scrotum on that last post. Shit just got real. -Bobby G

For my upcoming graphic novel project (Sigil Eyes), there are three main characters.

John talks like this, seen, 's 'cuz he's kind'a cowboy-ish an' I like usin' lots'a apostrophes for those charact'rs. Usually omits his e's, g's, and d's (at the end of "and") and "because" is always shortened to "'cuz". He also doesn't talk quite as much as, f'r instance, Anthony.

Anthony tends to talk fast with very few commas, and eh, usually needs to think for a second to keep his train of thought orderly, because eh, well, it's distinctive, you know?  ^*

Maria just talks normally. Like this. Usually with short sentences. Less than Anthony, more than John.

The gods in the story tend to go a bit like this:

"What utter idiocy. You have not yet come far enough in your quest to pose a threat to me! History will forget your name, and your bones will linger here forever!"

"I am P'shen. I am the Whispering Earth. I weave through a thousand worlds. Time is nothing to me. Yet you...you dare confront me in my own temple?! BE CRUSHED BY THE RAGING BOULDERS!"

So pretty much like World Of Warcraft raid bosses, yeah.

Then there'z thiz guy who talkz like thiz. He replaces every c  ^*

and s with a z, and every natural z is drawn out. Like zzzetaproxymetazine  ^*

^{but what does it do?}

. It'z becauze of hiz moquito theme. And becauze he haz a probozciz for a mouth. Zzz.

edited 21st Jan '11 1:18:45 AM by MisterAlways

Always touching and looking. Piss off.