Dialogue Deep Dive
The Philosophical and Grammatical Path to Writing Better Dialogue
We’ve all heard, at some point, that our characters sound too much alike. It’s a common problem: Once you feel out your voice as a writer, it starts slipping out of your characters’ mouths. Unfortunately, a lot of writers are implementing the wrong solution: dialects and vocabulary.
The types of words your character uses tells you nothing other than the types of words they’ve heard recently. In fact, it’s very common for people and characters to speak similarly to those they are around, even for that moment alone. So changing up their diction or accent will not help. Worse still, it can sound a bit contrived.
What you need to change is their linguistic habits. You can outline a character’s linguistic habits like so:
“I’m not a derelict, you know. I have work. I paint houses.” →
SUBJ.-VERB-//subj., dangling verb. SUBJ.-VERB-OBJ. SUBJ.-VERB-OBJECT.
Every writer can have their own way of doing this. You can use your own shorthand, and you don’t have to use the correct grammatical terminology. The key is the outline the types of words your character uses, and in what order. In the above example, my character is relying heavily on subject/object structure, and he is speaking self-reflexively. So all I have to do, then, to make the voices distinct, is to ensure that the second character’s response is a different structure.
In English, this usually manifests as one character talking about the particular, and the other talking about the universal. If character A is talking about himself and what he does (subject/object), I can vary the voice by having character B talk about the nature of the work itself, or anything other than the self:
Character A: “I’m not a derelict, you know. I have work. I paint houses.”
SUBJ.-VERB-//subj., dangling verb. SUBJ.-VERB-OBJ. SUBJ.-VERB-OBJECT.
Character B: “Of course; to work is the greatest joy in life.”
Subj., dangling noun, CONJ.-VERB, to be ARTICLE-ADJ. (HYBERBOLE) NOUN//EMOTION-prep-NOUN.
In this case, you don’t know the character’s names, but you can easily tell them apart. The response of character B, still has to fit the context of the story, but the principle is the same. One character points out the particular, the other steps back. You can see how drastically the voices differ from each other.
From a philosophical perspective, this is a very elegant solution: If your characters are using the same sentence structure, they are in essence talking about the particular, in an inner monologue. They are no longer separate characters, but the same character talking against another proposition of itself. But if you vary their sentence structure, they not only sound distinct, they become distinct.
If you’re interesting learning alternative approaches to writing fiction, join the Making Metafiction newsletter for free at shethewriter.com
