Beldam

Different people write prose differently. This goes without saying. I’m sure there are even those out there who make a living out of deciphering people’s personalities via word choice—who you are shows up in your writing, that’s just how it is. At the same time, however, you have to concede to the personality of the character you’re writing. Sometimes, the word that you’d prefer to use your character would likely balk at should they ever find you were writing their story, and sometimes, the things you want to describe in a scene your character probably wouldn’t even notice in that situation. This issue is furth amplified by multiple points of view, where you have to take all of this into account, and make sure it changes from person to person—which is what I’m concentrating on in this article: the immediate differences between different points of view in the same body of prose. After all, even if you’re not giving way to your character as much as you should, if there’s no basis of comparison it’s not like the majority of people would notice (though sharper people might, so for the love of all that is holy, shake it up.)

I read somewhere (wish I knew where) that word choice is a monumental deal when you’re writing different points of view. Quite simply, the hobo living just this side of the gutter is not going to have the same sort of vocabulary as the valedictorian from Oxford or what have you, so their points of view are going to be wildly different from the get-go. I know it’s tough, but try not to show off how smart you are at the expense of characterization, because we all know how that turns out. This is probably going to be more obvious in first person, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t also be important in third.

Your narrative distance (there’s an article that was written not too long ago about that very topic, so you should totally check it out) plays a big part in this, naturally. If you’re in omniscient mode, this article probably doesn’t apply at all. If you’re in that sort of distant third person, where you can switch freely between POVs without breaks or anything, then it applies somewhat less (whether that’s a plus or a minus depends on the writer, I think.) If you’re in very ‘close’ third person or in first person, then hell yeah, this is all you. Vocabulary, sentence structure, all that beautiful stuff is going to switch up between characters. After all, everyone has different backgrounds and even people with very similar personalities probably don’t view the world in the same way.

Just to show how different prose gives a different preception of character, I’ll use the same character observing the same things in two different voices.

Jack had never been much for house work, and though half a decade separated them, it was clear this had yet to change. Amerie observed the man quite desperately needed a maid, as his house was in a state of utter disarray, books and boxes strewn this way and that across the floor, and there were several inches of dust building on every open surface. Not to mention the dubious substances building up on the carpet that, if you stared at them long enough, became rather terrifying to behold.

Versus:

Amerie remembered how Jack had always been fine with rolling around in his own filth when they were teenagers. Five years later, and not only could he still not clean for shit, but he still didn’t have the good sense to hire a maid to do it for him. You couldn’t take half a step through his house without tripping over a junk-filled box or toppled book-pile, and the dust on the walls had built up so thickly that breathing was genuine torture. And then there was that infected-looking stain that was spreading over the rug which, now that he noticed it, was really starting to creep Amerie out.

I probably could have made those quite a bit shorter, but I think they both illustrate what I’m getting at. They’re both thinking and describing the same things, but due to the very structure of how they convey it, it still gives the impression of two completely seperate people.

This brings me to my next point. Superficial differences are, obviously, not all that matter. Attitude is also absurdly important, and when used in conjunction with the superficial differences, give a much clearer picture of the individual who’s behind them. Like, random example, a character sees the color red—one version of the character describes it as being poppy red, but another, completely different version of a character might say it reminds them of communism. Little things like that speak volumes about a character, and you should always be aware of those small moments so you can take advantage of them.

Also, if the characters in the previous paragraphs were two different people, then it would stand to reason that they would describe different things, in addition to describing the same things differently. Maybe they wouldn’t really notice the dust, would just be a little irritated at stumbling over nonsense every two seconds, and would instead concentrate on the strange globe in the room the other protagnist failed to notice. And maybe they’d find the stain on the floor to be, instead of scary, almost endearing in its unabashed grotuesqueness. Or, hey, maybe they wouldn’t notice the dearth of floor at all, and you would actually need a non-POV character to ask in eye-popping frustration, “How do you live like this?!”

A good, fun way to work on this is having two seperate characters meet the same person or go to the same place and have the person/thing desribed, because it’s a good, showy way to illustrate the differences in these two characters, and to further back up characterization.

Even what I’m just going to call the ‘wind’ of the character will change. That is, how much time they spend describing or thinking about a certain thing. This is the difference between a three page soliloquy about the blinding beauty of a certain shade of azure and the pure, the almost earthly sphere-ness of a specific shape, and a description like, “It was blue and round and fluffy, and it was the ugliest cow he’d ever seen.”

In spite of all I’ve said, subtlety is not a bad thing. The differences don’t have to be immediately obvious or smack you in the face, but they shouldn’t be utterly nonexistent either, unless, of course, you’re doing it on purpose. People’s intricacies are often very subdued when viewed from outside, and there’s no reason why that shouldn’t be kept that way on paper, as long as the author is sure to make it interesting.

Even though it’s good to have variation between different POVs so that the two characters are actually distinct, I guess there’s just one thing to take into account: don’t make it too jarring. I myself am not sure if there’s a specific point at which prose begin to clash with one another. This is where the combination of style and skill come into play, and while one writer might make an absolute travesty out of their attempt to try different styles, the other might be incredibly good at it and it enriches their writing instead of detracting from it. It’s probably up to the writer to be able to tell for themselves whether their approach is good or not, and how different they want the various characters to appear.

Anyway, if you’ve managed to get all the way through this long-winded and somewhat scatter-brained article, congratulations. I hope it did you less harm than good.

Comment [5]

I know the age old story—we’ve heard it all before. There’s always a million reasons why people who should be writing aren’t, ranging from A to Z, and one hears them time and time again. However, with it being NaNoWriMo so unspeakably soon, I’d just like to say my only response to all the reasons and excuses and pretenses is a firm, flat, and resounding NO. The very fact that you have time to talk about not having time means there is a discrepancy in your story, dear sir, and I kid you not it shall be dealt with yes it shall.

Writing is one of those things where, should you like to make a career of it (or at least get a bit of recognition), someone isn’t going to walk up, hire you to write a book and then proceed to give you enough free time to do so. No, unless you’re a bored housewife or unemployed and living at home or in some other position in which you can slack and still get some food out of it at the end of the day, you are going to have other priorities over writing. But if you love writing then the fact is this—you make time. This sounds hard, and maybe a little cruel, but really, it’s not. Days are longer than people give them credit, and you should take advantage of every second.

Though I may be singing to the choir, I love writing. The first thing I ever wrote recreationally (unknowingly, and much to my embarrassment) was a horrible, horrible fanfic, and I did it to get closer to a cousin who liked the continuity it was based on. In the end, I got caught up in my own story and OCs and to call it a fanfic after a point might have been pushing it. I was eleven years old and I had stumbled on this whole wide world of words that had seemed so distant before, and I was in awe. And the idea of abandoning that world for more than a day at a time is practically debilitating.

Making time isn’t that difficult. On some days I wake up an hour earlier just to get fingers to keys, and more often than not, I stay up far later than is reasonable so what inspiration I have isn’t lost to the morrow. And yes, I have a sleep debt because of it. I work it off on the weekend and rack it up during the week, but in spite of miserable sleeping habits, sparodic eating habits, and an all-round eclectic approach to just generally not dying, I still do well in school, still do my homework, still do SAT tutoring for two hours three days a week, still do writing workshop on Saturdays, and still take naps on sunny afternoons when I feel overcome by stupor. The point is, writing takes dedication. Life doesn’t stop for anybody, and so to put writing on the backburner is of course your personal choice, and rarely is it something that is impossible for you to work around if you try.

The best way to write is by being an antisocial hermit—say what you like, but it works. Jot stuff down during meals, ignore phone calls from your friends to avoid temptation, and don’t let your family members drag you to the movies against your will. Hell, I have a few friends who tell me (though I wish they hadn’t) that they read in the bathroom, so why don’t you leave a pen and notepad in there for the same purpose? If you’re going on any trip of sufficient length (fifteen minutes is usually enough for me, though I tend to get sucked in by passing scenery) then write then. If you know you’re going to be waiting somewhere for a while, like at an airport or in a doctor’s office, need I repeat what you should do? If you want to write, then there is always time to do it. Often, it’s the will and inspiration that are lacking, but the world outside your mind tireless.

Looking for inspiration is tough, but finding it isn’t (how’s that for an ice cream cone for ya?) I got the inspiration for one story from the Evil Overlord List—another, from watching an episode of Zero Punctuation. Another from a wiki article on Belphegor, another from this dubious yaoi story I found through random linking, and yet another from a necklace I got in Thailand that had my name on a grain of rice. Even if they seem stupid, and even when they pop into your head and you don’t immediately say, “Le gasp! Eet shall be mah master-peeze!” that does not matter! As a writer it is your job to make it awesome! There is no such thing as a bad story—only bad execution.

But it’s true—getting yourself into that mindset is hard, and stressing about it makes it harder, so keep in mind, even when you’re writing, you don’t have to write a lot. We can’t all write twenty thousand words a week, nor should all of us attempt to (though it’s a wonderful thing when you can manage). The goal should be to write at all. The one document that is always open on my desktop is a thousand pages and it is where I put all the ideas, lines, passages, and dialogues that have no context and nowhere else to go. Even when I don’t feel particularly up to writing the next Othello, I jot a couple of lines in there every day without fail—by and large they are inaccessible to all but me, but so what? Until your words have been sculpted out of their ugly marble brick into a perfect replica of Michaelangelo’s David that we all know they can be, they are only for you, and you need to be able to use them. But I implore you, don’t let your days go on without words. My father always tells me there’s nothing more powerful than a word made real, and even if I don’t always agree with him, I am just as beguiled by them—and I can’t imagine a world in which people aren’t putting them to paper.

So write.

Do it.

Comment [12]

I think this is one of those things that everyone has problems with sometimes, especially if you’re one of those writers who does heavy dialogue pieces. Basically, the question is, how do you make a conversation interesting while still making it obvious how your characters are speaking? As we all know, how you say something and what you say are irrevocably intertwined (the reason why ‘speaking’ on the internet is such a massive source of miscommunication) and so it becomes an author’s duty to relay these spoken nuances into paper, at least during moments of unambiguity.

This really isn’t a problem for people who don’t have a lot of talking, or only have single character talking. For the former, the usual ‘said’ will suffice, and for the latter, you probably don’t even need speech tags. Most stories aren’t this way, and therefore this is one of those hurtles that needs to be gotten over to make a readable story, or at least, readable dialogue.

One thing people do—I know I did it a lot in my earlier years—is try to counter boring speech tags and long periods of dialogue by changing the speech tag every other line. To someone who either doesn’t read or a lot, or doesn’t yet have a feel for writing itself, this sounds like a simple and effective solution for countering something that other people wrestle with for hours. But, like I said, people with more experience will tell you that it kind of isn’t. To demonstrate:

“Is that a dog?” Alma asked.
“It looks like a rat,” Ede laughed.
“Catch it!” Carmen yelled.

After three lines, reading the speech tags is already tedious, and pretty annoying. I don’t know who these three people are, but I hate them, and I hope that thing they’re looking at has an infectious disease which they will invariably contract and, hopefully, die from. Though it does tell you how the characters are speaking, which I suppose means it’s serving its purpose, the constant switching of speech tags becomes boring, throws off the dialogue’s rhythm, and the whole conversation begins to blend into one amorphous mass. Changing speech tags is useful, but like chili peppers, can’t be used in excess. Or else it’ll kill you. Seasoning your dialogue with a long list of adverbs to describe how the character is speaking isn’t much better, and the problem still stands.

The normal, ‘boring’ speech tags of ‘said’ and ‘asked’ are your friends. Though they might not be as interesting, because people are used to them they’re also much less obtrusive and even as you read them, they kind of mill around in the back like twits at a prom, not truly being picked up by your brain. However, don’t go too far in the other direction and replace all the speech tags in the previous dialogue with ‘said’ because that will probably make it even worse and more unbearable to read.

Also, keep in mind how you describe the speaking character. I think, at the beginning of any story, the author already knows enough about a character to know when to put ‘Dima said,’ ‘the doctor said,’ or ‘the Russian said.’ You don’t need more than three—even two can suffice at times—but having them is important in connection to the dialogue and the main body of prose.

In regards to the above few paragraphs, however, there is something I’d like to mention. A few times I’ve been told to never say in two words what you can say in one. For instance, never write ‘said quietly’ when you can put ‘whispered.’ I, on the other hand, think this is ridiculous. Words are more than just letters and their meanings—rhythm is a huge part of writing, even in prose. If putting in ‘said quietly’ gives you just the right amount of syllables to complete what you perceive to be your sentence’s rhythm, then sure as hell go for it. For this, playing around with the speech tag placement is also a good idea. They don’t always have to go at the end of the line—cut the speech into two pieces and insert the tag in between, or put it at the beginning, or change ‘Jack said’ to ‘said Jack,’ and it’ll change how a person perceives the passage, if even a little. Nuance is also important to remember for speech tags, and though ‘whispered’ and ‘said quietly’ are incredibly similar, there might be a good reason why you picked the one instead of the other for that particular period. Think of what your character is really saying, and how you want them to be perceived by the audience, when you pick a speech tag. It’ll come as second nature in no time.

At the end of the day, no matter how good you get at picking speech tags, if they’re all you use you end up with a horrible disease, one which will kill your writing like the proverbial plague. It is the dreaded ‘talking head syndrome.’ This is when your characters dissolve into their words, and eventually just slide into a vacuum and because they are in empty space, quickly become victims of explosive decompression. Or, put in English, they pretty stop ‘being’. As characters yack and yack, they stop actually existing, and your reader loses a sense of setting the longer it goes. I don’t really understand how people can fall into this myself. If I wanted to read a recitation, I’d buy a screenplay, or better yet, go to a movie. Actually, that might even help you to do just that. People aren’t fully conscious of their own actions when they’re being candid, but if you go see a play or a film, pay attention to what the actors do while they’re speaking to one another. Do they fiddle? Do they play around, as though not paying attention? Do the two walk, heading to a destination? All these things help to make a scene stop feeling static. I mean, if you’ve ever watched two amateur actors, the first thing you’ll notice is how brain damaged they look when they just stand there, perfectly still, doing nothing but talk about crap you don’t care about. This carries over into dialogue.

Alder frowned and got reluctantly out of the closet, eyeing the knife that was pointed at him. “You found me.” “So I did,” said Sedgwick after a terse nod.
“Aaaannd…” prompted the younger man. He took a slow step backwards, wondering if he should have stayed in the closet. “What do you intend to do with me now?”
At that, Sedgwick smiled. He put the knife back in his belt, made up the step between them, and answered sneeringly, “I mean to steal you away.”

Enhance speech tags by mentioning the actions of the character as they talk. Are they twiddling their thumbs? Playing a game? Are they doing some sort of task, like changing a light bulb or fixing a car? If they are, then mention it. It adds a lot of fluidity and realism, and serves to draw in the reader, letting them ‘see’ the character more clearly. Putting minor thoughts and opinions in these places—nothing that’ll take up more than a few words—serves the same purpose, and gives a better sense of the dialogue that follows too.

But if all this doesn’t work, never fear. Truth be told, the best way to fix a dialogue like the one at the top of the page is to do something quite revolutionary: remove the speech tags. That’s right, just let them disappear. I’m probably not the person who should be writing this article, since I don’t use speech tags very often, or at least not as often as I do other things. They bore me, and are the reason why I don’t like reading dialogue-heavy pieces. Write a character unique enough that they don’t need speech tags. If you have three characters in a room having a conversation and you never name who’s who, a reader should still be able to identify who’s talking because their voice is their own. Personality, word choice, and of course attitude towards the other two speakers, should all carry over into the dialogue and make speech tags superfluous.

“Are you some kind of idiot?!”
“Um, can we just…?”
“You’re frightening the girl. Don’t you know when to quiet down?”
“Don’t tell me when to quiet down, jack ass!”
“Please, I…I don’t want there to be…!”
“Listen to yourself. I think you’re going to make her cry.”
“N-no, I’m not—”
“Shut up! What do you know about it anyway?”
“I certainly know more about it than you.”
“Piece of—”
“Just stop fighting!”

This isn’t a grade-A dialogue word-wise, but for the purposes of demonstration, it does the trick. Even though none of the characters are named, you don’t know their appearances or who they are, you can pick each of them out without any difficulty, and even guess what sort of relationship they have. This is helpful when you have a lot of characters talking at once and you really just don’t want to be bothered adding speech tags that’ll do nothing but bog down the tension of the exchange.

With me, even when I don’t put in proper speech tags, I tend to mention what the character is doing at the time, or at least their reactions to what the other character has said. So in conclusion, all the things I’ve mentioned? Blend them. And you’d surprised. Instead of making dialogue schizophrenic and annoying, it gives variability and depth. So try things out, and see what works for you. Who knows, maybe this advice will actually help? But in any case, practice and get a feel for how to write speech, and with that newfound knowledge, go yo and be awesome.

Comment [17]