Giving them voices of their own.
Here are three lines of dialogue between three of the AtST characters. Who's saying each line?
Summat's not right, we shouldn't be in here.
The man at the desk said it was OK. Seriously.
Guys, there's something, it's on my, it's touching my… oh crap.
Danny, Tom, and Doug, right? How do you know?
voicing (n): the act of adjusting an organ pipe (or wind instrument) so that it conforms to the standards of tone and pitch and color
If you heard recordings of three or four people you know, chances are you'd be able to tell them apart. What if you saw what they said written down? What if an actor read it to you? What would you look for? Bits of an accent, slang words? Pet sayings, catchphrases? The way the words flow, or the way they stop and start?
Part of the fun of “constructing” the characters was working out how to write what they say and think so that you can use the same methods to tell them apart, rather than relying on he said, she said all the time.
The trick is to try to find the right amount. Too little, and it doesn't do the job; too much, and it makes the text hard to read and spoils the story. Have you ever watched those artists who set up on a sidewalk or pavement and sketch passers-by for a little cash? Amazing, isn't it, how some of them can bring someone to life with just a dozen or so strokes of their pencil. That's what I'm aiming for. One day…
Accents
Accents can mean a number of things; here's three to start with:
- particular words or phrases that come from the character's language or region, that anyone from that area might use.
- how they put words together
- how they say words
With the McFlys, only one character has an obvious accent that carries into writing; the rest are pretty bland, really. [Ducks a sudden hail of beer bottles. OK, guys, that's two inches off each of you in the nude scenes.]
Whoa. Hold on, there's a point. What is an “obvious accent”? To me (not from the UK originally) or someone from, say, Glasgow, Plymouth, or Myrtle Beach, they all have accents. People from Bolton and surrounding areas would claim it's the other three who have strong accents. So, if I came from Bolton, I'd write Danny's speech “normally” and render accents for the other three? Hmm - example of something like that in a bit.
That's why trying to render an accent phonetically is such a bad idea. But there's another, simpler reason. [nods to the man in the corner, who stands and clears his throat]
'Ow do. Mah nem's Danneh, ah coom from t' Land of Bolton, and this 'ere's mah mate Doogeh.
Be honest. How much of that could you bear before you got fed up? [laughter, and an offended "Eh?"] Probably about that much. Less if you actually are from Bolton. [Too right, that's nothing like how I talk.] If you really do want to try reading a bookful of it, go read, say, Huckleberry Finn. It's a great story, but doesn't the whole “I'se jess sittin' heah not doin' nuthin' massa” thing start to get annoying?
Sometimes, of course, protraying an accent is art, e.g A jist wen'y eatma / Pokacrisps furma dinner / Nabigwoffldoon. That's Glaswegian, by the way, written by a Glaswegian; the poem it comes from is spot on, poignant and funny - if you know the accent. It also contains a rendering of an accent rather like Harry's; see if you can spot it. How are you English and US folks getting on with it? Uh huh, uh huh, that's what I thought. And would you want to read 50,000 words of it?
So, written-out accents are hard to read, practically impossible to do for a general reader, and almost bound to offend someone (even nice easy-going people like Boltonians have their limits). Better to spend the effort on other ways of portraying the accent.
Such as?
Every accent seems to have some characteristic words and phrases. So I have Danny saying summat, owt and nowt. He says were instead of was, and occasionally says t'other instead of the other. It's gentle charicature, really, just enough to flag the speech as his, and still easy for most readers to follow.
Two other accent-related Danny-things. First, he sometimes says runnin instead of running, for example. Your English teacher probably told you to use an apostrophe to replace the missing letter (runnin'). It's up to you. I use the apostrophe if the character would normally say the final ing and don't bother if they wouldn't. (If I were writing for your English teacher, however, I'd put it in. :-) )
Second, he often leaves out the word the when he says something like I'm going to put kettle on. If you heard him say it, there'd be a little something before kettle, and it's tempting to try to write it as going to put t' kettle on, but as Doug found out (another tuh-one… utt-one… I can't say it), working out how to pronounce that can also trip up the reader. So I only have the southerners do it when they're mocking Danny.
I actually think I've pitched Danny's accent on the wrong side of the Pennines - Darrowby or Emmerdale, probably - despite hours listening to him and Fred Dibnah.
But I'm not trying to be especially accurate; the point is to create a clear impression - remember the street artist. You can tell Danny's different to the others, you can tell it's him speaking, and you can read and understand what he's saying.
Catchphrases
Catchphrases are just words or phrases that one character uses out of habit, enough so if you see it on the page, you'll think that it must be so-and-so.
The character Tom, for example, says Oh my god, actually and seriously. Harry seems rather fond of calling people you muppet, and he and Tom both have their own peculiar ways of addressing Danny. Danny has oh right and eh? - closet Canadian, that boy. Doug fukkits and craps a lot, and calls other people dude.
Actually, I've never actually heard the real Harry say muppet, for example, but it does seem to be something he would do. And now, some of you are saying it, too. It doesn't have to be real to seem real.
I wound up keeping a little list of the ones I wanted for each character, partly to remind myself, and partly so I could avoid having the wrong character use someone else's phrase by accident. (Having the character do it deliberately is a different matter…)
Mannerisms
Danny sometimes has trials… tribbles… no, trouble finding the right word. Tom often cuts peop-
Hey, don't bring me into this!
…cuts people off when they're talking. He also tends to think out loud, which can result in rather long sentences that, well don't always seem to get to the point very quickly, seriously, it's because he's trying-
Are you quite finished?
With you, yes. Harry often comes out with some very dry or sarcastic remark - very diplomatic, Tom, well done.
Danny is the only character who ever uses the name “Doug”, and only when he's talking to Doug or to himself. And Doug tends to rethink and edit what he's saying as he's saying it. Which brings me to…
Cadence - the rhythm and flow
Some speech is fluid, it flows and it swirls and it rises and falls and carries you on to the end. Other speech sounds quite flat and goes thud. Sometimes the effect comes from the choice of words, and punctuation, can alter, the flow, quite a lot. Try re-reading this paragraph out loud.
The cadence can identify a character. Doug's speech is often quite hesitant and choppy. Harry's tends to flow, as does Tom's.
But cadence also reveals a character's mood. Compare tired, stressed Doug outside the restaurant
Shop, I saw it. In the car. Don't wait. I'll get something, a sandwich, or… something
with relaxed Doug at the end of the final chapter
And now I'm doing things I never dreamed I would. It's weird, and crazy, and I'm scared sh-
Or normal Tom
The big stuff is easy, but all the small things, the stuff that bugs different people
with Tom coming apart at the seams
I promised, I'll take care of him, and I… Now Harry hates my guts, and you, papers can't wait, to get their claws in… All I'm doing is, hurting everyone.
Or Danny when he's relaxed and when he's out of breath from running up stairs, or… I quite like doing this, actually.
Vocabulary
Does a character stick to simple words, or do they use a lot of big words, or do they use a lot of jargon like a doctor or a computer programmer?
Danny and Doug tend to use shorter, simpler words; Harry and Tom use longer words as well, and Harry even uses other languages. That's all there is to it, really.
Except, it's incredibly easy to get this wrong. Writers get lost in the moment and forget it's the character speaking and not them, although sometimes it's as if they feel they have to use fancy language to appear smart, or literate, or something. Blame the English teachers :-) who encourage pupils to expand their vocabularies by giving extra marks for some exotic specimen pulled from the depths of Roget's Thesaurus.
A large vocabulary is fine, but remember, the reader has to believe the character is saying the words. Pick the wrong ones and it jars. There are stories out there written in first person from, say, Danny's point of view, that have him saying something like this:I gazed for an eternity into the haunting ebon depths of his crystal cerulean orbs…
Or maybe it was Dougie. Either way, it's just unreal. I don't know anyone who would say that, and I bet you don't either. I've never ever heard anyone say cerulean. Certainly not either of those two.
So read it aloud, and if you can't actually picture the character saying it, change it.
And don't throw away your thesaurus or ignore your teacher. The book has its uses; both it and WordNet are great for finding for the right word… but not the biggest or most exotic. Your teacher is (or was) there to help you get good grades on English exams. It's just sad that that's not the same thing as teaching you how to write well. (But that's a subject for a different rant.)
Gender
I want to mention this here, because it did factor in my thinking when I was writing AtST, but I'm not sure what I want to say about it, and it might not be the right place.
The characters are boys. Regardless of whether they're straight, gay, or the filling in a Woody Allen sandwich, they have to come across as sound like boys.
I think this is another symptom of the author substituting her voice for the character's. Yes, her voice: that seems to be how it works, and it's true working the other way as well. And there I'm going to leave it,for now.
The bottom line is probably the same as for everything else: try to picture the character or someone you know like them saying the words. If it doesn't feel right, it probably isn't.
Little Tricks
Maybe the ideal is when, even with no attributions, no he said - she said, it's clear who's talking. Hard to achieve for a whole group, but for one or two, it lets you have longish pieces of unbroken dialogue: just the speakers voices. Good for scenes in the dark, and I don't necessarily mean power cuts. :-)
There's a lot of fun to be had with a character like Harry. He's got a voice of his own, but there's a couple of touches that add even more to his character.
First, he changes his voice a little when he talks to different people. With Doug, for example, Harry sometimes says dude and his tone becomes a little parental. With Tom, he can be businesslike or a little annoyed. And with Danny… :-) The same is true if he's talking on the phone to someone - what can you tell about his relationships with his siblings Thomas and Kat? - or for effect when he got really stuck in to Kev in the TV studio.
Second, Harry's a mimic, so he'll use his own version of someone else's voice, as when he's telling Doug that Danny was all, I really like 'er, I reckon she might be t' one. Note how it's written for Harry, though; if it were Danny saying it, I'd probably have written I really like her, I reckon she might be one.… (Minor point: it's almost worth putting the t' in there to avoid confusion: if Danny had really thought the transvestite might be one he wouldn't have got into trouble.)
OK, I know I said not to write out pronunciations. But like every good rule, there are times to relax it. I did it a couple of times with Kev in chapter 3, when he says Clo-eye (for Chlöe) and Doog-eye. Cheap shot maybe, but it seems to work there, for those two words.
The other written-out pronunciation is when Danny is legless. He wasn't supposed to be particularly easy to follow there, but I tried to ensure Harry made clear what was being said, and - in terms of word-count, anyway - Danny didn't say all that much.
Listen, listen, listen
Where do all these little quirks come from? Some are pure imagination. Most come from watching and listening to recordings of real people and picking and choosing from what I see and hear. The great thing about basing characters on real people like McFly is that there's plenty of material to work from.
To do this reasonably well takes a bit of effort. It's not particularly hard work: the key thing is to listen carefully to people talking. But that means listening: to the accent, the vocabulary and catchphrases and stuff, not getting sidetracked by how smart, cute, ugly, or stupid they are.
It also means listening to what you've written. Read it out loud to yourself or someone else (you need to hear it), or get someone to read it to you. One neat trick is to get the computer to do it. Does it sound right; can you imagine that person saying that?
Did I get it “right”? I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out, for this story. The real people probably wouldn't even recognise themselves. As long as they don't recognise me. :-)
Thoughts?