Speech, History, Character
The Gen Con history project is, unsurprisingly, turning out to be an extremely interesting gig. The approach I’m taking is to present it as an oral history, with the participants’ own words interwoven to create a narrative of the show’s forty years.
Naturally this involves a small amount of pruning as I transcribe audio interviews to the page, removing ums and ahs, fusing disjointed clauses into complete sentences, and repairing the odd misstatement of fact.
I’m doing it this way so that it will be clearly a book about people, not a dry recitation of a series of venues. The personalities of the various interview subjects come through more clearly than they would if I had them answer email questionnaires.
Listening intently to exactly what people say when they talk has also been more generally illuminating. Sometimes a subject who seems laconic in the audio file, due to intonation and inflection, reads as extremely lively and vivid on the page. Other times it’s a challenge to convey a participant's verbal energy in the transcription.
As a writer of fiction it is part of my job to present dialogue which is engagingly stylized but at the same time feels rooted in real speech. This process highlights specific ways in which the rules of actual speech differ from fictional dialogue. Not just in its infelicity: the rules differ. A huge example is parallelism. In fictional dialogue, the use of parallelism represents a hauling out of the heavy guns. It conveys huge emphasis, and is therefore used sparingly. In ordinary speech, though, it turns out that parallelism is a very common rhetorical device. We use it constantly. Minor emphasis at best.
BONUS LINK: Patrick Sweeney, who commissioned me to do a revised version of the classic caveman comedy RPG Og, is now setting up outside playtests. His account of his first game with his own group appeared on his LJ yesterday.