FEATURE: Writing Canon-Consistent Dialogue
Dialogue is one of several tools that an author uses to establish characters and make them distinct from one another. If you're writing fanfiction (or parody, or pastiche), getting the voices of your borrowed characters to match the author's original renditions can be as important as making their physical descriptions accurate. Still, it's likely ( Read more... )
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I also find it helpful to play around with a new character's voice as I go about my day, rephrasing my thoughts to their speech patterns, so that by the time I sit down to write, I've already had some practice.
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One of my Theatre professors noted that if the character names are stripped from dialog, the reader should be able to tell who's saying what -- not only from speech patterns, but from motivation and situation.
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Welll, spiletta42 did say she was doing it "in her thoughts," so I don't think she's freaking out her family, friends, and acquaintances too much!
I think your theater prof's point could be another whole discussion about characterization, actually: how a fanfic author needs to remember the motivations and situations of the characters during the course of the new situations portrayed in the fanfiction.
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I like to hold imaginary conversations with some of my favorite characters, sometimes as myself and sometimes as a character from another canon entirely, in which Things Are Explained. The results probably don't bear close scrutiny, but they keep my mind busy when I'm doing something boring, like dishes!
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Heeeee! In a more recent discussion of Sutcliff's use of subtle phrasing cues to indicate the language/culture of her characters, hedgebird summed it up rather wittily here: "the Romans speak more like characters in well-bred, Queensbury rules English novels, and the British more like Stand tall, we are in an epic poem here."
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