{"id":7815,"date":"2019-03-12T08:10:24","date_gmt":"2019-03-12T12:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7815"},"modified":"2019-05-22T16:58:36","modified_gmt":"2019-05-22T20:58:36","slug":"did-they-really-say-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7815","title":{"rendered":"Did They Really Say That?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Making fictional dialog sounds like something people would\nactually say takes practice. Having spent so many years writing for think tanks,\nI have to be especially careful my characters don\u2019t sound like they\u2019re lecturing\na roomful of dozing college students. As a result, a few lines of conversation can\ndemand as much time and concentration as whole paragraphs of description.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Usually the key is subtraction, and you can get a master\nclass on how few words dialog needs by reading Elmore Leonard. A guideline that\nshould be emblazoned in neon, is \u201cno tennis matches\u201d! A conversational ball that\ngoes back and forth, back and forth, each person responding to the other\u2019s shot,\nis tedious. In real life, people change the subject, they answer a question\nwith a question, they go off on a tangent, they reveal hidden agendas. In\nfiction, they can do this too, without real speech\u2019s stumbling, imprecision,\nand grammatical tangles, like, you know?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But most of all, I try to make the conversation sound like\nanyone but me. Is the speaker male, female, old, young, ethnic, rich, poor,\nwell educated or not, from the South, the Midwest, New England? Is the story\nset today or fifty years ago? What phrases, idioms, and slang does this character\nuse?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two New Tools<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re looking for insights into how people speak, the\npartnership between linguistics and Big Data provides some answers. Orin Hargraves\nat Visual\nThesaurus<\/a><\/em> has described Brigham Young University\u2019s two new databases of\nconversation, based on dialog from English-language television and movies. TVCorpus<\/a> has some 325 million\nwords from 75,000 television comedies and dramas from 1950 to today. Movie Corpus<\/a> compiles 200\nmillion words from 25,000 movies from 1930 to 2019. These data sets let you\ncompare British and American English, and the way speech patterns change over\ntime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I know, you\u2019re thinking, screentalk isn\u2019t how people really<\/em> talk (though it\u2019s better than it\nused to be). In fact, I sometimes wonder whether the influence goes in the\nother direction! Would people really be so reflexively snarky and would casual\nconversation be so laden with profanity if television sitcoms and the movies hadn\u2019t\npaved the way? And Hargraves cites research showing that movie-talk better\nmatches how native English speaker think<\/em>\nwe speak than actual speech does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However that relationship works, these databases are a fascinating\nway to learn about \u201cvery informal language,\u201d which is probably what most of your\ncharacters speak. At the very least, you can use them to check for clich\u00e9s and\narchaicisms or to devise language to fit a particular era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did a quick scan of the phrase \u201cperfect crime,\u201d and found the\nTV database has recorded its use  203\ntimes\u2014a lot of times by Alfred Hitchcock Presents<\/em>\nand Psych<\/em>. Go figure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Meanwhile \u201cgo figure\u201d appeared 427 times in the TV database, including a lot of \u201cgo figure it out,\u201d while the movie database includes 224 examples, most of them like my standalone \u201cGo figure.\u201d Since the earliest use was from 1938, you could use it in a classic noir story without worrying you were introducing a 21st century expression.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPerfect crime\u201d appeared 91 times in the film database, with the first usage recorded in a 1936 film titled The Case Against Mrs. Ames<\/em>: \u201cThere is no perfect crime because there is no perfect lie.\u201d Nice!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

photo credit: Jon Seldman on Visual Hunt.com, creative commons license<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Making fictional dialog sounds like something people would actually say takes practice. Having spent so many years writing for think tanks, I have to be especially careful my characters don\u2019t sound like they\u2019re lecturing a roomful of dozing college students. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7816,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Did They Really Say That? - new tools for making your story's dialog work!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,185,29],"tags":[1523,1524],"class_list":["post-7815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-language","category-writing","tag-dialog","tag-speech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/Rehearsing.jpg?fit=477%2C480&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-223","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7815"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7969,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7815\/revisions\/7969"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}