Hatrack River Writers Workshop: creating a character's voice

This is topic creating a character's voice in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

To visit this topic, use this URL:
http://www.hatrack.com/ubb/writers/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=005025

Posted by Unwritten (Member # 7960) on :

Does anyone have any good advice about how to create a character's voice? I'm talking about accent, dialect that sort of thing. I want to keep it simple, but I have one character who grew up on the docks far away, and yet she still speaks like an English major from the West coast of the United States. I am a complete novice when it comes to something like this. Help!

Posted by halogen (Member # 6494) on :

I usually refer to police transcripts, audio interviews and youtube videos

stuff like interview with Jamaican track star Asafa Powell and Interview with Gisela Zebroski, author of The Baroness

etc... etc...

or random videos of just kids playing around in london, or india

Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :

In my work I listen to spoken recordings and read the written transcripts of evidentiary proceedings. Nationalities run the gamut, Oriental and Occidental and everywhere in between, Northern Hemisphere and Southern, Oceanic and so on. The great American melting pot saturates the legal system just as it does anywhere else in the U.S. Education level, social and financial status also run the gamut.

The common features for English as second language speakers are absent or misplaced articles, prepositions, and conjunctions; number, gender, tense, case, and station, and syntax and diction confusion; flawed interpretation of the nuances of words with multiple definitions, double and more negatives, and imperfect idiom usage or native idioms that don't translate into English very well.

Other less common areas range in frequent discourse markers used for thought-gathering processes, frequent repetition of definitive clauses, and broken or tentative speaking rhythms.

The rarer features I've encountered are erudite speech that's off kilter and sometimes peculiarly precise but seems like gibberish on the surface and the ready usage of foreign words that are part of American English yet used in different contexts in their native language.

I've encounterd dock workers, railroad workers, and shipyard workers, who generally have similar speaking dialects, yet their diction is precise in usage of abbreviated phrases related to the vernaculars of their profession.

Aristotle had a rhetorical excercise where a composition was translated into another language then translated back to the original. The native Spanish-speaking characters speaking English in the Old Western movies spoke like that was where their dialogue lines came from.

[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited August 07, 2008).]

Posted by Merlion-Emrys (Member # 7912) on :

I have this problem somewhat too at times. Remember though, that hearing a mode of speech, and knowing how to put it into print, isn't necessarily the same thing.

People deride the way Lovecraft presented "dialects" in his work...but truthfully, how many ways are there to do it?

Posted by halogen (Member # 6494) on :

So what does "far away" mean? A particular accent? What time frame?

[This message has been edited by halogen (edited August 07, 2008).]

Posted by ChrisOwens (Member # 1955) on :

Not that I've mastered this by any means, but I think the secret is to put yourself into the character's headspace. If you can become the character, then their voice should come naturally.

In a short story, I typically cheat by having one main character speak with lots of contractions, and the other main character speak with fewer. It's a quick fix--maybe not the best one--but it does help keep two characters from sounding alike.

Posted by debhoag (Member # 5493) on :

No matter how much i like the flavor of dialect to begin with, after a while, it gets annoying to read. When I do it, I try to pick one or two relatively small quirks, and write the rest pretty straight. Referring to attempts to render speech into print.

Posted by InarticulateBabbler (Member # 4849) on :

I agree with Deb. When using phonetics, it should be sparingly. If one person has a quirky dialogue that's not too bad, but if you can keep it to a couple of identifying quirks it's much easier to read. Too thick, the phonetics become a code that needs broken in order to know what the character's saying. If you give a couple of separate quirks to a few characters, that will help identify who is speaking, and tag the attitude with which she/he "normally" speaks.

Posted by wetwilly (Member # 1818) on :

I think one of the most important things a writer can do is listen to people. I'm not hust talking about hearing someone talk and notice they sound different. I'm talking about listening to them and picking apart how they talk. Notice things that set their speech apart from other English speakers. "That person speaks in really short bursts. That gives me X impression of him. This other person uses a lot of colorful idioms. This person leaves out a lot of articles/conjunctions/whatever." If you live in city, sitting on a bus or a subway is a great place to do this. Or sit in a diner and eavesdrop on the people that come in and out around you.

Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :

A goldmine of links to various dialect and accent resources is at http://www.evolpub.com/Americandialects/AmDialLnx.html A glossary of Southern dialect might be found at http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/southernese.html Some of the content is more anecdotal than authentic and much of it is outdated. The site also sources addresses of vernacular dictionaries for specialized vocations.

Strunk & White, Roorbach, several other writing guides all say a little dialect goes a long way. Though I've read stories that either all the dialogue or the narrative are entirely in dialect. I've not encountered any stories where dialect is in both.

One guideline for written representation of dialect recommends replacing missing letters (unpronounced) with an apostrophe, 'em for them. Though more than one apostrophe is generally confusing. Contractions with missing letters are a bit awkward.

A Southren dialect example mixing grammatical vice with apostrophes and regional dialect.

"I din't say airy 'at. I say he din't keep me like he used of no more."

[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited August 08, 2008).]

Posted by Crystal Stevens (Member # 8006) on :

I have a child in one of my stories that is a supporting character. She's seven years old and tends to run certain words together. I keep it down to a minimum, but I feel it helps to give a touch of youthful innocence to her tone of voice. This would include combinations such as wanna for "want to" and kinda for "kind of". She'll sometimes start a sentence with "Ya know...". Stuff like that.

She also will huff a lot when adults may not understand what she's talking about. I've discovered that gestures can help immensely when fleshing out a character as long as they're not over used. Otherwise this child would be huffing like a steam engine through the entire story.

Posted by Unwritten (Member # 7960) on :

quote:
So what does "far away" mean? A particular accent? What time frame?

The whole story is actually set in fantasy equivilent of modern times, and the girl has always spoken the same language as everyone else, she's just lived a different lifestyle. I don't know what accent I'm looking for, although I've been given a lot to think about just now. Thanks for the great ideas everyone. I definately want to keep it simple.

Perhaps a Maine fisherman accent...Do you think you could help me with that IB?

Posted by InarticulateBabbler (Member # 4849) on :

Ay-uh. That'd be wicked-easy. Just be sure to make them rugged.

Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

Rita Mae Brown, in her book on writing, STARTING FROM SCRATCH, recommends using the fact that English has so many synonyms for so many words when you use dialog for characterization.

She says that if you have a character who uses mostly "Latinate" words (which usually have more than one syllable), your character comes off as arrogant, or at least more intelligent. If you have a character who uses mostly "Anglo-Saxon" words (which are usually words of one syllable), your characters come off as ignorant, or at least more "just folks."

And you can have a spectrum with only words of one syllable are used at one end and the most multi-syllabic words possible are used at the other end, with varying characters all along in between.

So maybe if you think of what you want your girl character to say, and then find a way for her to say it that is closer to the one-syllable words end, while the rest of the people tend to be closer to the multi-syllable end, you'll have enough of a difference to work, but it will also be subtle enough for the readers to sense but not really notice.

Edited to add: I hope that makes sense.

[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited August 08, 2008).]

Posted by Unwritten (Member # 7960) on :

I'd appreciate it, cause I'm havin' a wicked hahd time makin' it to the coast, with the weath-ah what it is. And folks around he-ah are mostly from away, so we don't talk quite right.
??????

I think all the "ah"s instead of "r" would get old quickly in a story.
One thing about my husband's distant relatives that actually talk this way is that they have an impressive vocabulary, and dozens of ways to describe the weather "It's been spitting rain all day" and "It's been misting" mean two totally different things (and neither apply to today. It's been pouring buckets today, but if I actually SAID that, I'd get accused of hyperbole. No one wants to admit the weather might actually inconvenience THEM. They're way too tough.--"Nah," they'd say, "This he-ah's just a nice show-ah." And did I mention that they are rugged?)

[This message has been edited by Unwritten (edited August 08, 2008).]

Posted by InarticulateBabbler (Member # 4849) on :

You might choose Stephen King's approach: write out the words, and then say: he pronounced here as he-ah. Within a couple of sentences, you wouldn't need to do that because we'd automatically think of his voice as such.

Posted by debhoag (Member # 5493) on :

Unwritten, you are delovely!

Did anyone besides me have a tough time with The Color Purple dialogue?

Posted by Unwritten (Member # 7960) on :

halogen--I love the way Asafa Powell talks. It's almost musical. I wonder why accents from colder climates are so much more harsh than those from warm ones.

Thanks for the compliment debhoag--I don't think I've ever been called delovely before.
I have a hard time with more than the dialogue in The Color Purple. I didn't make it very far into the book before I had to put it down. If I remember right though, she didn't really use an accent at all, it was mostly her choice of words and their arrangement that conveyed the voice. What didn't you like about it?

Posted by Unwritten (Member # 7960) on :

quote:
So maybe if you think of what you want your girl character to say, and then find a way for her to say it that is closer to the one-syllable words end, while the rest of the people tend to be closer to the multi-syllable end, you'll have enough of a difference to work, but it will also be subtle enough for the readers to sense but not really notice.

Would this make her seem less intelligent than the other characters? She IS less educated, but certainly not less intelligent. I guess it wouldn't have to do that. I'm going to give it a try and let you know how it goes.

Posted by debhoag (Member # 5493) on :

It was the narrative voice. I had trouble hacking through the phrasing and stuff, and it made the story drag for me. I couldn't just read it, I had to stop and figure out what she was saying a lot. Although some people might put that down to my inability to follow rather than Walker's writing.

In terms of intelligence, if she can make sense of complicated things, I think that would show even with monosyllabic dialogue. While an expansive vocabulary is indicative of a good education, that doesn't mean it has anything to do with smarts.

Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

Vocabulary tends to be more of an indication of education (or experience or exposure to lots of words) than of intelligence.

Heck, some people think spelling is an indication of intelligence, but I know some really smart people who just can't spell worth a darn. I suspect it's more a matter of how they process (visual processors tend to be better spellers, but with English, aural processors have a much harder time).