Writing

“Realistic dialogue?!” she shrieked. “Heavens no! Kindly abandon such a hazardous suggestion, immediately!”

I have a day job – even the published writers have to have them apparently so this will come as no surprise to you. Sometimes I feel like this place is like my super-hero identity, whereas my day job is where I go to blend into society. Only I’m not super. Or heroic. Damn, maybe I need a better analogy. Anyway, I had an interesting experience in my day job that’s made me think about dialogue in books – more importantly realistic dialogue.

I’ve been transcribing an interview that I conducted recently, and I was shocked by two things. One: that my voice sounds like that (I will never open my mouth again, thank God I’m a writer and not a DJ) and two: just how broken and poorly formed our sentences are in conversation.

I already knew the latter was true; I first started to think about that when I studied a linguistics module as part of my degree, specifically the acquisition of language. One of the puzzles about the way children learn a language is that they have such poor data to work with. They listen to adults who are constantly starting sentences, abandoning them half way through and saying something else. Sometimes we use the wrong word without realising, or mispronounce something, not to mention the number of ‘errs’ and ‘ums’ there are a day.

Suffice it to say that I am constantly amazed by how we learn to speak despite this. Of course, I’m not suggesting that children produce perfect speech straight away, there is a definite trial-and-error process, and of course, most people talk to children differently than they talk to adults (that’s a whole other topic that my inner geek loves – for some other time and another blog perhaps) but I’m still impressed.

Listening to the interview today, this stopping and re-starting happened constantly. It wasn’t a simple conversation about the weather, so the error rate was bound to be high. But still, it was an eye-opener.

Being a writer disguised as a person who does a day job, this fascinated me. Ever since this activity, I’ve tried to think of any books that I’ve read that contains dialogue even close to being as realistic as the transcription I produced today. I could think of the odd book that has characters with dialects – Joseph in Wuthering heights for example, with his broad Yorkshire accent. But no characters that sounded like we did today.

Quite rapidly I realised that there probably aren’t any – and you know, I’m glad about that!

If people in books talked like we do in real life, they would be ten times long and an agony to get through. Whilst we may not notice all of these errors we make in spoken conversation, we would be painfully aware of them if we had to read them! I never realised how poorly I spoke until I had to type every word of it (though in truth I ended up editing as I went along for the very same reason it doesn’t appear truthfully in books!)

So after rejoicing that no authors that I’ve ever read have produced exactly authentic speech, I wondered why I have judged some dialogue to be more ‘realistic’ than other renditions. I think I’m forming a rudimentary list of things that give a semblance of realistic dialogue, I was wondering if any of you have more to add to my list?

1: That all characters do not sound the same. Whether this is sentence construction, types of similes favoured, the complexity of language used, all kinds of reasons, one of the things I hate is if a cast of characters have a similar voice – most probably the author’s voice creeping in to the dialogue as well as the narrative!

2. Long speeches, except in plausible situations, or as a character trait. Sometimes it seems that a character has become a mouthpiece. It’s quite rare for real people to give an impromptu discourse on something in a normal situation. Obviously things like confessions, or retellings of events etc aren’t included.

3. Implausible eloquence. This is something I’ve been very aware of in my book, as a significant proportion of the children in it haven’t been educated, and have had limited contact with adults. There are reasons why they have the language level they do – it would make poor reading if they only had ten words in their repertoire and a bunch of made up ones for the rest – after all, XKCD was right.

4. Occasional false starts – the odd um, err etc can help I think. Not too much though.

I think that’s my lot for now but there must be more – your turn!