You have sheets and sheets of paper, all filled with plot, character sketches and situations. Maybe you've made one of those line chart things where you plot your main story points against an axis of the page number on which they will appear. You have your ending with the killer twist.
You know exactly what you want to say...but do you know how you're going to say it?
I don't mean the point of narrative: what I'm talking about is, well, talking. How do your characters speak?
As an English person living in Canada I am often acutely aware that I don't sound like the majority of people around me. I am not the archetypal tea-drinking, leg-before-wicket, Hugh Grant foppish stereotypical Englishman so beloved of Hollywood and the media. Rather I am a hairy-arsed, rough-and-tumble, beer-swilling, pasty-eating roustabout Sandancer Geordie from South Shields, rarely encountered much further south of Scotch Corner let alone in North America and definitely not in Hollywood.
Hang on, I'll just clarify that...there are famous Geordies:-
- Sting
- Eric Idle
To name but two...
Thing is, when you here them talk you wouldn't get a clue as to their origins...they have lost their regional accent. To my ear they sound like they come from nowhere...and characters need to come from somewhere!
As an experiment I am writing another blog in my local dialect, http://howaymanhinny.blogspot.ca/ ,with the words and phrases spelled out phonetically. It's hard going, even for a native speaker like me, translating the sounds into words and I've found it's also quite difficult for someone not familiar with the patois to read internally. However, it is a lot easier to read aloud.
Try writing some direct speech exactly as you would say it aloud, including all the err's, um's and you-know-what-I-mean's. Better still, record yourself talking casually, then play it back and transcribe it, using ellipses to fill in the pauses. Listen to the contractions you use, and the endings of words you miss off (I always miss of the G in words that end in 'ing' for instance).
I know a lot of people don't like listening to recording of themselves but hey, get over it!
Listen to speech patterns, the form as well as the content. We're all different, and when you transfer this 'difference' to your characters you imbue them with an essential layer of depth to the point the reader will be able to identify who is 'speaking' on the page just by the pattern of their words.
Have a look at http://howaymanhinny.blogspot.ca/ ...translations are available on request!
