valyssia

I’m not even sure if that last thing made sense, but it works for me. There’s this quality that I look for. It feels a little like poetry without the rhyme.

One of the better examples I’ve seen is:

“No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by the force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand. The Centauri learned this lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free.”

This J. Michael Straczynski quote from Babylon Five looks as though it should be clumsy. But when you read it aloud, or even better, hear Andreas Katsulas’ delivery, it becomes poetic. Not to mention, very powerful.

One of the things that’s so beautiful about it is that the language itself is simple. There’s not a single word there that you couldn’t say to pretty much any English speaking person, regardless their level of education, and effectively communicate…save for ‘Centauri’ and that’s the name of a race within the mythology. There just had to be geek-speak. It was a sci-fi show after all.

It bugs when authors hit the thesaurus and choose unnecessarily complex or underused words just ’cause. It has nothing to do with the character or events in question. They are simply trying to prove that they have a vast vocabulary.

Bah!

Anyone can use a thesaurus. The fact is that the language should suit the character. In my opinion, even the language of the narration in third person should suit. It should blend and flow.

The idea is to maintain and deepen the reader’s emersion. Suspend their disbelief. It’s like sleight of hand, only better. You achieve nothing if you use words that throw your audience off. This breaks the emersion, the spell flops and they’re thrown out of the fantasy you’re trying to construct. By simply looking at how the words fit together, you achieve so much more.

This brings us to character voice.

Which one is better?

Giles cleared his throat…and, pulling out a handkerchief, began to clean his glasses.

Giles had a couple of really entertaining tells. He either fiddled with his suit or his glasses. Without the suit, there was only one thing left and he went straight for it.

I’m picking on myself here. Everyone who’s ever seen an episode of BtVS pretty much knows that when Giles gets flustered, he cleans his glasses. Hell, he cleans them when he’s pensive too.

Does simply illustrating this make for good characterization?

Probably not.

In fact, it can be just plain tedious to read. The thing that saves the second quote is that we are seeing another character’s opinion about the behavior. It’s a different way of looking at something that we just accept as part of Giles’ core behavior. It’s a tick. You can use them, but be creative. Find another way to express it.

With dialogue this gets trickier. Look at Faith. We all know she uses the phrase ‘five by five’ to indicate that she’s what Buffy might call ‘peachy.’ But how many times did she actually say that on the show?

Out of the twenty-six episodes Faith appears in, she says the phrase a total of five times, four on BtVS and once on ATS, not counting teaser flashbacks. In the Angel episode Five By Five, she never uses the phrase. She’s just not feeling particularly peachy at that point. However, three others have used the phrase. Willow used it to describe Faith to Tara and Tara quoted it back questioningly in This Year’s Girl; and Wesley snarks the phrase back to Faith in the ATS episode Salvage.

But then, the word ‘peachy’ only appears five times in one-hundred and forty-four episodes of BtVS. Buffy says it three times and Willow and Xander say it once each. For something we associate so much with the character, Buffy uses the term scant little. So when an author drops these buzz words several times in a fic and calls that good characterization, I have to giggle.

Simply slathering on the slanguage actually kills the characterization. The point is that the observations need to be clever on some level. That’s why we recall them in the first place. If you can’t pull off clever, then just be plain. The majority of the dialogue is exactly that: plain, basic communication.

The rest of the formula is extrapolating reasonable responses. A fair percentage of the time, I find it easier to reverse engineer the situation.

Take this hypothetical for example: I want Buffy to run from a fight. What would cause that? In canon we don’t see her do a lot of running. After that initial flight response, she pretty much just faced whatever the sadists who wrote the show threw at her. An obvious exception would be when she’s hurt. We plainly see a case of that in Fool for Love.

My point is that you have to think about it. That’s why they call this a creative process.

Anyway…procrastination can be fun and all, but I should get to work.

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