A creative writing exercise in identifying characters by the way they speak
Every individual has their own unique speech pattern. Hence, distinctive speech is a valuable way of showing characterisation, making characters memorable, and reducing the need for speech tags.
For example, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby peppers his speech with the colloquialism ‘old sport’.
Star Wars‘ Yoda’s unusual word ordering sets him apart.
Tolkien’s Gollum uses his own word and names The Ring as his ‘Precious’.
At the extreme is the comedian’s ‘catchphrase’ – deliberately designed as a memorable shortcut to character.
Famous examples include Michelle in ‘Allo Allo, with ‘Listen very carefully, I shall say ziz only once.’ Note the ‘zis’ to indicate she’s French.
Dr Who‘s Daleks express their single minded obsession of ‘Exterminate!’
While Blackadder‘s Baldrick introduces his stupidity with ‘I have a cunning plan.’
But a novel is not a sit-com, and there is a danger of falling into stereotyping and cliche.
So, how to create dialogue that genuinely is unique?
Know your character
Speech is born of the whole of a character’s life. Age, gender, class, nationality, education, regional accent, era and fashions, upbringing, friends, where they live, what job they do. All these things affect how that person speaks. Knowing these things about your character informs their speech.
Try to listen to lots of different people talk: in the street, on TV, internet clips. What does that person’s speech tell you about them? What, exactly, conveys those messages?
Vocabulary
Word choice is vital. Every word your character uses must be of THEIR world, and THEIR experience – not the author’s.
For instance. do they call a toilet a toilet? Or is the lavatory, privy, commode, loo, bog, john, powder room?
What idioms does their social group use? Will they ‘break a leg’, or perform ‘the Scottish play’? Or will they dismiss something’s value as ‘a dime a dozen’, before they ‘hit the sack’?
Do they use slang or swear words?
Does they use jargon? Will they use ‘blue sky thinking’ to determine that the best course of action is to ‘get the low hanging fruit’.
Do their activities involve specialist knowledge? To an outsider, a car is a car. To a mechanic, it might be a saloon, a hatchback, an SUV, petrol, diesel, electric, turbo, catalytic, a Renault, Toyota, etc. etc
Grammar, rhythm and syntax (word order)
Few people truly speak ‘standard’ English. But writing fictional speech as real people speak doesn’t work – it reads like gibberish. The trick is to introduce a few indicators of non-standard speech.
This is especially useful when it comes to foreign/regional accents and/or dialect. To try to faithfully reproduce an accent in phonetic language is difficult, hard to read, and quite likely will not be understood by any reader who is not familiar with that accent.
The trick is to introduce just one or two things that indicate the accent to the reader, without altering the whole text. As in the example of Michelle above, the spelling of only one word is amended to indicate the French accent.
Depending on the accent, you might use the odd apostrophe for a missing part of speech, or change word order, or miss a word out. Someone might switch prepositions, misuse a pronoun, or leave out parts of speech such as ‘the’ and ‘a’. Remember, use sparingly – just to indicate.
Personality
Personality is expresed strongly in speech. A hesitant, shy person will use modifiers to hedge what they say. Words like ‘might, could, perhaps. A dogmatic, confident person will claim that listeners ‘must’, or ‘will’ do something.
Blunt, to the point people use short words and sentences. Pompous people use long words and long sentences.
Audience
Consider not only your readership, but who your character is addressing in the dialogue you are writing. People speak differently to different people, especially if power dynamics are in play. Is your characters speaking to, say a child, their boss, a friend, officialdom?
Perception
People’s langauge is coloured by their interpretation of their situation. Does the girl walking through linear park at dusk perceive it as threatening, a rapist lurking behind every tree? Or does she feel it as a rejuvenating nature walk after a hard day in the office?
Exercise
Try it out for yourself. Pick two characters from your current work in progress, and have them discuss the actions of a third.
Or if you need a prompt for something different, try this scenario:
Fred and George are up before the judge.
Fred says, “I were walking down t’ road,”
George says, “We woz ‘ere all the time, yer ‘onour.”
What happens next?