In this week’s episode, we’ll talk about using dialogue to create distinctive characters in fiction.
I also talk about buying an Xbox and answering reader questions.
THE PULP WRITER SHOW will return with new episodes in June 2022.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, welcome to Episode 120 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 6th, 2022 and today we’re going to discuss how to use dialogue to help with characterization. I’m also going to talk about something I didn’t think I would ever do: buy an Xbox. Before we get into all that, let’s have some updates on my current writing projects.
I am exactly 59,000 words into Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves, and I am definitely going to get to 60,000 before I have to call it a day. I’m also about 3,700 words into Cloak of Spears and that will be the book that hopefully comes out after Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves. I’m hoping to have Blade of the Elves out in June and Cloak of Spears out in July. I am also proof listening to Frostborn: The Shadow Prison the audiobook. I’ve listened to the first six chapters of it and I’m very excited to have that series complete in audiobook and available for you to listen to, and that should be probably June or July when that’s finally done, hopefully sooner.
00:01:03 Thoughts and Reader Comments on the Xbox
Now for our first of our topics: the Xbox. I recently joked that it was old enough for a midlife crisis now. I thought about it and I bought an Xbox. Other than the Nintendo Switch, which I got in 2019 to celebrate my 100th book, which was Dragontiarna: Knights (the audiobook book version of which is now free to Audible members). It’s the first traditional game console I’ve used since 1998, and I didn’t play any console games at all from 1998 to 2019. The technology has changed just a little bit since 1998. The reason I got an Xbox is because back in the old days, one of my jobs was doing tech support for college dormitories. I used to get very annoyed when students complained about connectivity problems with their Xboxes and PlayStations- college is expensive, and I thought at the time was you should be doing homework and networking career opportunities, not playing games. But I’m older now, maybe marginally wiser.
Traditionally, a midlife crisis is when you reflect back on your life and try to relive your youth or experience things that you missed out on the first time around. That said, I’m pretty happy with how my life turned out, and I think I’m blessed to be able to say that. If Doc Brown pulled up in his DeLorean and offered me a chance to go back and change something, I’d tell him nah, I’m good. Also, I’ve seen enough time travel stories to know that if I tried to change something, one of the people who complained to me that Xbox Live was running slow would wind up becoming the tyrannical supreme leader of the dystopian imperium of global harmony or something, so no going around messing with the past.
That said, I did wonder if I missed out on something in terms of console gaming. Perhaps I denied myself what would otherwise have been an enjoyable and enriching experience, so I got an Xbox Series X brand new game console. What’s the first game I play? Skyrim, obviously. I have to admit playing Skyrim this way is very comfortable and I’m going to finish a quest I never played on PC or Switch, the Imperial Storm Cloak Civil War. I flipped a coin and it landed on Empire, so I sided with the Empire. Once I win the Empire’s war for them, it will be on to the Dawnguard expansion. I have to admit the Xbox ecosystem is very impressive. Granted, I still remember playing PC games by swapping out a stack of five and 1/4 inch floppies and very carefully configuring emm386.exe, so maybe I’m easily impressed, but still.
When I talked about this on Facebook, a couple of people had opinions. William said: the original Halo is the only Xbox game I’ve ever really played, but the pace is very good and goes well with the sci-fi story.
I have tried Halo since it came with Game Pass. So far I’ve managed to figure out how to run in circles while shooting at the wall and how to accidentally roll the car down the hillside into the stream. Hopefully if I have time to play it more, I will get better at it.
Scott says: Elden Ring is currently popular. You may enjoy if you like Skyrim. I play Elder Scrolls Online on PC, however, so I can’t vouch for the console experience.
I’ve heard good things about Elden Ring from many different people, and I was considering giving Elder Scrolls Online a try next month after I’m a little less busy. I don’t really like multiplayer games because to be perfectly frank, computer games are where I go when I get tired of people and I want to unwind a bit, but I’ve heard there’s a ton of excellent solo content in Elder Scrolls Online, and if you want to, you don’t ever have to interact with another human while you’re playing the game. I may have to give that a try.
Jesse says: Dawnguard was excellent.
Dawnguard is one of the expansions for Skyrim, and unfortunately it turns out I won’t be able to play it on the Xbox because I finished the Civil War plot line and then I tried to start the Dawnguard plot line. However, there’s a bug in the Xbox version of the game where if you find the location of the vampire lord’s castle before you come there for the quest, the quest line breaks and doesn’t continue, so I don’t think I’ll be able to play Dawnguard on Xbox. If I want to play it, I’ll probably play the Switch because of my Switch save state for Skyrim. I haven’t visited the vampire lord’s castle yet, so I think I’m going to play Dragonborn instead once I have a little more money in game saved up.
00:05:11 Main Topic: Dialogue and Characters
Now on to the main topic of this week’s show, which comes from a question that Scott asked. It was a very interesting question that got me thinking, which is why it’s now the topic of this week’s podcast. Scott’s question is: “a question on making dialogue for individual characters unique to them. It’s very common for all characters to sound so homogeneous that attribution is the only way to know one speaker from another’s. Awkward accents aside, what are some techniques that help separate social classes and regions in speech?”
I think Scott’s absolutely right- accents aren’t a great way to differentiate characters in books. That’s different in audiobooks, of course, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish. There’s this example in HP Lovecraft’s short story of The Color Out of Space of a farmer talking a phonetic accent, and it’s so bad in what’s otherwise a very interesting horror story. And everyone should read that story just to read that farmer’s dialogue as an example of how not to write phonetically accented dialogue.
That said, I’ve found in my own writing, in my own experience, that varying sentence structure and length and vocabulary are better as a method of distinguishing characters’ dialogues from one another. Like a teenage girl might talk in long, rambling sentences that usually reference the opinions of her friends, while an elderly farmer might speak in laconic sentence fragments. A college professor might have more complex sentence structure with a greater vocabulary, while a human resources professional might talk entirely in business jargon like this: “I’m reaching out today to touch base on performance evaluations.”
An actor or a standup comic or performer might talk entirely in motive based language, such as when offering opinion, they’ll say “I feel that” or “my feeling is that.” They’ll have very emotion-based language. A doctor or accountant might be more clinical in their speech, such as, you know, “the prescription is”, or “the evidence suggests”, or “the numbers say.” Police officers and members of the military will often have their own jargon with a lot of acronyms that can be impenetrable to outsiders or people unfamiliar with that specific kind of culture. So if you’re writing characters who are in the military or are police officers, it might be worthwhile to learn the common terms they use and work that into your dialogue.
Profanity is a tricky one. It’s very easy to distinguish speech patterns among characters using profanity. But profanity often grabs readers, though in one way. I recently had someone complain that Nadia in the Cloak Mage book says “goddamn” a lot. And the truth is I kind of dialed down her profanity. I think that if Nadia existed in real life and was a real person, every third word would be a profanity once she got ticked off and when she got really mad, she’d swear a lot more than she really does in the books, where I do dial it back a bit.
When reading dialogue, it’s also important to remember that people rarely give direct answers in conversation and frequently go off in tangents, like I just did when I was talking about Nadia and profanity. For that matter, the subtext of a conversation is often more important than the actual words that are actually being said. You can frequently see that at major life events or traumatic life events like a funeral or a mass layoff, where people will spend a lot of time discussing trivialities about the weather or how the drive was or minor matters, rather than the enormous glaring fact in front of them of the funeral or the mass layoff or the other unpleasant event they’re at.
Now on to examples. Let’s imagine a detective is investigating a murder in a bank lobby and asks five witnesses where they found the body. The way that the five witnesses talk can differentiate them from each other and provide insight into their character. In this example are Tanya (a teenage girl), Braden (a teenage boy), Rick (an imperious bank executive), Janet (a candidate for state senator), and Robert (an elderly farmer).
So here is what Tanya, the teenage girl said to the detective: “like, I came inside because I need to withdraw some cash in the stupid ATM wasn’t working like again, and oh my God, this dead guy was just on the floor in the middle of the bank. So I texted Zoe and Zoe was like, we need to get this on Facebook Live like, right now. But then Zoe’s mom heard what was happening. She told me to call the police, so I called 911 and the guy was like, “what’s your emergency?” I’m like, dude, there’s a dead guy on the floor.” And as you can imagine, she’d go on in this vein for quite some time.
By comparison, this is what Braden the teenage boy would say while mumbling and looking at the floor. “People started screaming. I saw this guy on the floor. He was like, dead. Can I go now?
This is what Rick the bank executive would say: “I heard a commotion in the lobby and I got up to see what was happening and the dead body was on the floor. I want to assure you that Mutual Fidelity Credit Banking takes all criminal matters very seriously and cooperates with the authorities to the fullest extent of the law. However, any further questions will need to be referred to our corporate counsel, and I’m afraid I have several other meetings scheduled this afternoon. Good day, officer.” So you can see this is a very distinctive and precise way of speech for Rick the banking executive, while providing insight into his character.
Our next response is from Janet, the state senate candidate: “The thoughts and prayers of my family and I are with the victim’s family in this terrible time. This tragedy only further proves that the policies of my opponents are actively harmful for the most marginalized communities in our state. When I’m your state senator, I will proudly stand for all communities.” She pauses. “Wait, is that the victim’s parents? I need to get a picture with them for my Twitter.”
So you can see, Janet talks very much like a politician. I think her dialogue period pretty much has been copied and pasted from Twitter. And it also provides insight into her character.
Our final example is Robert, the elderly farmer, who says to the detective: “Came in. Fellow was on the floor. Poor bastard looked like he’d been shot in the head. Checked his pulse anyway, and then called the cops.” That’s all he has to say.
So these five characters, as you can see, all talk in very different ways. I didn’t use any fancy accents or slang, only a little bit of profanity, but not all that much. But those were five distinct speech patterns, and the dialogue actually provides further insight into their characters. We can see that Tanya likes to talk. Brayden doesn’t like to talk. Rick has a high opinion of himself if he thinks he can brush off police officers conducting a murder investigation. Janet, the state senate candidate, is pretty ruthless and willing to exploit someone’s personal tragedy for her advancement. Of the five, Robert, the elderly farmer, was the only one who actually tried to help the guy who was dead on the floor.
So I hope that is a good example of how to differentiate characters using different vocabulary and speech patterns. When I talked about this on my blog, Grace said, “this is where stereotypes in writing come in handy. Even if you had only given the list of characters at the beginning and attributed each paragraph, I would have been able to guess who was speaking, because in this case each one is a basic stereotype. Obviously, not all characters fall exactly into a stereotype (see Tythrilandria from Cloak Mage), but it probably helps for one appearance characters.”
That is true. A longer-term technique, I think, is to subvert the expectations produced by the first impression of characters. Maybe the banker is secretly obsessed with graffiti or the teenage boy shovels the driveways and mows the lawns of his elderly neighbors without payment. Or the teenage girl is massively into Bitcoin mining. That makes for more realistic characters because in real life people often possess many different contradictory qualities, though for characters who have just one scene, you can probably get away with just the initial impression.
William asked about this (going off on a tangent like we did earlier): Where did Nadia pick up the habit of swearing a lot? I know Morvilind assigned some rather rough ex-military types to train her. So I guess it might have started there and grown worse issues left on her own and started mingling with criminals in general. It’s one of those things no one seems to have pointed out to her and she hasn’t self-reflected on it.
William is exactly right. That is where Nadia picked up her habit of swearing, because most of her teachers when she was a child were very rough people. And then when she got older and started out going out and doing missions for Morvilind and she met even more rough people. That said, Nadia isn’t particularly self-reflective but she does have enough self-control to dial back profanity in appropriate situations, whereas you know, sometimes you meet people in real life who have gotten so much in the habit of using profanity to pepper their speech that they can’t shut it off even when it’s like grossly inappropriate, like at a job interview or a situation like that. Nadia doesn’t have that problem. She is able to switch off profanity on her off as necessary, but if she is really angry then that’s when it will come out.
So that’s it for this week, and I should mention as a final one for this episode, the podcast will be going on hiatus until the middle of June or so. The reason for that is I need to finish Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves. I also need to proof the audiobooks of Frostborn: The Shadow Prison and Cloak of Shards. I also have a ton of real-life stuff I gotta do in May, so I need to prioritize, which means we’ll have a break from podcasting until mid-June when things calm down. So thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show this week. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next time.
