speech thoughts.

[kippurbird]

I don't remember if I wrote about this or not. But I figure, why not again? Right?


So. Writing group last night. There was a new member who couldn't seem to make up his mind on if he wanted the piece to be a one woman play or a short story. It'd originally been a one woman play because he has a friend of a friend of someone famous who might be interested in it or something. It felt like reading a play scrunched up into story format. It was all dialog. Anyway, this is not the point. The point is, when reading my piece he commented on the fact that the characters didn't sound like they were in a fantasy world.

Which has always been an odd sort of thought for me. What do characters who live in a fantasy world not of Earth sound like? Do they have to sound like Conan the Barbarian or someone from the Lord of the Rings? And to people in Conan or the Lord of the Rings think they sound like someone from Conan or Lord of the Rings when they say things, like "I feel the heat of a thousand suns in this desert as those traitorous dogs flee to their deaths!" as opposed to, "It's gonna be hot in that desert when we're going after those traitors." Sure, one is more poetic... but it doesn't sound natural to me. There maybe different cultural rules for people interacting with superiors and things and how to address them... but I'm fairly certain normal everyday people don't talk like the heat of a thousand suns.

I just wanted the characters to sound like they were having a normal conversation without making it look like they were mining the thesaurus for every day things like, "I need to go take a shit". This isn't to say I don't put cultural idiosyncrasies into their speech, but in most conversation you tend to stick to short and clear sentences as opposed to long pontifications. I feel like that if a character is speaking a non-Earth language, which they clearly are (the last time I checked Earth doesn't have two moons) then they're for all intents and purposes speaking as we would do.

Comments

[canadianevil.livejournal.com]

Your characters do occasionally sound very modern in their speech. It can feel weird at times.

[kippurbird.livejournal.com]

You're right. I'll try and keep an eye out on it.

[subieko.livejournal.com]

I agree. It's tempting to gussy up the dialogue so the characters will sound more 'fantastical', but THEY don't know they're in a fantasy world (unless it's that kind of story--then maybe they would do that on purpose! *laughs*). To the characters, it's every-day life. Of course, using very modern slang and expressions could get awkward or confusing, but making it too formal and fancy-sounding just gets silly.

Unless you've got a character who just talks like that...I say things like 'heat of a thousand suns' sometimes. XD

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Unless you're writing the dialogue for a fantasy-world equivalent of William F. Buckley, Jr., plain speech is definitely better.

If you are writing the dialogue for WFB Jr. then, yeah, he probably stretches his mouth every morning so those big words come right out.

[notadoor.livejournal.com]

Last year, my playwriting teacher pointed out that Shakespeare, though he wrote plays set in Italy, Denmark, ancient Rome, ancient Greece, etc., etc., always wrote in the common dialect of his time (though it seems terribly formal & strange to us now.)

Therefore, he said, unless you have a damn good reason for doing something out of the ordinary (and know damn well what you're doing/how you're doing it), stick to plain English.

[dove-cg.livejournal.com]

Right. You want the dialogue to sound natural and I tend to do about the same thing, though if someone speaks in a specific manner, I cater to it. (Like a king potentially speaking in a more formal/elegant manner.) But you know,I think it can depend on what type of time period the fantasy world is set in. While I agree with Notadoor entirely, I suppose having a lot of words that are strictly modern usage could be a little unusual if the setting is meant to feel older than that.

Then again, I agree that it should be pretty obvious the world is unusual and therefore fantasy when the narration starts bringing up unusual details. Perhaps you should ask him to clarify? He may simply be voicing a preference for what he has read a lot of but it never hurts to find out what exactly he feels is different. Perhaps he felt it seemed like more of a sci-fi setting? It's unlikely but it isn't impossible.

But I am sleepy... ^_^;

[x-trickster-x.livejournal.com]

You see, I've always found dialogue when taken out of a modern/Earth context one of the trickiest things about writing. On one hand, you don't want your characters to sound like they're the bastard children of Shakespeare, Tolkein and a thesaurus. On the other hand, it sounds just as jarring if your characters sound like they have an i-phone in their back pocket.

I guess the thing is to find a good medium because as hard as you try, more modern speech will always sound more casual to the average reader. However make it too modern and you lose believability. I'm having a similar problem writing in a Victorian setting- it's very hard to make conversations not sound stuffy and... well... Victorian whilst still making them authentic.

[x-trickster-x.livejournal.com]

Oh, just forgot to add. The problem is that certain words and phrases can just tip the entire balance in one direction and these vary depending on different people. Like people suggested above, did you ask him what bits about the speech in particular didn't sound right?

[reverie-shadow.livejournal.com]

Right. Because we all know that there's only one kind of fantasy out there.

Personally, I prefer fantasy characters when they speak with a more modern tone. The reason I'm starting to hate the fantasy genre so much, is that there are so many writers who seem to be under the impression that there's only one way to write fantasy, and that's with frilly, confusing dialogue. Their way of talking becomes so metaphorical that it loses all its meaning because the meaning has just become lost.

But hey, if your characters talk modern yet still have an air of believability, more power to you.