Picture, thousand words. Just trying something.
“I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.” – John Steinbeck
Day: April 19, 2006
Jane Espenson on character dialogue:
One of the great exchanges in the book has to do with an executive’s surprise that there is no clue in a character’s dialogue that that character is black. The writer replies that this was an intentional choice. The exec’s reply: “Well then, how will the audience know?”
I’m reminded of this exchange sometimes when I read scripts that attempt to capture the voice of a character with a particular background… ethnic, national or even, say, vocational. The spec script versions of Spike or Giles (from Buffy) are sometimes positively stuffed full of “bint”s and “bloke”s. And every word out of a soldier’s mouth is an acronym or a “yessir.” And the Southerner spouts folksy sayings about grits and drops “y’all”s like magnolia leaves. It’s as if the writer is asking “how will the audience know?” Well, they know Giles is English because he sounds English. No matter what he’s saying. That’s how an accent works. You don’t have to try very hard to convince your reader that he sounds English.
I think this applies not only to scripted scenes, in which there’s real-life actor potraying the character and actually speaking the lines. I think it’s good advice for writers of any fiction. You’ll get more freedom with dialogue in short stories or novels, for example — and plenty of writers have made ample use of regional dialect to say something about a character’s education, upbringing, class, or whatever — but it’s tough to do without sounding forced and cliched and fake. A character may very well say “y’all” or drop the g from the end of a word like a bad habit, but actually writing it like that can seem very artificial. It might be more interesting to explore what you’re trying to say with such dialogue tricks in what your characters choose to talk about.