Craft series #1 - voice

[sage]

Hi! This is the first post in what I hope will be an ongoing Craft of Writing series. The way it works is I'm going to pick a question off the list, give my thoughts on how it can be resolved, and then in the comments, we'll talk about it. If you have alternate suggestions, great! If you want something elaborated, also great! The thing is, we want to keep this discussion fairly close to the topic in question, so if this inspires OTHER, totally unrelated how-to questions, please go add them to the list!

Following this post, I'll do an Admin post requesting a volunteer to take on another question.


fspider suggested:
Something about developing voices/dialogue? You hear about writers "hearing" a character's voice, but how do you reach that point lacking a lightening bolt?




I'm starting with this one because I'm one of those people who can hear characters' voices -- in fact, I can't write in a fandom until I do hear their voices clearly in my head and I only really get blocked when I can't hear them anymore. Part of why I haven't been writing much DS fic lately is I'm having a lot of trouble hearing Fraser and RayK talking, so maybe answering this will be useful for me, too.

I'm not a visual person -- when I close my eyes, all I see is blackness, but I hear things in the void. When I start writing something, I close my eyes and listen for the characters to show up and start talking. It's sort of like being in a dimly lit theater and waiting for the characters to come out on stage. Gradually I figure out who wants to be the POV character and what story it is he or she feels compelled to show me.

Then, suddenly, they're in the scene, words are flowing, and all I have to do is transcribe it. (And then clean it up in editing so it makes sense to people who aren't me. :P)

Now, as far as getting the voice clearly, I do a lot of things, some of which are kind of silly. The ones everyone will tell you are:

1. listen to good episodes, where the characterization in the ep is exactly fitting with the story swimming around in your head. (Some Frasers are more Fraserish than others (same with RayK); Stella, Frannie, and Meg are notoriously inconsistent; Vecchio post-Vegas is different than in the Pilot, etc.) When you listen more than you watch, you hear the rhythm, the pauses, the breaths, the muttering, the undertone of life that you miss from reading the transcript or watching with the sound off (which are good for looking for other things). Thing is, just watching normally doesn't work for me because I get caught up in the ep and forget to pay attention to how they sound. So, listening. :)

2. read classic fic. I reread resonant8 when I need a voice-check, because her work helped define the characters in my head when I was brand-new to fandom. My Fraser isn't her Fraser, but her Fraser helps turn the volume up on my inner Fraser's voice so I can better understand what he's saying and get it onto the page. I'm sure everyone has their favorite touchstone authors/fics that they return to when they feel like they've lost their connection to a character -- Res-fic happens to work best for me. :)

3. get into their heads (and/or their skin). Beating muses into submission has never worked for me -- they just laugh at me and clam up even worse than before. Seduction works better, so sometimes I immerse myself in things the characters value -- kind of taking them on a date doing something they love, so they'll let their walls down and let me see (hear) who they are. Music works for a lot of people. In my head, RayK has a huge thing for Joe Strummer and young Frannie was over the moon for Madonna. Sometimes I buy food they would eat (arctic smoked salmon for Fraser). Sometimes I look through my closet and think about the clothes they wear and what that says about them. Writing about flannel or silk or leather happens differently when you and your POV character are both wearing it.

As far as the dialogue itself, the thing is, they talk to each other. An episode of Due South isn't 45 minutes of silent brooding punctuated by car chases. They're chatty, snarky/courteous, opinionated guys, and it can be fun to start a scene in the middle of a conversation and let it run a little to see where they take it -- and then to see how it continues when an armed robbery (or whatever) interrupts their flirting and they have to do some actual policework before they can go home and make out over hockey and Chinese. *g*

I'm not sure if this covers what you were looking for in your questions -- or if it makes sense to anyone who isn't in my head, so please please ask questions and I'll try to make things clear! :D

And if anyone has other solutions for ways to better hear and convey voice -- or if you have other voice-related questions, please say so in comments!

Thanks!! :D

ETA: I forgot one thing I used to do all the time before my jaw started giving me trouble. Read aloud! Nothing tells you whether you have the flow of their voices down like actually speaking the words on the page (and it also helps you find those annoying elided and's and the's that you miss when skimming). :)

Comments

[chesamus.livejournal.com]

I think the problem most people have with Ray is they get bogged down in the "des guys over dere" and "dos idiots" etc. Yes, Ray does have a bit of regional uniqueness to his dialog, but it's more Chicago by way of Brooklyn as spoken by a Canadian. I tried to write in it once, but then started micro-managing the dialog until it sounded like a bad Sopranos episode. I finally decided that if the words were chosen correctly, the reader would hear the accent without needing to read it.

Dropping in the occasion 'cuz' or 'ya think' isn't going to pose a problem, but I find reading an entire story with what I've heard one person call "authentic voice" pretty frustrating.

[sage]

Oh god, writing in dialect bugs me so much. It's so distracting, I can't focus on the story. It isn't as if he's speaking another language or that ANYONE actually spells it phonetically. As far as "authentic voice", I've NEVER seen anyone feel a need to write out 'sew-ree' or 'pro-cess' for Fraser, and if you're doing so-called "authentic voice" then I would expect it to be applied across the board. (Hi, cultural preferencing is such a pet peeve, sorry.)

The only time it makes any sense to show it is if POV character totally can't understand what he's saying and it's directly relevant to the story. Or like, someone is tied up and talking around a gag and you're writing what POV-guy is hearing.

[nos4a2no9.livejournal.com]

I completely agree about Ray's dialogue being distracting when presented phonetically. It's hard to avoid sometimes, though - I found myself slipping into it (more of the "cuz" or "ya think" variety than "des guys", thankfully) while writing a recent story and it's a tough habit to break once you start.

I guess it comes down to how you're using it and why. Professional authors frequently make use of phonetic dialogue. If you've read David Adams Richards's "For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down", the character CKR plays in the film speaks almost entirely in phonetic New Brunswick dialogue. So it can be done, but only with serious concessions to what becomes possible in the rest of the story. If you're writing phonetic dialogue for RayK it has to be done for a specific purpose - Fraser musing on the differences in their accents might justify it, I suppose, or if you're trying to illustrate some of the class/cultural barriers between RayK and Stella. I'm not sure if I've ever seen it done well in a story that relies heavily on this specific kind of dialgoue, but it must serve a purpose in small doses. I think.

[revbiscuit.livejournal.com]

Dropping in the occasion 'cuz' or 'ya think' isn't going to pose a problem, but I find reading an entire story with what I've heard one person call "authentic voice" pretty frustrating.

I'm glad it's not just me, then. I have trouble with phonetic spelling in general because I'm not a native speaker. My default phonetic spelling is Italian, and it looks totally different. I have no trouble with ordinary spelling because I associate the sound with the word - when I read something, I tend to hear the words as if the person who plays the character had spoken them - but whenever anyone tries to emulate dialect that way I am immediately at sea.

It's difficult deciding where you should draw the line. I'm with you, I'd keep it simple and just stick to easily recognisable words, that way it doesn't stop you in your tracks.