Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-15-a-close-reading-on-voice-tying-it-all-together 

 

Key points: Voice can be an active part of developing plots and character arcs. As the character changes, their voice changes. Characters learn. Allow yourself to love to write. When you can't write with joy, reach for craft. Use the tools in revision. Use pacing, punctuation, word choice, accent, sentence structure to make the character more them. Allow yourself to be yourself as you write, use the personal voice! Use the smiley face! When something is good in what you are reviewing or critiquing, put a smiley face by it. Look for the key phrase, the sentence or paragraph that really sounds like the character, and use that to ground yourself as you revise or write more. Take big swings! Push yourself, and aim at the home run. Watch for falling into the same rhythm, sentences, and repetition by accident. Try reading it aloud to catch this! Check the musicality of your text. Deconstruct what you're doing, just step back and look at what you are trying to accomplish and how you are doing it. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 15]

 

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we've talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we'd revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com

 

[Season 19, Episode 15]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Voice – Tying It All Together.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[DongWon] So, this episode, we are reaching the end of our first sort of module, talking about This Is How You Lose the Time War. We want to focus a little bit on both recapping some of the stuff we've talked about, but also making sure it feels actionable for you, the audience, about how you can start to apply this to your own fiction. So one of the things I really wanted to focus on, I think we've hit a number of times over the past few episodes, is we can sometimes think about voice as a very passive element of your story. You decide the voice at the beginning, and then once you sort of finish your opening section, you're like, "That's the voice for my book." I hope you can see from the past few episodes as we looked at Red and Blue and the letters individually, how voice is an active participant in developing the plots, in developing the characters, and really carrying the reader through in a way, with much more clarity than if the voice hadn't evolved.

[Mary Robinette] This is something that is a factor that you will find in most fiction that you're going to be reading or writing, that… If you have a character arc, I should say. If you have a character arc, your character at the end is not the same person they were at the beginning. So it is natural that the voice of the character would evolve over the course of the story. But we often don't think about it. We just let it go for a ride. So, thinking about some of the tools that we've used here, the big one that I would say for adjusting things is the experiential nature of the character. Like, that they are seeing things differently at the end than they are at the beginning. So you're going to be using different language to highlight things, as one example.

[Erin] I think another thing is, building on that different language, is also that characters learn things. You know what I mean? There are things we always carry with us, like, if you were the child of fisherfolk, maybe you always use fish metaphors throughout the rest of your life. But if you suddenly learn magic, or you learn how to become an engineer, or you go to space, the type of language that you use will change. I think a lot of times, again, we will sometimes think, "Oh, I've set up the knowledge that my character has at the beginning of the story," and then that knowledge changes. But has the language changed with it? So you can sort of look at a paragraph from the beginning of something you're writing and something at the end and say, "Do these seem the same?" If they do, is that a choice that I've made, or is that something I've defaulted into?

[DongWon] Well, one great example of that is in the letters, they start referencing this thing that's like Mrs. Levitt's Guide, which is some kind of…

[Mary Robinette] Etiquette.

[DongWon] Etiquette manual. Thank you. That teaches them how to write letters. Red is using this actively, and we see Red discover postscripts and all kinds of different aspects of letter writing. But it's also a cue for the audience as well of showing how literally Red and Blue are teaching each other how to speak to each other. Right? We'll see poetry start to appear in Red's letters. We see this back-and-forth about different elements of letter writing, about postscripts and things like that. I think it's really reflecting what Erin is talking about, of how you can actively and deliberately have your characters learn how to speak and how to write in a way that shows their ongoing entanglement in the way that language changes.

 

[Howard] The tool that I would first recommend that you, fair listener, take from this whole close read. Allow yourself to love to write.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Let yourself love it. Lose yourself in it. In our previous episode, I used the word luxuriate, Erin used the word indulgence. Embrace those. Please. Luxuriate in it, indulge yourself in writing. And that joy will begin to lock in some of these tools for you. Because I'm watching Mary Robinette work from notes as she talks to us and lists these things that we can do deliberately, and I think I will never be able to do all of that deliberately. That's fine. I'm just going to have fun with it, and then remember those rules and rewrite deliberately.

[Mary Robinette] Well, so frequently the tools that I list are things that I used to punch up my fiction, that it's… Sometimes it's stuff that I do unconsciously, because I come out of theater. So, getting into a character voice and rhythm is something that I was trained to do and have internalized. But other times when I'm writing with depression, I cannot write with… Through the joy. I lean… I reach for the craft, and I'll let myself get something down that's messy, knowing that I can come back and I will look at it and say, "Okay. Pacing wise, where does this character pause? Is this a character that speaks in long fluid sentences? Or is this a character that speaks in short punctuated sentences?" I will go through and I will adjust my punctuation, I will think about the word choice, I frequently go back in even with something that I have written from a place of joy, will go back in and look at how I can dial up a character's particular accent. Like, what are the word choices and sentence structure that makes this character more specifically them? How do I remove the ambiguity, so none of the other characters on the page could have said that sentence?

[Erin] I think we do a lot of this subconsciously all the time. I think about being in a meeting, or even listening to this podcast. You'll be like, "Oh, yeah. That's such a so-and-so thing to say."

[Laughter]

[Erin] Or, like when somebody says to me, they're going to use a long metaphor and talk about their cat, because that's what they always do…

[Mary Robinette] Have I told you about Elsie recently?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Who is Elsie?

[Mary Robinette] Elsie is my cat, who uses buttons to talk. It's very much… Carry on.

[Laughter]

[Erin] That was absolutely… The cat who has no shame. I've been looking at pictures of my own cat all day. But I think that… Think about the things that you do. How do you recognize somebody else's voice? Then, what is it about it? Is it the lens… Is it the things that they reference? Is it a specific word that they always use? That is a thing that they always come back to? Then think about how can you create characters that have that same depth and richness?

[Mary Robinette] Also, think about who your character is addressing, because that is one of the things, again, that we do naturally that Erin was just talking about. So when your character is speaking to someone else, do they have the same rhythm every time? Or do they change it based on who they're talking to?

 

[DongWon] Yeah. I think one thing that comes through clearly in this is kind of going also to what Erin's saying that allow yourself to be yourself as you write. This is the 3rd part of voice that we didn't talk about, which I'm forgetting the exact term you used for it, but…

[Mary Robinette] Personal voice.

[DongWon] Personal voice. Right. Red and Blue sound very distinct because there written by different people. I get the distinct pleasure of being friends with these people, so I know how they talk. These are such heightened versions of how Max speaks and how Amal speaks. But their natural rhythms and their natural proclivities in how they talk, how they construct a metaphor, are coming through and they let that happen. Right? There was no hiding who they were. They were in fact amping that up, I think, to make that distinction very clearly felt the different sections. So, I think one other lesson you can take here in addition to let yourself have fun, write from a place of joy when you can, is also just because we're giving you all these tools to manipulate voice, to use it in different ways that are very deliberate, don't feel like what we're also saying is you have to hide who you are. The way you talk, the way you think, the way you speak. Sometimes, the most distinctive fiction is the one that feels like you are talking to the person who wrote it.

[Mary Robinette] The way I often describe this is you've spent your entire life honing your tastes as a reader, and you've got good taste. So trust your taste when you're writing.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] I would say as both a reader and a listener. Because I think there are ways of writing, ways of speaking, that actually don't make it into fiction as often. So if you love the way that your auntie tells a story, you know, maybe there's a way to take that and put that on a page in a way that nobody else could because nobody else has your auntie. Well, except your relatives.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So, just get that and put that on the page. Because it comes from you and your experience, it will feel real and it will feel valuable to the reader…

[Howard] Depending on the relatives, it might be a sister or a daughter.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] You are still right. None of them have your version of her.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's the personal voice. So, the thing about this is that what we're trying to do here is to teach you the mechanical and the aesthetic voice and how to manipulate them. What we hope is that you can learn to inhabit your own personal voice. Because mechanical and aesthetic can be learned. Personal is all about just learning to trust yourself.

[Howard] I have a smiley face for you. After our break.

 

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[Erin] This week I want to talk to you about Princess Weekes. She has some of my favorite YouTube video essays on the Internet right now. She has this way of bringing excellent story, culture, and media analysis that has helped me immensely in crafting my own work. She looks at popular or unpopular works of media, asks the right kinds of questions to get you thinking, and explains why it did or didn't have the impact it was looking for. Specifically, her video on why The Last Duel failed was an excellent critique of how you can look at a movement like Me, Too or see the problems in representation of women, and then try, but fail, at addressing the true reasons the movement happened. But you should really go watch all of her things. That's Princess Weekes on YouTube.

 

[Howard] One of my biggest fears when I pick up the long lists of tools and techniques is that it will suck the joy out of whatever it is that I've written, that it will become mechanical, that it will become cookie-cutter or recipe or whatever. My solution for this is the smiley face. In red pen, when I am reviewing my manuscript or when I'm critiquing someone else's, if there is something that sings to me, makes me laugh, it was a wonderful metaphor, whatever, I put a smiley face next to it. That means there may be other things you need to change in this document, but don't break this bit. Don't break this bit. I gotta tell you, the smiley face has been the most valuable critique mark that I write to myself, because it stands as a reminder.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Howard] Because when I go back over the text, I don't always remember how much I loved that the first time I wrote it or the first time I reread it.

[DongWon] It's such a huge mistake I see early career editors make. Right? When they're starting out and doing their first books that they're working on, they'll give feedback and the author will be like, "I thought I wrote a good book. What happened?" I'm like, "You did write a good book. This person just forgot to write down all the parts where they liked this." Right? They forgot to do what I think of as an alignment exercise of, like, first you tell the writer here's what I loved about this book, here's why it's important, here's why all these things are working. Now let's get on to some of the stuff that isn't working that will further highlight what does work. Right? So I think when it comes to voice, when you go through your manuscript, I think this is great advice from Howard, of learn to recognize what things do sound like you and you like that fact. Right? Lean into that going forward.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's a more of this, please. This is something… I love calling it an alignment exercise. This is, again, trusting your own taste, trusting that personal voice. You… Books that you love, you're not the only person that loves that book. When you read it, you have an emotional response to it every time you read it. So when you're reading your own book and you have emotional responses, trust those emotional responses. Those are genuine things that you experience as a reader. If you like it, lean into it. It's like, "Oh, okay. I did that well." And when you're learning, you can use these tools to say, "Okay, what did I do well here? How can I do that intentionally, and heighten it later in other parts of the book, so that this thing that I love, I continue to be good at?"

 

[Erin] I also think with voice specifically, because it can be hard to really capture the voice of a character, at least it is for me, is sometimes I'll go through and find a sentence or a paragraph where I feel like, "This is the person." Like, I really got it here. Sometimes I'll have to write my way into it. Like, I'll start writing the story, it's not quite there, it's not quite there, and then I'm like, "This is the phrasing that this character would absolutely use 100% of the time." I will highlight that, and then when I go to either revise or write more, I will start by grounding myself in that sentence or paragraph and say, "Okay. This is what I'm trying to get to, this is the feeling. Now, can I carry it forward?"

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] As someone who has built PCs, I love the word grounding myself…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because if I forget to ground myself, I'll destroy a $1500 video card…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Absentmindedly.

[Mary Robinette] Well, this… In audiobook narration, we call this thing that you're talking about, we have a word for it, it's called a key phrase. It's used to get yourself into the rhythms of the character, so that you remember what is your pacing for this, what is the accent of this character, what attitude do I have? I think that that's the thing that you're looking for when you're looking for this phrase, it's like… It embodies all of those things in a single moment.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. Kind of building off of this, the one thing that I also want people to remember when experimenting with voice, in addition to the other elements we've talked about, is don't be afraid to take a big swing. Don't be afraid to push yourself and reach for the tonality, the voice, the emotion that you're looking for, whether that is the blunt muscular brutalism of Red or the deep poetic organicness of Blue. These are huge swings in terms of voice. Right? There really aiming for the fences with how far they're pushing this, and I think that's part of the joy of the book and that's part of the playfulness of the book, is this sort of high wire formalist act that they're pulling off here. Then we see that again in the letters, the way they become so profoundly hugely romantic. That's… That is not a thing you see very often in text. I think one of the reasons people responded to it so well is both the humor, but also the "Oh, my God, these characters are so in love with each other," and feeling that in your body as you read it is really wonderful.

[Howard] Sports ball has the best metaphor here. You miss 100% of the pitches you don't swing at.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] You take that big swing, and, speaking as someone who is at this moment remembering very vividly some of my young writer mistakes and fears, you will miss some of those pitches you swing at. The good news is that as a writer, you get to go back…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And rewrite. You get to put the novel in a trunk, or the story in a trunk, and come back to it 10 years later and say, "Oh. Now I have the skill set to finish this thing that I wanted to do," or, you come back 10 years later as Dr. Frankenstein, and this is more liked my approach, and say, "Oh, that corpse is only good for parts."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But I know which parts!

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah. Not to stress everyone out, but from a publishing perspective, we're in an era where base hits aren't good enough. Right? You've gotta be swinging for the fences. It can be okay if you get on base, but that shouldn't be your target. Your target should be the home run. So I encourage you to do all these things that we're talking about in terms of finding a way to get to that joyful place that you're writing from, but also to make sure you're pushing yourself and reaching for the thing that is really distinctive, is really going to stand out, is really personal.

 

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] As we're talking about this, I want to flag a thing that I see happen with early career writers with voice, that is an… Asking for a mistake, and I see it happen a lot, which is this idea we've been talking about pacing and finding the rhythm of the voice, is that you will have a character or the… Just the language of the text itself, where everything has the same rhythm, where all the sentences are the same length, and you have this accidental repetition that, again, can flatten something. All your paragraphs are the same length. In the real world, you have this variety of rhythm. Something that you can really see when you look at This Is How You Lose the Time War is how intentionally they're using when the character speaks in long sentences versus short sentences, when the switch happens, when the variety takes place. So look at your own work and think about if you've been thinking my prose falls flat, and your urge is to add more adjectives, take a look at it instead and see if it's something that you can fix with your punctuation. Fix by just breaking up how the sentences are structured.

[Howard] I am almost shocked and amazed, Mary Robinette, that you didn't tell us to try reading it out loud. Because often that is how I identify it, when I realize just in the pattern of my breathing, in the pattern of my nodding, of my body movements, I'm like, "Oh. This is all written to the beat of the song I was listening to…"

[Laughter]

[Howard] "When I wrote it."

[DongWon] That's what I was going to say is…

[Howard] Oh, my.

[DongWon] I encourage people to think about the musicality of the text. Right? Think about the rhythm, the sound, all of those things. One way to switch stuff is to change the music you're listening to. If you write to music, whether it's wordless or with lyrics, find something with a different BPM. Find something with a different tonality. That can help you shift out of one rhythm. Or, even if you're not using that specifically, just think about it as a piece of music, of when do you want to change your time signature, when are you heading into the bridge, when are you heading into the verse. Right? Those are all things that will help you unlock those tools of rhythm, of sound and poetics, and of repetition, which is also a very common thing in music, of when are you coming back to the same beat, the same note.

 

[Erin] I also think it's just fun to sometimes deconstruct what you're doing. There's this song that I love called Title of the Song in which each ver… It's like declaration of my feelings for you, elaboration on those feelings. The ver… The actual versus are telling you what the song would be doing. Sometimes, when something feels off to me, I'll actually say like, "A long ass sentence that appears to be explaining the world. A really short quip." Like, I'll actually look…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] At what my thing is… What my sentences are attempting to accomplish. If it's the same thing 8 times in a row, then it doesn't quite work.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because, to think about musicality and karaoke, one of my favorite things, even the most amazing singer, if they just come out and belt, with no variety, they never make their voice softer, no matter how good the tone is, people will start to tune out, about 2 like sentences in. Because they'll be like, "Oh. Okay. That's what's happening here. Back to my conversation." The way you keep people in a song is the way you keep people in writing, by using variety so that not quite sure what's coming next and they feel like you're taking them on a journey that they want to go on with you.

[Howard] The song between the servants, This Is As Good As It Gets, in season 2 of Gallivant, the actress is trained as a Broadway singer, and they don't let her off the leash until the last 2 verses of that song, and she belts… I get chills every time I hear it, because I realize that was the message of this song. She is breaking free from a life of servitude and accepting that she is good enough to not have to eat olives off the floor. They communicate that with that note of… Just a couple notes. Oh, I get chills just thinking about it. So, yeah. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Changing the rhythms. It's something that we're hardwired… We're hardwired to pay attention to repetition and then to also tune it out. The reasons are that if there's something that's a sameness, that's… If you think of us as humans as animals, that's not important information. You know what it is, you've identified it. So you're listening for the threat or the opportunity. The threat of the rhythm of someone stalking you. Or the drip drip of water that is a food source… A water source. So, again, like when you're placing those repetitions in your text, you want to be placing them in points where it's carrying information that the reader needs as opposed to just accidental repetition that the reader tunes out as unimportant. It's like, "Oh, yeah, it's all green. It's true, it's leaves."

[DongWon] Yeah. If you want an example of how pacing and repetition can really enhance your experience, I love Tina Turner's rendition of Proud Mary, which starts very slow and then gets incredibly fast and intense by the end of it. I think that sense of… That increasing excitement and thrill and danger, all those things are communicated in that song as it changes very differently tonally from the beginning to the end. So, I want all of you to sort of think about the musicality and think about that tonality. Think about rhythm and repetition, as I'm demonstrating right now. As you're like really digging into how to keep building the voice of your work.

[Mary Robinette] I think that brings us to our homework.

 

[DongWon] Our homework for this week is I want you to write a short outline of your work in progress. This would be a new outline. I want you to instead of focusing on what are the plot beats for your characters or… You could even do this for a single character arc if you don't want to do it for the whole book. But instead of writing down what happens to the character, make notes about how the voice of that character will change with these events. Make a little bit of an outline so you have a sense of the arc as the character changes how they see the world, how they're going to talk about the world, and experience it.

 

[Mary Robinette] I love that homework. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

[DongWon] Please rate and review us 5 stars on Apple podcasts or your podcast platform of choice. Your ratings help other writers discover us for the first time.

 

[Mary Robinette] Support for today's show comes from the Inner Loop Radio. If you listen to us because you're a writer, then you'll also want to listen to Rachel and Courtney talk about how to stay inspired, how to stay focused, and how to stay sane. Subscribe now to the Inner Loop Radio on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or any other podcasting site. Get inspired, get focused, and get lit on the Inner Loop Radio.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-11-a-close-reading-on-voice-an-overview-and-why-time-war

 

Key Points: Voice in fiction. Voice, mechanical, aesthetic, and personal. Tools for voice on the page: pacing, accent, attitude, and experience. Pacing is cadence or rhythm, pauses, punctuation. Accent is word choice and sentence structure. Attitude is attitude. Experience is how the character views the world. Aiming to give you tools so that you say, "Oh, I can do that." 

 

[Season 19, Episode 11]

 

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

 

[Season 19, Episode 11]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Voice -- An Overview and Why We Chose Time War

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[DongWon] So, this episode is the first of our close reading series. I'm very excited to dig into this one. We've chosen for our first module here to focus on the aspect of voice in fiction. We thought what better book for that than Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar's This Is How You Lose The Time War. This was a novella that was published in 2015 that features two alternative voices from two different POVs and [garbled] as letters written between them. It won a bunch of awards. It's been very popular. I think the voice in this book is very distinct and very powerful and much of the charm of the book is in how these two different writers are approaching these characters and how the voice is carrying through.

[Howard] There's also the elephant in the room which is when I got this book out to reread it and showed it to my 22-year-old and told them, "I think you might like this book a lot," they said, "Yes. Bigolas Dickolas said the same thing."

[Ha]

[Howard] "I will get to it eventually." They will get to it eventually because I'm going to bring this copy back and shove it in front of them. Yes, this book got huge props… Was it 21, 22?

[DongWon] It was the… Oh my gosh… What, 23?

[Howard] I do not remember.

[DongWon] Summer 23.

[Mary Robinette] 23. Summer of 23.

[Howard] This is… I mean, we're recording this in fall of… Or in December of 23. So…

[DongWon] It was this summer.

[Howard] It was this year.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It won all of the awards when it came out, and then it was rediscovered by Bigolas Dickolas, and now is a phenomenon sweeping the globe.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Howard] Part of the reason it's doing that is that the voice is so strong and so… It speaks to a lot of people. I think voice is the reason it does that.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, I want to just put something out, that is we're talking about voice, that the voice of this is one of the things that is so important. But voice is also one of those wiggly words that we use a lot. I find that it tends to mean 3 different things. There is the mechanical voice, which is, like, the style. First person, 3rd person, the mechanics of it. There is the aesthetic voice, what it sounds like. Then there's the personal voice, which is what the author brings to it. We are primarily going to be focusing on the aesthetic and mechanical voices when we're talking about this. In part because we don't know which parts which author wrote, so it's harder to pin down and say this is because of their life experience.

[DongWon] They have said who wrote which part.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, they have now?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] For a long time, they refused to.

[DongWon] Yeah. Oh, I'm pretty sure that's public. So I have the other elephant in the room is that I have a particularly inside perspective on this book, because the first 2 books we've chosen, I swear to God, I did not do this on purpose, I did not suggest these, are both books that I have worked on is a literary agent. So, Max and Amal are both my clients and I have worked on Time War since its inception. So I have a little bit of inside perspective and sometimes filtering out what is public and what is not is a trick for me.

[Howard] Drop the knowledge, DongWon.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] But I will very gladly give a few peeks behind the curtain when I can.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Double check them on that one.

[DongWon] I will.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, the… For me, one of the things that struck me immediately the first time I started reading this was that there was a poetic denseness to the language that you see less often in science fiction. It's… I can think of other examples, but the poetic denseness was one of the things that pulled me in, and also, slowed me down. Because I felt like I needed to savor the book as I was going through, that the language, the voice itself was as important as the plot. That it was inextricably tied together.

[Erin] Yeah. I think some of that is the form of the book itself. Because so much of it is epistolary, it's in letters, I think that there's a certain indulgence in some ways that, as readers, we give to a letter. We sort of assume that it will be like… That you're going to lean into maybe the poetry of things when you're writing a letter to another person and what… I think it was such a smart idea, because while in like non-letter prose, you might be like, oh, this is a lot, in a letter you're like, oh, no, this completely makes sense, because it's such an expression, such a personal expression, and therefore a way in which a voice can come out so cleanly and clearly.

[Mary Robinette] Interesting, because I actually have the opposite experience when reading, which is that the letters are the more straightforward prose than the 3rd person passages.

[Erin] Interesting.

[Mary Robinette] Isn't it interesting?

 

[Howard] An example. The piece… There are 2 pieces that hooked me on the first page. The first piece, 2nd line and beginning of the 3rd paragraph, "Blood slicks her hair. She breathes out steam in the last night of this dying world. This was fun, she thinks."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Okay. I'm on board.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I'm on board. Then, paragraph 4, this is where the prose gets dense and does a whole bunch of worldbuilding for us. "She holds a corpse that was once a man. Her hands gloved in its guts, her fingers clutching its alloy spine. She let's go, and the exoskeleton clatters against rock. Crude technology. Ancient. Bronzed depleted uranium. He never had a chance. That is the point of Red." Okay. You've thrown a bunch of cool technical terms at me, and I'm like, "Oh, wow, future battlefield… Wait. Crude technology. Wait. What?"

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Now I have… That's the 2nd hook.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] The first hook is, "[gasp] That was fun." The 2nd hook is how advanced is this? Please world build some more for me.

[Mary Robinette] Right. I think that that was part of what I'm thinking about… And we're going to dive into this way more in the next episode, when we're talking about… Like, we're going to do really close reading about Red's perspective, looking at these first pages. But, in general, one of the things that Amal and Max are trying to do in this book is describe this time war which is technology that we don't have and an understanding of time that we don't have. So they are using this metaphor poetic language to attempt to communicate something to us because we don't have the language for it. So that juxtaposition of those 2 things, of, like, this is a very highly technical thing I'm going to attempt to explain to you people who are locked into this single timeline… It makes things really juicy and lovely.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, it's one of the main reasons I wanted to pick this. I wanted to pick it both because I deeply love the voice of this book, I find it very affecting and very sort of pleasurable to engage with. But then, there are really almost 4 different voices in this book. Because you have the Red sections, you have the Blue sections, you have Red letters and Blue letters. Each of them has a distinctly different voice that is communicating different information and different worldbuilding as we go. So one of the reasons I wanted to examine this one is we get to sort of do that contrast between, okay, what's happening here versus what's happening here versus what's happening here. So it felt very useful as a teaching tool in addition to one that is just, oh, they are executing this at a very high level and is delightful to engage with.

[Howard] Yeah. Let me circle back on that teaching tool briefly. You can pick up to similar books by different authors…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And compare voices and ask yourself, why do these sound different? Why do these feel different? Why do these work differently? That's valuable. Having that experience in one book where the same narrative, a singular narrative is being run in multiple voices is utterly invaluable. There's… I cannot think of a better teaching tool for voice then reading and rereading and analyzing your own experience as you pick up the book again and again than this book.

[Erin] While this book is… Has a very sort of unique style, it's also something that you can do in books with multiple POVs. So if you wanted to take what we're doing in this close reading and apply it somewhere else, you could take a book that has a lot of different points of view and think about how is the voice being done differently by the author from one character to the next.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is just an extreme case, which I think is what makes it so useful. Right? Of having such distinctly different voices, and it's such a voice-y book. What I mean by that is there just leaning so much into that voice as a forward component of it. Which, in part, they get away with because it's a shorter book. Right? It doesn't overstay its welcome. This might be more difficult to do at great length. But, given the compactness of the book and how quick the experience of reading it is, you can really push pretty hard on the voice lever. Which they've done in this case.

[Howard] I have a question that I'm going to pose after our break.

 

[DongWon] I want to talk to y'all about Scavengers Reign. Which is one of the best things I saw in 2023. It's an animated series on Max that tells the story of a group of survivors crash landed on an alien planet after their colony ship malfunctions mid journey. What makes the show wonderful is its incredible art style, but also its approach to how they portray alien life and how humans interact with it. It's really deeply interested in systems and ecologies, and tells a really beautiful story about how humans interact with their environment and with each other. I really can't recommend it highly enough.

 

[Howard] The big question is if you are but one author, but one mortal author…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Trying to write multiple voices, as you said, a novel with multiple POVs. Can you do it this well?

[DongWon] Yeah. Well, one thing I want to point out as we go into this close reading series is we're picking these as examples we hope are instructive. We're not saying you have to do what these authors are doing or replicate these. We're picking examples that are really pushing the boundaries of what is possible in this particular severe. So, this is pushing the boundaries of voice. When we get to Memory Called Empire, that is pushing the boundaries of what you can do with worldbuilding. When we get to Fifth Season, that's going to be pushing the boundaries of what you can do with structure. I do not recommend trying to replicate these things. We're showing you big examples so you can take lessons from them and learn from them.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to give you a couple of words that we're going to be using as we're going through. As you probably know, I am an audiobook narrator, and when I'm trying to learn how to do character voice, when I'm teaching it, there's a couple of tools that we use that are very useful for doing voice on the page. So, pacing, accent, attitude, and what I call experience. So, pacing is kind of the cadence, the rhythm of the voice. Where they pause, whether they're doing long sentences or short sentences. Where they put the punctuation. That's something that you manipulate really by punctuation. It's replicating the way we pause in speech. Accent is all about word choice and sentence structure. It's not about pronunciation, which is what a lot of people focus on. So you'll hear us talking about the word choice and sentence structures that are specific to each character. Then, attitude is exactly what it sounds like. When you're talking to someone on the phone, and I know that a lot of people never do that anymore, but you can tell… Well, when you're listening to us, you can tell if we're smiling or not smiling. Mechanically, that's because the shape of our facial mask changes. But really it's that our attitude is driving the way that everything happens. On the page, you're manipulating that with word choice, sentence structure, and punctuation. Then, experience is about what… How the character views the world. So, specifically, when you're hearing us talk about Red and Blue, you're going to hear us talking about the use of botanical metaphors versus the use of mechanical metaphors, depending on which character we're talking about. That comes from their experience. So those are a couple of levers that you can push very consciously without having to, like, have this extensive acting career or, in Amal's case, Amal is a poet and is using a lot of additional tools. But these are 4 things that I find very useful.

 

[Howard] In… Oh, gosh, this would have been 40 years ago. I was reading the liner notes… Liner notes? Must have been, on a Billie Joel album. Billie Joel talked about getting his start. He said, "I listen to things on the radio and I told myself I can do that." That… I wanted to be a rock star for years. Then I got into cartooning and into writing because I looked at things and said I can do that. I look at Time War and think I can't do that.

[Laughter]

[Howard] If you are feeling the same thing, I just wanted to express some camaraderie, a little bit of commiseration, and a little bit of hopefulness, which is that as we go through these, we want to give you the tools so that on your 3rd or 4th reread of one of these close reads, you begin to tell yourself, "Oh. Oh, I can do that."

[Mary Robinette] It doesn't even have to be doing that entire… Like, you can't write Time War because that's where the personal voice comes in. Their own experience, the thing that drives them. But you can use the tools that they're using in Time War. That's the piece that we're hoping that you're going to get out of these really close readings, that here's this tool that you can use and apply to your own personal voice and your own experience, that that will come out on the page.

[DongWon] Well, one thing to keep in mind is also that this is 2 people. Right? This is a collaborative process. They're bringing double the firepower to this project, and anybody who's read Amal and Max's work individually knows that those are already some pretty heavy guns that they've got. So, there's something special that can happen in a collaboration where the sum is even greater than the individual parts. It's very hard to get to. I don't love a collaboration project, actually. It's one of the grand ironies of this book, is I tend to be fairly opposed to them because they're so difficult to do well. But in this case, those 2 came together in a way that their voices really braided together in this really powerful way that leads to the reading experience that we have in front of you.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, Erin, you tend to do fairly voice-y fiction also when you're writing. What are the things that you think about when you're looking at Time War in kind of relation to the way you approach your own work?

[Erin] I think, I like the way that you broke down sort of the different stuff, pacing… I'm going to forget them all now.

[Mary Robinette] Pacing, accent, attitude, experience.

[Erin] Pacing, accent, attitude, experience. I really wanted that to be like something I could say, like PAAE. That's not really…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.

[Erin] It's okay. But I think that pacing, especially… Like, I love to look at the way in which other folks use punctuation. Because, like, really as writers, I find us to be a controlling lot.

[Laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean? We don't just want you to read it, we want you to read it how we would read it in our own homes. So thinking about, I wonder if this… If the way I'm reading this is the experience that they intended me to have. Why is… In the thing that Howard read earlier, okay, there are some shorter bits in there. There are things that are 2 word sentences. Why is this. Here, why not a dash? Why was this not a semicolon? Oh, it's because I need to stop all the way here. I like to really think about that because when I'm doing it, I know the effect that I'm going for. What I like to try to do is listen to somebody else and wonder about the effect that they are going for. It's sort of like the listening to the song on the radio and going I think this song is meant to make me sad. Why and how? Because if I'm writing a song that wants to make somebody sad, I should think about if I understand how they did it, then I can understand the way that maybe I could do it better.

 

[Mary Robinette] My… One of the arguments that I will occasionally have with copy editors who will never see the argument back, like, the book is never returned to the copy editor with my No!

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But I'll have things that are phrased like a question, but I do not have a question mark, because they are not said with a rising tone. Like, "What did you say." Like, what did you say… Like, there's a falling tone there. If you put a question mark, it's a very different, "What did you say?" That kind of thing. I see early career writers, and I know I did it myself, get hung up on the grammar and having something grammatically correct is not what you're trying to do when you write. Grammar is there for when you need to express clarity in some way. But most of the time, what you're looking for is just do these rhythms flow?

[Howard] I look at grammar as the rule set that we play by when things are complicated and we need to make sure that everything is working well. Breaking those rules is what we do when we need a new rule in order to communicate something different. So we will deliberately throw down a word like mis-underestimate which isn't a word, but which we can kind of tell what it means and away we go. The copy editor will say, "Hey, this isn't a word," and you say, "But it's my word for this book."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] One way to think about voice is that voice is about clarity for the reader. It's about clarifying the reader's experience of all the information you're trying to give them. Right? Because it is the vessel with which that's handed over. So, sometimes, the way you achieve that clarity is by breaking grammatical rules, by using a very complicated language, or inventing your own word sometimes. Because what you're trying to do is communicate what the emotional experience that you want the reader to have is. Right? So voice is your first interface with them. It's the first… It's why we're doing this as our first module, is voice is the first and the last thing that you will encounter while reading a book.

 

[Erin] Yeah. I also think… Something else that just occurred to me, a bit of a side note, is that the other thing that I really like to look at is that… Is… Once you create voice and people understand what that voice is, you have to keep doing the work, but in some ways, you've already established who this person is. The way that they talk, the way that they think, and it actually helps to put their voice in the mind of your reader.

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, one of my favorite English sentences is, "I didn't say you got to keep the money." Because you can put the emphasis on every single word in that, like, I didn't say you got to keep the money. I didn't… Like, it's a different… It's a slightly different meaning. If you have the voice of the character established, they will emphasize, hopefully, the word that you would emphasize when you were writing it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is very similar to what happens in audio fiction. There are character voices that I cannot sustain for an entire thing. Like the [low shack] Luidaeg in the October Daye books. I'm talking like this. I can't do that for an entire page. So I hid it really hard at the beginning, and then I back off and use it for emphasis where I want to drive home this is the [low shack] Luidaeg speaking. I find the same with… When I'm writing, that I will use those embellishments, the… Sometimes it's just as simple as italics, but sometimes it's like the flourishing words at places where I want to remove ambiguity about who's speaking or what they mean or places where I want to add emphasis. It's like, no, this is seriously this person.

 

[DongWon] Well, one last thing I wanted to point out here is another reason I think this is a great book to use is so much of the character development and plot development is communicated through alterations in voice. The voice evolves over the course of the book, and as it does, we grow with the writer. Or the characters, and our understanding of the world that they live in also evolves. Right? So we get to sort of see how you can use voice as an active tool in your fiction.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think people think about it as kind of a passive set thing. Right? In the first paragraph, you set your voice, and then it's the same throughout. That, ideally, is not true. It grows and changes with you. I think this again is a pretty radical example of how you do that.

[Howard] Before we jump to our homework… Isn't that what we're getting ready to do next? Before… I would like to send us home with a passage that I think fits beautifully. "I am glad to know you love reading. Perhaps you should next write from a library. There's so much I want to recommend."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's perfect.

 

[DongWon] That is perfect. On that note, I have our homework for you this week. So. What I would like you to do is to take a sentence from a work you love that has a strong and clear voice. So think about what are some voice-y pieces that you've read that you really enjoy. Take that sentence and write a scene based on that as a prompt in the same tone and voice as the original. So, I'm not trying to get you to replicate the original scene, but take that… Take what you love about why it sounds the way it does, and try and extend that into your own fiction and make that voice a little bit your own.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

[Howard] Hey, podcast lovers. Do you know that you can upgrade your experience here with our ad-free tier on Patreon? Head over to patreon.com/writingexcuses to enjoy an ad free oasis as well as access to our virtual Discord community where you can talk with your fellow writers.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-28-writing-conversational-dialogue

 

Key points: Dialogue, conversations between people. Dialogue that doesn't sound like real people talk versus verbatim transcripts? Middle ground, that isn't accurate, but feels accurate. Writers convey to a human brain that a dialogue is happening. Every line of dialogue does two jobs, the authorial intention, why the author needs that line, and the character reason, which depends on who the character is talking to. Real life, um, or bantery fun? In real life, interruptions follow the actual word, but for punch, in writing you often interrupt at the word. Think of written dialogue as compressed talk, with the small talk stripped out. Pacing, accent, and attitude. Much of conversation is nonverbal. Pause points and body language. The rules in dialogue are much less rigid. Natural dialogue changes over time. 

 

[Season 18, Episode 28]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Conversational Dialogue.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] Today we want to talk about dialogue. How to do conversations between people. One of the things that will pull me out of a story faster than almost anything else are conversations, dialogue, that don't sound like real people actually talk. The problem is if you actually do write down exactly how real people talk, it is often unreadable and also just as bad. So there's a wierd middle ground that isn't really accurate, but feels accurate. We're going to magically somehow tell you how to find it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] By way of metaphor, in my audio engineering class, they explained... They sat us in front of a pair of speakers and played music, and the right answer to, "What are you hearing?" Is, "Oh, I'm hearing a pair of paper cones move back and forth powered by magnets." As audio engineers, we were taught we're creating the illusion of these things by using other tools. As writers, you are using patterns of dots, whether it's ink on the page or pixels on the screen or whatever, to convey to the human brain that a dialogue is taking place. It is a magic trick. At some level, you gotta lie.

[DongWon] Well, it's funny. We're kind of performing a version of that magic trick right now. I mean, this podcast is intended to be very conversational and it sounds conversational. But this is also not how the five of us sound when we're sitting around the dinner table and chatting. There's all this crosstalk, over talk, interrupted thoughts, pauses. Those are things that we, as podcasters, are working to [garbled]

[Howard] Wait, hang on. Is Dan allowed to have French fries?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] No.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But we're ignoring that for the moment. I mean, exactly, that kind of interruption. Right? Like in… We do that a little bit here and there, but I think we're very deliberate about it. Unlike me, at the dinner table, I'm a huge interrupter, as everyone here has realized.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think those are kind of things to think about is how are you going to manufacture the illusion of a flowing conversation, rather than replicating the absolute chaos that is a real conversation between friends.

[Dan] When we were talking this morning, and planning out exactly how we were going to do these episodes over breakfast, we were talking about this episode specifically, and I suggested one angle on it, and Mary Robinette suggested something else. Then we had a brief exchange that was mostly, "Uh... Ch... Oh..." Like, and we knew, because we've known each other for like 13 years, exactly what we meant.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] That's how we decided the topic for this was like 13 bizarre syllables in a row…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That come to us, made perfect sense.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's one of the challenges when you're writing is that every line of dialogue is doing two jobs on the page. There's the authorial intention, the reason that you, the author, need that line to be there. Then there's the reason that the character is saying that. The reason the character is saying that is going to change depending on who the character is talking to. So it's like I could not have that multisyllabic partial utterance conversation that I had with Dan, with the majority of the listeners, because we don't have any of that shared context.

[Howard] It actually… It wasn't polysyllabic, it was multi-gruntle.

[Mary Robinette] Multi-gruntle. Thank you.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Our multi-gruntle modality is one that is very specific. So when I'm trying to create dialogue for characters, I think about two areas of intention. What am I trying to accomplish on the page, like, what scenic lift is this doing? Then, the other is, why is the character saying this? What is my character's goal? What's the [garbled]? Again, that shifts for me, depending on who they're talking to. So if I swap characters out in a scene, my dialogue has to shift as well.

 

[Erin] I think one of the interesting things about that is that sometimes your authorial intention can be to replicate conversation as best you can on the page. Sometimes it's more stylized. Any sort of dialogue can have a range from being almost completely fidelity to the way that we speak, with um's and pauses where you're trying to show that this feels like real life too, like, very bantery where it's completely… No one actually speaks like that, but there is a fun in it. I think about Dawson's Creek when it came out a zillion years ago, and no teenager talks the way that they do, but there was a fun in hearing teens use this like very complicated language that they wouldn't in real life. So, sometimes your intention is also in showing something with the dialogue style, in addition to the dialogue itself.

[DongWon] Or, I think about Deadwood a lot, with this… Where most of the characters spoke in a very vernacular way. Then you have Ian McShane playing Al Swearengen who talks in these elaborate Shakespearean just foul mouth paragraphs, where he'll just be talking and talking and talking. But it's one of the most delightful things to witness, and all of the other characters seem to understand him, even though I, as the audience, I'm like I barely figured out what he was trying to say there, but…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] It was delightful. So you can use that to great effect to communicate things about character in ways that play with what is naturalistic. But how the other characters listen and respond to that, I think, can also be very powerful.

 

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to talk about one mechanic, just to start us off. As an example of something that I see people doing on the page, and it was something that I would do, is that you want the character to interrupt some other character. In real life, when we're speaking, that interruption comes several words after the word that causes the character to want to interrupt. Most of the time on the page, you do the interruption right at that word. So if you want the dialogue to see more natural, then you go ahead and you let the character carry a couple of words past that interrupting thing. If you really want to put a punch underneath that word for some reason, then you would have them interrupt right at that time. So, like, if I were saying, "Uh, we're going to be going downstairs," and someone interrupted me on the page, and the downstairs was the thing that I wanted to underline, it might be, "We're going to go downstairs." "Downstairs! How dare you say downstairs!"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Whereas in real life, I might say, "We're going to go downstairs to…" "Downstairs! How dare…" And it doesn't play the same. So you can think about that. Like, why are you doing that interruption and how are you playing with it?

 

[Howard] I like to think of conversational dialogue, conversational moments in books, as a compression algorithm. My favorite compression algorithm is the GIF, or jif, or we're not going to have that argument, where you pick key colors and you say this color for this many pixels, this color for this many pixels. When I had a breakup conversation with a girlfriend in high school, we talked for like three hours. When you read a breakup conversation in a romance novel, when you see one in a rom-com, it is not three hours. What got compressed? What were the key colors? How many pixels did they run for until the reader knew that that was the color that they needed. I don't know what the right compression algorithm is for everything, but I know that it has to be compressed. Because real conversations take a lot longer than they take in books.

[DongWon] There's the way that nobody says goodbye on the phone in a movie unless someone is about to die. Right? Like… Because otherwise, you don't need that note of we are concluding the conversation. All of the information has been communicated, we're moving on from here.

[Mary Robinette] This is, I think, as a side note, one of the reasons that so many people in fandom have difficulty with dialogue is because they have… In real life, is because they have learned it from film, television, and books where all of the small talk has been stripped out.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Intriguing]

[Howard] Also, so many things in romance and rom-com and drama, people will say such cruel things without any sort of warm up or even any sort of justification. Because, wow, that's the punchy bit. I'm sorry, people, don't learn to talk by what you see on TV. Because those people aren't being nice to each other.

[DongWon] Well, it's also dialogue in fiction is designed to communicate the emotional state of a character. Right? You are very rawly and directly trying to get what the character's actually feeling across to the other character, but really to the audience so they understand what's happening in this conversation. When I am in conversation with somebody about how I am feeling about something, it is rare that I am directly stating it. Right? I'm talking about effects, I'm talking about consequences, I'm talking about all kinds of other things that are ways to get them to understand what my experience is. But coming out and saying it directly is actually not a very effective way to get them to understand what it is that you're experiencing.

[Erin] I'm thinking back to that idea of the compression algorithm. One of the things I like to do when thinking about dialogue is trying to read more uncompressed speaking. Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright, her style of doing plays is to actually go interview people and then turn it into a one woman show. She does some compression, because otherwise it would be endless, but her technique is trying to remain fairly faithful to the way that people talk. Like, so… Listening to her do her shows, I'm like, "Well, that's pretty true to what a mildly compressed speech is. Now what do I want to look at?" A Marvel movie might have like super compressed bantery stuff. Then, trying to figure out where do I want to fall in between. Repetition is a great example. When I listen to her work or other things that are more uncompressed, we repeat ourselves. When you broke up with your girlfriend for three hours, I'm going to guess you said the same thing 18 different ways. That's some of the stuff that happens in real life, but on the page, it gets repetitive in a bad way. Because you're not in the same moment. So you want to use… You can use repetition to make things feel more real, because that's what happens. We forget where we were, and then we come back to what we were talking about.

[Dan] Well, this goes back into some of our previous conversations about format and about different types of writing. There are things you can do, for example, in a script that don't work on the page because of all the extra um's and so things that we kind of add-in that sound very natural to us, but reading them become very onerous. Let's pause now and come back later.

 

[Howard] I did not know how much I needed Cunk On Earth until I watched the first episode of Cunk On Earth. This is a comedy documentary, faux documentary of human history presented by Philomena Cunk, who is a character played by the actress whose name I've now forgotten.

[Dan] Diane Morgan.

[Howard] Diane Morgan. Diane Morgan so brilliantly stays in the voice of Philomena Cunk. That's where half the comedy comes from. Her uncertainty when interviewing people, her… The self-consciousness coupled with the absolute certainty that she's right. "Oh, my mate so-and-so shared this with me on YouTube. No, really, the moon is a lie. I'll send you… You just need to see the video." I love Cunk On Earth. 30 minute episodes, which is the perfect length for this kind of comedy. Available right now on Netflix. If you've ever wanted to learn lots and lots of things about human history mostly correctly while laughing, Cunk On Earth.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, as we come back in, I want to talk about a couple of tools to make your character voices distinct. Because when you've got two characters speaking to each other, in an ideal world, they sound like different people. Coming out of narrating audiobooks, there are five things that make a character voice, roughly speaking. Three of which can be replicated on the page. I'll tell you the other two, because it'll annoy you that you don't know them. They are pitch and placement. But the three that can replicate on the page are pacing, accent, and attitude. So, pacing is something that you control with punctuation. It is someone speaking with very long, fluid sentences, or somebody who's talking with lots of parentheticals. I mean, sometimes they talk with parentheticals, but sometimes they don't. Like, that kind of thing. Accent is about your sentence structure. It's not about replicating someone's like phonetic distinctions on the page, it's that the sentence structure is going to vary based on where they're from. When I'm talking to my parents in Tennessee, I will… My pronunciation doesn't change that much. But I'll do things like, "I'm going to go on over to the store." I'm like I don't know what all of those extra…

[Dan] Syllables.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Mono-gruntal.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I don't know what all of those extra prepositions are actually doing. On over to? Like, what are we doing there? But that is, rhythmically, that is… That's built-in part of the accent. Then, attitude is about your word choice. So the words that you pick when you're mad at someone are very different than the words that you pick when you aren't mad at them. It's kind of an all of the above scenario, too. Like, if you take, "What did you say?" And you're mad at somebody, it's like, "The actual did you say?" That changes…

[Erin] Yeah. I love that where people come from impacting the way that they speak. One of my favorite things is that there are many languages where at the end of sentences, you basically say, "Are you with me?" Some sort of phrase, like, yeah, got it. It's like different languages have different words that go at the very end, but it's basically like, "Are you still with me as I am speaking?" If you have someone who comes from a culture like that, or you've invented a culture like that, you might have more check in words at the end of sentences, because that's part of their way of speaking. That will come through. I think something that's really important and interesting to consider is that none of us just speak in a vacuum. Everyone is… One of my sort of pet peeves is everyone has culture including you. So, as opposed to thinking of changes in language as something that just other people do, it's why do you speak the way that you do? Then think about for your characters, why do they speak the way that they do, and what are they conveying about themselves that they may not even realize through the way that they speak?

 

[DongWon] Love that. One of the things that I've been thinking about in the course of this conversation, I actually don't have a great answer for, but so much of conversation is nonverbal. It's facial expression, it's gestures, it's eye contact, it's all of these things. I think one of the struggles that we've all had living our lives mostly mediated by Zoom these past several years is these tools got much more difficult to apply. So when you're doing just verbal dialogue… So, like, in Dark One: Forgotten, we're not getting character gestures, body language, eye placement, all of that. All we're getting is what are they actually saying. So what are some of the tips and tricks to communicate the things that would otherwise be communicated by like a tag that's like, "He sighed, he shifted, he…" Whatever that happens to be. He broke eye contact in some way. Like…

[Mary Robinette] So… The thing is that we've actually been doing nonverbal dialogue… Dialogue decoupled from body language since the invention of the telephone. So we know how to do that. We're familiar with those patterns. What I find is that when you're trying to replicate that on the page, you want to look for the natural pause points. Because anytime you put in body language, that's going to slow things down. So instead of saying he paused, then you would say he scratched his ear. What I find is that… Again, the body language is, as you say, part of the communication. So, he looked away… Well, what did he look at? What is that actually conveying? I'm very bad in my books. My characters do a lot of sighing. I have to go back in and do a search and find/replace to swap that out for other pieces of body language. Because it becomes in-specific.

[Dan] So, if you want a really great example of how important all of these kind of nonverbal cues can be, get on… Jump on YouTube and go look up what I'm going to call the mother F-r conversation from an early episode of The Wire.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Which is two characters who are doing what is essentially like a…

[Mary Robinette] It's a crime scene.

[Dan] Crime scene investigation…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Trying to figure out how a woman died, where the bullet is, all these things. The only word that they say, over the course of about five minutes, is not one we can say on this show. But because of their attitude, because of their vocal inflection, because of the way that they look at each other, you know exactly what they're saying and exactly what they mean. It is one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen. Flipside of that, another one of my very favorite shows is Justified. One of the things I love about that is how distinct the dialogue is. So, yes, of course, it's a show and so they're doing some visual cues. But, going back to what Mary Robinette was talking about, how do you make all of your characters sound different, watch an episode of Justified. Pay attention to, for example, the way that they threaten each other. Wynn Duffy is kind of an outsider, he's not really a Southerner, he doesn't have that kind of slow laconic way of talking that so many of them do. He's very clinical. At one point, he says, "If I see you again, I'm going to get a blow torch and make you as small as I possibly can." Which is just very direct and to the point. When Raylan Givens, who's the main character, wants to threaten somebody, he says in this very slow way, he… Actually, to Wynn Duffy, he pulls a bullet out of his gun, drops it on his chest, and says, "Next one's coming faster." Which is such a beautiful way of encapsulating his personality, the way he solves problems, his absolute economy of words, but in a way that's completely different than Wynn Duffy's.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things about threats in particular is that they often say more about the character who is making the threat than the character who is receiving the threat. Because most of the time when people are making threats, their actually signaling this is something that I would find upsetting. They are not necessarily signaling this is something that would be a problem for you.

[Erin] Thinking back to what we were saying about the difference between, like, when you're putting something on the page and dialogue and when it's spoken, I was thinking that sometimes it's… Think about this sentence. I don't know about that. Right? So I'm thinking if I don't know about that and I am saying it in a conversation with people who can see me, I might sort of pause, think, and then say, "I don't know about that." On the page, you might say like, "She furrowed her eyebrows," or something much better than that, but in…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] In a dialogue, I'd be like, "I… Don't know about that." That's what I would do on the phone. Because what I'm doing is taking that space where you would see me do the furloughing and putting it in a vocal… Like, I'm doing it vocally, because you can't see me. That's what you do on the phone. So, something that's really interesting is just pay attention to the things we do when we're talking on the phone and figure out is there a good place to put those in text. When do you lower your tone and whisper? When do you get louder, when do you extend vowels and when do you get more clipped in the way that you speak, maybe because you're upset.

 

[Howard] This circles back to what I think is kind of a 101 level, but we should all be reminded of it, writing and editing rule as it might be for dialogue, which is that the rules for grammar and punctuation and spelling and whatever else for dialogue are much less rigid than for other things. Because we don't put commas where they necessarily are supposed to go when we're speaking. Play with that. There've been a lot of times when I've had to step something from a copy editor because my grammar has been egregious and I have to go back in and say, "No, that was meant to be egregious," because of the way this is supposed to read. But in checking what the copy editor has written, I am like, "Let me make sure that that reads correctly. I didn't accidentally spell a bad word, did I? No. Okay. We're cool."

[DongWon] One other thing I want to point out is that what feels like naturalistic dialogue also follows trends and evolves over time. What was naturalistic in the 1950s was the screwball comedy, which is incredibly fast-paced, had a very specific accent, and cadence. Then we entered the 70s, where there was this very like naturalistic like thing is how people really talk. As audio changes, as technology changes, as our expectations change… Right now, we're in the era of mumble core movies, where it's almost impossible to tell what anybody's saying because of the way the sound is mixed in the way dialogue is written right now. You find that in prose, too. In text, how people talk in different eras, different genres. What feels like natural language, natural conversation, those shift depending on what you're trying to inflect. So I think what really we're circling around in so many ways is conversational dialogue, natural dialogue, is highly stylized. It is approached to great effect through a real character, through a real tone, through a real genre and category, in all these really powerful ways.

[Erin] I think I love that. I love that I think it's both what you're trying to inflect and also what you're trying to reflect. Because not all folks talk the same. So I think one thing that's really exciting is to not feel like you need to force yourself into the way that the dialogue that you're used to reading or use to seeing is, if that's not the story that you're trying to tell. I really love the way that like, an author like Susan Palumbo, who's a short story writer, uses dialogue in a different way. She's from the Caribbean, and, like, there's a different style of writing that she's doing that is amazing and completely natural. But just natural to a different storytelling ethos than the one that we're use to, specifically, in the United States.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to give you some homework this week. What I want you to do, and it's a very simple exercise. I want you to take dialogue that you've already written and delete every third line. This is going to give these gaps in the conversation, that you are going to have to then bridge with the body language that you use and having the other characters make the deductive jump that we would make in natural conversation. It's not going to be a perfect thing that you need to do with everything that you write. But it's an exercise in making deliberate choices for what you're doing in your dialogue. Try deleting every third line of dialogue.

 

[Mary Robinette] In our next episode of Writing Excuses, we discuss the different sounds of collaboration, and learn about two of our hosts experiences building worlds with Brandon Sanderson. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.