Three problems in dialog

First, a public service announcement: the Worldshaper’s podcast which did an interview with me a few months back is running a Kickstarter to fund an anthology of short fiction by authors they’ve interviewed. The URL is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edwardwillett/shapers-of-worlds-volume-ii

The authors involved will be people who  were interviewed in the second year of the podcast – details on the Kickstarter – and I was interviewed in Year 3, so I won’t be in this volume, but the lineup looks pretty impressive.

There are three basic dialog problems I’ve been running across a lot lately: “Dialog” that sounds exactly like the narrative; characters who all speak exactly the same way; and characters who all speak the same except for their speech ticks and/or accents.

1. Dialog that sounds exactly like the narrative.

This used to be primarily the result of writers over-internalizing the essay-writing rules they learned in grade school. They were taught to use consistently proper grammar, syntax, spelling, and punctuation, have a topic sentence for each paragraph, and so on, in all their written work; dialog is part of a written work, so they logically applied the same rules to writing it. These folks wrote “dialog” that sounded as if their characters were reading essays. If you printed out a page of “conversation” and pinned it to the wall next to an article from an encyclopedia, you couldn’t tell which was which from eight feet away – the paragraphs were all of similar size and density.

I still see that, but these days, there are also writers who have the opposite problem – their narrative sounds like someone telling a (usually disjointed) story, rather than like narrative (“So he smacked the guy over the head, and there was this other dude behind him. So he went to smack the next dude. Only there was this other dude, not the second one, a third one, who was behind him. Not behind the first guy, behind the hero who smacked him. So when he, the hero, went to smack the second dude, the guy behind him got him instead.”)

This kind of thing can work, provided that a) the writer is using a first-person viewpoint, and b) the narrative is in the dialog voice of the first-person narrator. Even then, the writer runs into problem #2:

2. Characters who all speak exactly the same way.

People do not sound the same, and I don’t just mean voice register. The way people talk – their vocabulary and sentence structure varies based on all sorts of things: their background, class, education, ethnicity, and on and on. People from different parts of the country use different phrasing, slang, and common terms. For instance, what I grew up calling a casserole is, in Minnesota, generally termed a “hot dish.” And there are maps that show what parts of the U.S. call a fizzy soft drink “pop,” “soda,” or “coke.” There are also terms of art, general knowledge, and jargon – most of my family will look at my current knitting project and say “That is cool-looking fuzzy yarn!” while my fiber-crafting friends say “Ooo, is that mohair or brushed alpaca?”

There is obviously a lot of overlap in what people say and how they say it, or no one would be able to communicate with anyone else. If all the characters in a story are members of the same family, of about the same age, running the family farm or other business, it is reasonable that they’ll all sound very similar … but that just means that finding the differences in their dialog is probably going to be more difficult, because many of them are likely to be subtle. (Some won’t be – an enthusiastic ten-year-old is not likely to talk the way their teenaged sibling does, much less the way their parents do.)

Differences in characters’ speech patterns may be slightly muted in a first-person narrative, if the narrator’s voice is strong, but they’ll still be present. This is especially true for characters who have a strong voice of their own that is different from that of the narrator’s. The narrator’s natural voice might be “’scuse me, is Abby around?” but if another character says “I beg your pardon, but have you seen Miss Abigail?” that is what the first-person narrator will report, if only because it is so different from the narrator’s voice that it is, to them, memorable.

3. Characters who all sound the same except for their speech ticks and/or accents.

Writers who do this have often become aware that their characters ought to sound different from each other, but aren’t quite sure how to make this happen. Often, they seem to think that “different voices” means “voices that are obviously, easily, and instantly identifiable as different even to a four-year-old.” So they assign each character an accent or a catchphrase in an attempt to make their dialog identifiable. Unfortunately, it is deeply annoying to have a character use their favorite catchphrase in every line of dialog. (“Hello, my dear, jumping Jehosephat!” “Golly, Grandpa! What brings you home so early?” “Jumpin Jehosephat! You haven’t heard about the tanks, then, have you?” “Tanks? Golly! No.”) Also, the more unusual the catchphrase, the more it sticks out, and the more annoying it tends to become with overuse.

Catchphrases, accents, and stammers work, if your only concern is making sure that it is always clear which character is speaking…but really, that’s what speech tags are for. They don’t actually do anything to change the underlying phrasing or syntax or vocabulary the characters use – and it is particularly important to pay attention to these things if the character has an accent. Accents signal that a character is from another region, another country, or a different social group from the other characters, and any of those backgrounds means that the character will also have slightly different (or significantly different) speech patterns.

Also, especially when dealing with a character who is a non-native English speaker, using a phonetic accent is often unnecessary. It is perfectly obvious from Yoda’s sentence structure that he didn’t start off speaking Galactic English; he doesn’t need to have an accent on top of that. Keith Laumer did something similar with most of the aliens in his Retief stories – each race mangles English sentence structure in a different (but consistent for that race) way. This, too, can be annoying if it is overdone, but for one character or alien race in a story (like Yoda), it can work very well, and is much more readable than most attempts at phonetically rendering a foreign accent.