Today I had a meeting with one of my independent study students. I felt bad for him, because my lunch meeting ran over and he had to sit through a class session before we could talk, but as we discussed his work, I found myself on a familiar refrain that seems super-simple but I think many writers don’t keep in mind: the most important part of a character is CONSISTENCY.
This student is writing a screenplay. It’s going pretty well in terms of plot and pacing, but the struggle point for the writer is with character voice. And yes, depending on how famous you are as a writer, you might be more or less permissive with the dialogue in your scripts, but that’s not the way to learn character development.
It’s always a weird point for me as a teacher because that was the part of writing fiction that came easy to me; I never really struggled to give each character a unique and consistent voice. My problem was– just as it is with my game narratives, when I serve as a DM, when I write an email to make a case to someone, etc.– that I tend to want to draw out the discussion a bit longer than most. I once had 130 pages of a novel where the protagonist had moved a sum total of about 45 feet. Perhaps that’s an interesting concept piece, but it’s not a good action-driven story.
I offered my student three pieces of advice. I’m going to share them here, too, so that next time I can point to this (and some of you can either say “oooh, cool” or “no wonder he writes games and not novels or movies”).
- You can’t REALLY worry about the complete rounding out of a character’s voice until you know her full arc. Obviously I don’t mean that you need for your character to go from the start of the story until death before you can go back and shore up the dialogue, but what I mean is that if you’re deleting a sentence over and over trying to get the dialogue just right, and you’re like ten pages or so in, you can’t get it perfect because you don’t know the character. Keep telling the story, and eventually the character will say THE thing that defines who the character is. You’ll get to “I’m not even supposed to be here today!” or “I love you,” “I know.” You’ll get to “yippie-kai-aye-motherfucker.” You’ll get to “they speak English in What?” It WILL happen, because the character wants to have a voice. If you write like 100 pages and the character still either sounds like you or, worse, sounds like the most generic person ever, guess what? You don’t have a character. You have WWE star Roman Reigns. Stop. Do not pass go. Burn the draft. Bathe in the ashes and rise anew with a new story and character.
- If you write and that line, that moment, doesn’t come to you, there’s a second sort-of-wild option that is a modification of something they do at the Sacred and Mighty Iowa Workshop, so you know it’s good ish. It’ll get you some strange looks. But trust me, this works. You wake up. You go to your closet. You dress AS your character. You go into the world (I recommend going out-of-town shopping or something… don’t go where you know people and will follow your own habits). Go be the character. Walk in a park. Get food. Ask for directions. Try to make a friend. If it’s a strong character, you’ll connect with it. When you do, go find a place to start writing stuff down.
- Here’s the secret. It’s a super-simple trick, and I bet at least 100 other writing teachers have thought of it, but I actually came up with this one on my own. Once you have THE critical sentence or two. Once you know the character and the voice is unmistakable, you write that sentence or two on a note card. Then as you re-read your text, you use that note card to track sentences, sliding down the page. When the character in question is speaking, it should sound correct and match up in tone and cadence with what is on the card. If it doesn’t, you need to revise.
This seems, at least to me, like it’s pretty obvious, but it’s also the trap we all fall into as storytellers. In all of my novels, the protagonist is me… in some way shape or form. The thing is it can’t LITERALLY be me. If you can’t tell from my written voice, I have a distinctive diction and pace. I say “so” all the time, for example. I say “the problem is” frequently. I respond to most prompts with “cool,” even though that’s not the most appropriate word.
I swear often for effect when I’m mad. Or when I want something to be funny.
All of my characters can’t do that, because that’s not how the world works. People don’t speak in complete sentences. People don’t mirror the diction of the people they are with (not always, anyway). One of my favorite characters I ever wrote was an emo kid who had a penchant for setting things on fire. He would never, ever say “penchant.” He mixed Offspring lyrics into almost every long conversation he had. He loved to make up fake quotes from the Art of War. I can still remember his note-card from my revisions. It was him quipping back at one of his friends in the story. It said “You can fuck with me. Won’t work, tho.”
I mentioned one of Joss Whedon’s lines for the Hulk yesterday. It’s one such moment of dialogue. That’s where this universe’s Hulk came from. He is THAT sentence, distilled and repeated. All the rules of Whedon’s Hulk are right there. Whedon did similar things with characters on Buffy, on Angel, etc. At one point early on in Buffy– I think it was season 2– the once stereotypical villain, Spike, says “You’re not friends. You’ll never be friends. Love isn’t brains, children, it’s blood. Blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.” That’s all you need, right there, to know how to write dialogue for Spike. That’s who he is. Sarcastic, romantic, a little bit vengeful but a terrible bit hurt.
Dialogue has so much power because it’s where we show instead of telling. But if let it go south, and all the characters in a piece speak the same way, it will make even the most brilliant narrative arc feel terrible. Because it’s the style that grabs us, and the style is in the variance of speech. It’s why computers (and monkeys) can’t actually write Hamlet. There’s a template for Hamlet. It goes “alas, poor Yorick” and keeps going from there. That little snippet is all you need to figure it out.
Careful with your dialogue. And if you have other cool tricks, share ’em.