This month, Brandon took advantage of his ability to ask questions about my process. I’m going to try to answer those questions in tonight’s post, with apologies for the delay! (I’ve been fighting a cold since just about the day he asked me)
The Question: What sort of thought do you put into dialogue and how it reflects on the character? Like word choice, manner of speaking, and such like that — is it a big deal or just something that kind of develops along the way with a character?
The Short Answer: It’s both.
The Longer Answer: In a lot of ways, it really depends on the character, but typically their manners of speaking and word choice develop pretty quickly in the process of writing them. There are some characters where I’ve consciously gone into it thinking about certain types of phraseology that they’d use, certain colloquialisms, accents, and other things like that. A good example of this is characters like Bryn Knight and Kate Berkshire, both of whom are from the UK, so their manner of speaking and their word choice is a little different from their counterpoints. Characters like Reverend Stonard from What Angels Fear and Erakiah from Measure of Dreams also had some very deliberate choices made about how they speak which reflects on their character as a person and the image they want to convey to the world. By the same token, at certain points characters speak in ways that aren’t necessarily totally in their character (Tim at points in Measure of Dreams) and that is also meant to show a shift in the character.
At the end of the day, though, the manner of speaking does tend to develop with the character. Each of them have their own voices which I hope is more or less distinct and reflective of their characters overall.
