When we first start writing, often we fragment elements of our own personality as fodder for our characters. Writing is a particularly soul baring exercise – your inner self is on display for all to see. Fortunately, only other writers realize we’ve allowed a glimpse into our soul.
Beginners first use stilted speech in their writing. It sounds like “I am a satisfied customer” reading from a sign kind of acting at first. I hit this stage with my first Star Trek novel back in 1976 – fortunately lost to time.
Then you begin to create realistic speech patterns – but everyone speaks like you.
This unfortunately is the case of too many amateur writers. And amateur is where you stay until you learn to hear voice patterns.
It’s rude to eavesdrop, so we’ll try some experiments. Take a movie, and listen to the patterns of an actor. For instance, Clint Eastwood in the Spaghetti Westerns is hard to track down- although he’s playing the same characters, he uses a slightly different voicing in each movie. Compare “I never found home all that appealing” from A Fistful Of Dollars to “Isn’t that Shorty?” in The Good The Bad and the Ugly. It’s the same voice, but a different voicing. Eastwood obviously had a different vision from the producers in attempting to make Blondie, Joe and Banco three different characters.
What’s the difference? Blondie uses terse dialog. There’s very little three syllable words spoken by Blondie – and Joe is FAR more sarcastic. “If you save your breath, I feel a man like you could manage it.” in Good Bad Ugly, verses “This is all very touching” in A Fistful of Dollars.
Let’s compare Tom Cruise’s voice patterns with Eastwood’s. Cruise sometimes plays laconic characters as well, but not with Eastwood’s intensity. His response to “you know what your problem is?” is a “I can think of a couple of women who’d love to tell you”. Compare that to Eastwood’s “I feel a man like you could manage it.” Where’s the weighted emphasis in their speech? Both lines are similar (couple of women, man like you) but Cruise actually puts the weighted emphasis twice in the sentence, whereas Eastwood does it once.
Weighted emphasis is where you put the volume change. Now believe it or not, by how you structure your dialog, your characters often will HAVE weighted emphasis, even though you’re reading, not hearing.
Heinlein had four words in one novel where you can HEAR the weighted emphasis. “Administrative punishment. Thirty lashes.” The weighted emphasis jumps out at you, in the word thirty.
It’s also the only one of two lines of dialog from Starship Troopers that made it to the regrettably horrible movie edition. Oh my goodness, Starship Troopers was so horrible I couldn’t finish it, and it used to be one of my favorite books!
Compare the dialog above with the urgent, “Mr. Rico! BUGS!” from the same novel. We have weighted emphasis twice in three words, and one of them is on a syllable!
Play with speech patterns and weighted emphasis over this coming week.
