Comments on: “Say What?”–Character Quirks & Non-Verbal Dialogue

By: Krista Phillips

Krista Phillips — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 01:09:10 +0000

In my book, I have the MC’s mom call everyone “Dear”. I wanted to give her the southern old fashioned mom speech and just hearing her “dear” everyone envokes this image of her. It was funny, I had my antagonish call Jenny “dear” once, as in guy calling a girl dear, and my critique partner was like, NO, he can’t call her dear! That’s Jenny’s mom’s line!

By: Caleb

Caleb — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:39:26 +0000

Good wrap up.

For me, I hate catch-phrases, but I like the ones that change constantly such as Sawyer’s nicknames.

Hurley’s “dude” is bearable just because “dude” is an easy tag (as is “man”). Same goes for swearing if it’s used properly. No word in the English language is more versatile than a well-placed f-bomb. For me, both of those are in the same category as “Oh” or “Yeah” or “Like” or “Wow” or any other number of sentence fillers if they would realistically be in a certain character’s vocabulary. That’s just how people talk.

By: Jess

Jess — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:17:33 +0000

Good question, Eileen.
The only verbal quirk I really have right now is there’s one character who sounds very “California;” lots of “mans” and “dudes.” Whenever he says “Wow,” the lm says “Yeah, that’s what I said.” Which is kind of funny, I guess, since he would never actually say that.
But reading this, I think I need more.

By: Eileen Astels

Eileen Astels — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:03:33 +0000

This has been a great series, Kaye. Very helpful to me.

In general, if you discover your characters are sounding similar in their dialogue do you have any suggestions in how to deviate them? As you said, you can’t go overboard with the quirks or it becomes nausiating to the reader. So what other things can we do to individualize their dialogue in a quick and snappy way after we’ve worked on characterizing already, but it’s not enough for certain dialogue interactions?

One author suggested that I just go through and slash one or two words from each of a particular character’s lines in the problem scenes to help reveal a difference. Are there any other tricks that you can think of?