TopShelf TG Fiction in the BigCloset!
So it doesnt seem like their puppets or peole just in a play at the moment. That they seem like real people that could live next door to you with a life. How do you do that
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Comments
think of a movie that had
think of a movie that had really good dialogue. Now imagine your story as a movie, each scene.
I find that if i do that the dialogue and character expansion really becomes easy.
Practice
That sounds flippant but it isn't.
I'm still learning but might I offer four ideas I use?
1. Practice.
2. Read great examples. But make sure you read as a writer.
3. Listen to conversations around you as a writer.
4. Ask for feedback (specifically about dialogue and characterisation).
Persephone
Persephone
Non sum qualis eram
Great advice!
Also, keep in mind that what's said isn't all that's actually said.
Dialogue means nothing if your characters simply stand there, staring at one another, talking back and forth. Sometimes you can say as much with a simple gesture, expression, or laugh, as you can with another twenty words.
That's what makes a character real. Not just who they are on the inside, but how they express that person on the outside.
Melanie E.
There's an old joke...
A man walks up to a street musician and asks, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" The musician answers, shaking his head ruefully, "Practice, man, practice!"
Which of course is true, but writing is an apprenticeship, just as playing an instrument is. To be a writer, one must study writing as assiduously as do musicians study the techniques and skills of other musicians. Both writers and musician tell stories; we've been doing it since we sat around camp fires in the African Savannah, and have kept up both habits over a million years or so. We've gotten rather good at it, since every generation builds upon the work of the last. We started out with sticks and rocks in the musical world, together with our voices, but now have electric guitars and keyboard synthesisers and drum kits. We started out with the story of "How we killed the wildebeest we're eating right now," and have continued through Mallory's King Arthur, Jerry Pournelle, and Danielle Steele. Choose your own poison, as they say.
To "Practice" one really has to add, "Read!" Pick out authors you particularly enjoy reading and try to copy their ideas, word choices, and structure. If one wanted to be a rock musician, one might start with the American Blues (as did many famous "rockers"). The same goes for writing in any "genre."
Study the masters -- and only you can decide who's worth studying -- and try to duplicate their "riffs."
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
paint the scene
Use words to paint the scene. You can tell far more in words than you think. If you just have two people standing around doing nothing it's just words.
If you have both your characters walking, moving hands, using body language, sight sound feel. They are not just lumps but people.
Read it out loud and do voices
Be sure to do this in a public place. It may not help but it will entertain your friends. :)
Seriously, do read it out loud and doing voices won't hurt.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Actually, if one doesn't "do voices"...
...one often winds up with a very long and confusing monologue. Think of old radio programmes (back in the days when they still had radio dramas) and think of how the actors (often only two or three or four people) portrayed every character using a distinctive "voice" and "register" for what might be dozens of supposed individual characters.
An author is in much the same fix, making his or her own natural (and solitary) voice stand in for many characters. One has to work at it. It helps to keep cards, or a database, describing every character's voice, their verbal 'tics' and typical register.
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Hrm.. some reading suggestions
Some reading suggestions on the subject of character and dialog:
Nathan Bransford maintains a huge blog filled with writing advice. I find it a little annoying to load, because there are a lot of comments and RSS feeds etc. But his writing advice is pretty good, so I'm willing to struggle through it.
From Bransford's blog:
Character and Plot are inseparable
John Green and dynamic character
Does your dialogue sound stilted?
Seven Keys to Writing Good Dialogue.
As for making life like characters ... pick an author you think does it really well, and read everything they wrote. Take it apart, figure out what they did.
Think of how real people talk
Then see it in your head, remember they stray off topic, they make jokes. They use gestures, wave their arms about, nod or shake their heads, roll their eyes, laugh, get red faced and shout, or jump up and down with excitement.
As for building characters, give only the bits of description you need to visualise them quickly, then add to it as appropriate. Don't spend pages describing their clothes or the setting unless it's important, and as the others said, practice makes perfect.
Angharad
Real people
When I first read a transcript of an interview, I was astonished at how full of 'noise' it was, all ums and ahs and ers. Real people do not talk in soundbites. They struggle to get things out, they hesitate and use filler. The sort of filler they use allows an author to set up the 'voice' that puddintane describes, aye? Not too much, yeah, because it can sound a bit contrived, like.
Think up your character, and visualise what an actor would call their motivation. If they are inconsistent in what they do, there must be a good reason for it. And remember: characters only know what they themselves see or hear, while the author is God. They act according with the things they know.
What's important...
...varies for different audiences. Clothes and setting typically play a much larger part in women's fiction, because women pay attention to such things, whilst action tends to dominate at least some men's literature, even when the literature is "comic books." Think of the difference between "True Romance" and Spiderman.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://farm5.static.flic...
Note that the front cover features very little action, only a setting, and all the dialogue is interior.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://goodcomics.comicb...
Spiderman, on the other hand, features only an action scene.
While a crude comparison (Spiderman is known for being "introspective," for a guy) as a general rule, it often plays out in books of all sorts.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Voice Dictation
I tried voice dictation and thought it worked really well, except that I became horse. :-)
Gwendolyn
Neigh you say! :)
Neigh you say! :)
*
*
An example
Here's a good example of how to write dialog:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0226.html
:)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I'm sorry...
I'm gunna just have to say try the things suggested above... They might work for you...
Me... It's not anything I ever struggled with. Ever. I guess I'm fortunate in that my characters usually bonk me over the head ready made and begging me to tell their stories.
Abigail Drew.
Get your characters real in your head first
depending on how much page time they get. The guy your character bump into in the store doesn't have to be anybody in particular. But for one of my favorite characters, the witch grandmother in PLAY NICE, I never had a grandparent in my life, so I made her the grandmother I would've wanted. I made her a combination of Auntie Mame and one of the less pretentious 60's guru like Baba Ram Das, then added a flair for outlandish bullshit and the possibility that she really HAD had some of the supernatural adventures she talked about. The sister Joy was based on several of the flakiest druggies I ever met, selfish and never taking the blame for anything she did, all her disasterous choices were to her just things that happened to her; and with a real mean streak (but NOT based on mean television characters or the unmotivated, out-of-nowhere cartoon meanness of the "mean sisters" in a lot of teenage force fem; but always keeping in mind the processes of her thoughts, the things that might set her off). An impulsive slave to her resentments, you could almost feel sorry for her. The hero/transformee-heroine narrator of the piece I had starting out as a square and dutiful gay guy, just a bit too proud of his virtues and not really aware of what a short fuse he/she had, the depth of his/her own resentments; who would serve as a straw dog to Grandma's wisdom.
Once I knew WHO the characters were, what they would say became a matter of listening in and typing frantically as they talked in my head. The hardest part was when my characters drifted into monologue I had make sure to break it up, shuffle the dialogue like a deck of cards and throw in some crosstalk randomness like humanoids do...
~~hugs, Veronica
.
(If anyone wants to try to finish PLAY NICE send me a PM and I'll fork over my remaining notes.
I just can't seem to write anymore and I sense it's infinitely more serious than
just a case of writer's block...)
"You can either fly Over the Rainbow or Under the Radar but you can do both..."
You have to let them live
While you're reading something that you or someone else has written, you need to watch for the moment when you think, "That's not how it would happen."
At that moment you need to stop reading, step back, and ask yourself, "What would they really do?"
Sometimes the answer is surprising or even frightening, but if you take your characters seriously, as if they were real people that you're watching, you'll find that they write the story themselves.
I'm not sure if it was
I'm not sure if it was mentioned, but remember that very few people speak grammatically correct. Use slang. Use poor English.
theres a secret?
They exist, you don't make them. Its no secret, I couldn't possibly make up a character, at least not a chief protagonist, they are real people - so okay it might be the girl from the hairdressers with the accent of the char doing the stuff the guy down the road does with the fashion sense of your mother - hmm would that work? it either will or won't. Your side characters should be characatures of people you know or have met - obviously we might disguise them with different hair or clothing to avoid libel but if they don't really exist they won't be convincing.
The biggest mistake I see in writing - sometimes even in so called professionally written tomes is assigning unrealistic speech patterns to characters. If your character is fifteen they need to talk like fifteen year olds and if they are in say Arkansas that should be reflected in the speech patterns too. If in your head they say Lahk instead of Like put it in, the reader will get a better feel for the character and the whole experience will be improved,'appen. Oops, bit of local dialect there, If you read my stuff you'll find that creeping in with some characters to the point other characters take the Micky, er Michael, um tease them about it. With the spread of Estuary in the UK (think Valley in the US)its perhaps a little less important but its still a useful tool in characterisation.
Zo, nowe than moi luvlees, get them fingors tarping on't kees an' downt make tha talwk thur same as ther preeveeus paragrarf, yoo 'eer me?
Madeline Anafrid Bell
I would like to see
a sampling of your idea of Arkansan dialogue, if I may. :D
Melanie E.
Hitchcock said ....
I'll toss in one more comment.
Alfred Hitchcock once said that a good story is life, with the dull parts taken out.
That applies to just about every aspect of writing, including dialogue.