Finding Your Writer's Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction by Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall

Author:Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall [Frank, Thaisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250093400
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY

Finding Dialogue through Impersonation

Just as your character’s inner voice is richly revealing, so is your character’s outer voice—his dialogue—laden with double-meaning, nuance, and implication. When you home in on what is important in dialogue you hear not only what is being said (and not said), but how it’s being said. You’re aware of interruptions, how people don’t listen. You hear someone being indirect, or challenging, or taking center stage. You notice how people talk past each other. “Mother, I quit my job.” “Do you want more stew, darling?”

Everyone has distinctive conversational mannerisms or strategies. (She says: “Do you think it’s cold in here?” when she wants the window closed. He says, “Close that damned window!”) And everyone has a subtext to what they say. (“Close that damned window!” could mean “I expect to have things my way,” or it could mean “I’m mad at you for not having sex with me.”) By capturing these distinctive markings as you write dialogue, you reveal something about your character as well as something about the emotional drama of the moment.

Great impersonators throw aside their own way of talking and take on the voice of another. As you work with character, letting yourself become possessed by this person, you want to abandon the automatic voice in your head that offers dialogue as you would speak it, and become the voice of this other person. Begin by quieting your own speech and absorbing what you hear around you. Spend a whole day listening to someone of the opposite gender, of another generation, or another ethnicity. Notice the difference between the way you talk and the way they do. What is something they would never say? How often do they ask questions? Do they express feelings directly? Do they speak briefly or are they long-winded? Are they hesitant or direct? Do they use particular “sayings” or colloquialisms? How is their cadence distinctive? Listen for what is not said as well as what is said; listen for the meaning of silence.

As you listen, notice how the body participates in speech. High-strung Mrs. Kinnard always talks a mile a minute, finishes your sentences for you, and waves her hands. Arnie Slater swallows his words and never looks at you. Your voice is influenced by your relationship to your body. So are the voices of your characters. The more deeply you’re grounded in a character’s body, the more easily you’ll capture his distinctive speech.

ILL WILL AS A SOURCE OF MONOLOGUE

It’s often easiest to hear a person’s conversational trademarks when you’re listening to someone who irritates you. The voice of someone who drives you crazy scratches around in your head like an irksome grain of sand and invades your very being. You remember every nuance, every annoying twang, every discordant clearing of the throat. I can call to mind in an instant a teacher from high school whose high-pitched nasal whine (“That’s easy for you to say, you don’t have to support yourself”) came incongruously from a pale, lovely face while she swung her nyloned leg.

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