Writing Dialogue
Originally published at rspaulette.com. Please leave any comments there.
Jane Espenson’s latest blog entry is all about dialogue - particularly with some useful advice on keeping dialogue sounding naturalistic by including the false stops-and-starts and circumlocutions that come from everyday speech.
This was something I discovered very young, I think, particularly when I had a school assignment towards crafting dialogue. The assigment was to recreate a conversation I had overheard - either through literal audio-recording and transcribing, or through memorizing and as-close-to verbatim transcription as possible. I chose the latter path, but ended up picking my friend, Sam, and his mother as my unbeknownst subjects. I chose them particularly because they had unique speech patterns.
Now, dialogue is always something I’ve been complimented the most on - there’s something of an attuned ear you can develop when you just listen to people speak. Particularly, when you’re young and uninterested in the content of the speech, you can pay attentions to the rhythms of how people speak. That’s the key right there, really. When you’re able to listen to converstations not in terms of content (because the content will come with context - whatever you need the characters to say will be provided by plot, character, et cetera), but when you’re able to listen to conversations in terms of rhythm, beat, and meter.
Writers like Mamet, Sorkin, Bendis, et cetera, get complimented on their ‘realistic’ dialogue when, really, it comes down to their ability to match not the what, but the how of speech.
With that in mind, what Ms. Espenson’s entry really makes me think of are some of the quirks in dialogue writing. Warren Ellis has spoken to Sorkin’s dependence on the phrase “hate his/her breathing guts.” Nobody actually says “breathing guts” - at least, in my limited experience and, as far as Mr. Ellis’s assertion, in his, either - but it’s a Sorkin-ism, and we accept that, in his world, it’s a commonly used phrase. Ms. Espenson - as per her example in her post, as well as in some of the Buffy episodes I’ve recently become exposed to (or, as I and my Buffy-watching partner like to call them, “Jane Espensodes”) - is inclined to have characters speaking in neologisms or in grammatical constructions which are obviously, and self-awaredly (see how I did that there), wrong, but which suit the syntax of the sentence.
And that strikes me as her tick.
Mine? One that immediately springs to mind is “How do you mean?” As in, a character asks a question, and the expected response is “What do you mean?”, only I’m compelled to write “How” as the question word. I don’t think I actually use this in speech - I’m pretty much a “what” person most of the time - but there’s something about the “how” that throws the rhythm off of the expectation that makes you pay attention. I think, also, it buries the question word, placing the emphasis of the line on the word “mean,” which, when spoken, will be lilting upwards anyway - it’s a question, after all - so only serves to drive that line towards the idea of the question.
All of that’s overanalysing what’s, in effect, just a tick - it just happens that I reach for the ‘h’ key rather than the ‘w’ key.
I’ve always been more comfortable with the home row, than with the ‘qwerty’ row, anyway, so maybe that’s the answer.