How Your Characters Speak

Since my characters are mostly all teenagers, I make them talk in a sort of slang, but not enough so it would be Totally Radical.

How someone talks reflects their pesonality. Since my stories are usually based on the principle that everyone starts neutral and whatever they have hidden inside them bleeds out as the story rolls,and this evolves the character. You'll find that most of my characters are completely different by the end of the book. That said,let their personality determine how they speak.

If they're a mob boss,they should talk in a threatening way towards others,in a control through power manner.

If they're crazy,have them talk like a crazy person would talk. Look at a well known crazy person,the Joker.

This formula is what I use when I write dialogue. You want how they speak and act to showcase the character itself.

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?"

I've noticed that people with a low-education/low-income background like to repeat themselves, often using some sort of intensifier or putting emphasis on a key word when repeating their previous sentence.

edited 21st Jan '11 1:12:03 PM by WoolieWool

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

Sounds really cheesy. Which could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on context.

edited 21st Jan '11 1:27:51 PM by Ettina

Yeah, having a "sound" for a voice works well, as well as minor tics. A true Verbal Tic or Phonetic Accent can grow annoying, but little touches help; I keep track of things like their correctness of grammar, preferred word choices, ability to simplify concepts, tendency to swear and choice of swearing, preference for bluntness or euphemism, and their relationship to the person they're speaking to.

The only character for whom I have a clearly recogniceable speech pattern is the Herald, who tends to alternate between "grandious and important sounding" and "polite but crazy". He has a habit of throwing around phrases like "foolish mortals" and using very flowery speech and purple prose.

I also know exactly what Zaran sounds like. She has an accent of a sort, which causes her to emphasise syllables in a slightly unusual way. However, I've never bothered to show it in her speech, since it would be kinda hard to show in text.

I also have a couple of characters that will use british spelling, whereas the rest use my normal form of spelling. How's THAT for a british accent?

edited 21st Jan '11 2:49:49 PM by MrAHR

Milo says 'um' a lot, and is very hesitant. That's more of a shyness thing, though, and he does that much less as the story goes on. On the slang front, my species carls say 'okay' a lot. Humans rarely do, unless they're mocking one of them or something.

My older characters tend to speak a little more formally than the normal-aged ones, although not to ridiculous extents. Although there's one minor character who talks like a thesaurus, just for the hell of it.

For one of my older characters I do not use any abbreviations in order to illustrate that English is not her first language and she has no desire to learn any of the 'slang'. For my other such character he talks with older turns of phrase but also uses abbreviations as well as the occasional piece of modern slang because he suffers from Immortal Immaturity.

Ironically, one of my youngest characters talks like this. Quickly.

How my characters talk tends to vary heavily based upon personality, education, and region from which they hail. Whether the default language is their first also factors in.

i usually end up with a mixture of:

a character who fails at contractions,

one who talks like Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! in a series of tangentially related sentences

another one who continually tries to clarify what they're trying to say (they all do that, to some extent)

another who speaks in a short first sentence, longer follwing sentences, and shorter ending sentences

another who never speaks more than five words at a time

The damniness of it is, i never plan on this happening

there are occaisionally variations. One story, a character was basically a truckful of innuendo. dissonant, given she was a sweet grandmother type

I'm really bad about assigning distinct speech patterns to my characters. So far I have a couple of characters who speak very little, one of which drops articles if they're the first word in a sentence, but the rest are indistinguishable.

My problem is that I don't know how people talk. I'm doing my best to fake it.

I do occasionally worry that my characters are just mouthpieces for my elaborate puns and other jokes, but then I stop worrying.

This is the one area where I positively envy the japanese language. I wish we had that much variety in our vocabulary, just for the possibilities. Obviously to the japanese it's normal, so to them they think nothing of it, but goddammit, I think some pretty interesting angles could be taken with it.

Really? English doesn't have Japanese's multiple variant pronouns depending on formality, which is a loss for creativity, but for sheer ability to create new words and new ways of speaking, English is a very versitile language.