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Voice in Narrative and Dialogue - A Contrast of Writing
Styles
by: Michael LaRocca
One of the nice things about being an author is that we can
break any rule we want. (I just did.) It's part of our job
description. Language changes through usage -- definitions,
spelling, grammar -- and authors can help it do this. But on
the other hand, we have to have some sort of agreement on
the language or we won't be able to talk to each other.
When we as authors break a rule or two, it's not because
we're ignorant. It's because we have reasons to break them.
That's one of the joys of writing.
Having said that, now I'm going to explain some rules. There
are two types of writing in your novel. There is your
narrative and there is your dialogue. The rules for the two
are not the same.
For example, comma use. In dialogue, it's not so difficult.
Put in a comma wherever your speaker pauses in his/her
speaking. In narrative, you have to consult the style guides
and hope that you and your editor, working as a team, can
sort it all out.
NARRATIVE
A cop thriller like my Vigilante Justice has a simple set of
rules for the narrative portion. Third-person,
straightforward writing, light on adjectives and adverbs,
easy to read and grammatically correct. Sentence fragments
are acceptable if communication is achieved, and you'll note
that I use them often in this article. Why? Simply because
it's more effective that way.
To a degree the genre will help you identify what's
appropriate. For a cop drama, write in the dry style of a
journalist. For horror, a bit of hyperbole may be acceptable
in the most dramatic sections. For romance (not my genre),
you can probably use lots more adjectives (swollen, heaving,
throbbing, etc.) than you'd normally dare.
When I wrote Rising From The Ashes, the true story of Mom
raising my brother and me alone, I tried to adopt a
"childlike voice" early in the narrative. As the character
of Michael the storyteller grew older, I abandoned that
childlike quality. (An entire book of that would get old
fast anyway.)
When I wrote An American Redneck In Hong Kong, the humorous
sequel, I once again used first person narrative. But the
narrative of Rising is first person only in that it uses "I"
instead of "Michael." Michael is only a camera. It still
follows all the rules of "conventional" narrative. In
Redneck, I threw most of the rules out the window.
I used what one author referred to my as "conversational"
tone to maximum effect in Redneck. This fellow author felt
like he wasn't so much reading my book as just listening to
me tell some stories over a few beers. That's exactly what I
wanted.
In Rising, while I was the "first person" character, I
wasn't really the book's focus. In Redneck, I am. Center
stage, in the spotlight. Using more of a "dialogue" style in
what should have been "narrative" allowed me to focus the
reader's attention on the first person to a greater degree
than simply describing him ever could. You may love me or
you may hate me, but you'll know me and you'll laugh at me.
If you want to see such a technique used to maximum effect,
I recommend A Monk Swimming by Malachy McCourt. (I read it
after writing Redneck, by the way.) It's about an actor who
gets drunk and does very bad things to himself and his
family, and it's amazing just how much I laughed out loud
reading about it. Doesn't sound like a funny subject, does
it? It's not, and yet it is, thanks to his unconventional
narrative style.
To tell you the truth, I don't even think McCourt "wrote"
that book. I think he just said it all into a tape recorder
and transcribed it later. It reads that much like "a guy at
the pub telling a tale." If he used the grammar checking
function in MSWord, I bet it underlined every sentence. And,
bright fellow that he is, he ignored them all and didn't
change a word.
If you're going to use a more conversational tone in your
narrative, don't think that means you just write something
down and don't have to edit it. You still have to organize
your thoughts, and that means rewriting. While your style
may be unconventional, you have to make the ideas easy for
the reader to follow.
(I'm not entirely serious when I say McCourt just spoke into
a tape recorder, and even if he did that doesn't mean the
rest of us can get away with it.)
I originally wrote Redneck in chronological order. It worked
for Rising, and it works for memoirs and novels in general,
right? Well, in the case of Redneck, it was a disaster. Way
too much "remember what I said before about..." and so
forth. So while it was accurate, and while it was
conversational, it stunk. I changed everything to more of a
"theme-based" approach and that did the trick. Still
conversational and accurate, but organized. The ideas are as
easy to follow as the writing style, and that's always the
goal. Ease of reading.
In the case of narrative, you have the choice. If you want
to spotlight the storyteller to maximum effect, you can go
with first person and let the storyteller's narrative and
his dialogue read the same. If you'd prefer to "move the
camera" back a bit, make the narrative conventional in
contrast to the dialogue. As a rule, this reader likes
contrast, because he gets bored reading the same thing over
and over again unless the style is really special. Or
perhaps you can find a point somewhere in between.
Every story has a way that it should be told for maximum
effect. Maximum effect in the author's eyes, of course, as
it's a subjective thing. Keep it in mind as you write. Make
the call, stick to it, change it if it's not working. It
might even be okay to be inconsistent, but only if you do so
deliberately. Just keep stuff like "ease of reading" and
"maximum effect" in mind and go be creative.
DIALOGUE
Have you ever read a book where the narrative and the
dialogue read the same? I hope you haven't. But as an editor
I've seen such things, and they're very ugly.
Do you know why they're so ugly? Because they remind the
reader of the one thing an author does not want to remind
the reader of. Namely, that every character on the page is a
puppet under the author's control.
As readers, we put that thought aside so we can enjoy
reading. "Willing suspension of disbelief," to quote the
phrase an English teacher used when describing the
performance of Shakespeare's plays. If the author ensures
that the reader can't suspend disbelief, the book will not
be read. Stilted dialogue is one of the quickest ways to
make that happen.
I've decided that writing dialogue is the hardest thing we
do. It's certainly not something we can go look up in a
style manual like Strunk or Turabian.
What are the rules? "Make it sound real." But with the
corollary, "not too real because people always say um and er
and crap like that." Oh yeah. That explains everything! End
of my article, right?
Nope. I'm still writing it.
Ideally, the greatest of the great creators of dialogue will
have every character "speaking" in a voice so distinctive
that he/she need never identify the speaker. Okay, that's
enough fiction. Back to reality. None of us are writing
dialogue that well, are we?
People use a lot more contractions in speech than in
writing. They're faster. More sentence fragments, too.
People very often use the wrong version of lie/lay or who
instead of whom in speaking. (I never use "whom" in speaking
or writing because I want to see the distinction scrapped,
but that's another story.)
The dialogue portion of Vigilante Justice isn't difficult to
describe. The hero is a self-destructive cop named Gary
Drake. He is based on a real-life cop, my little brother. So
his dialogue was easy because, in my mind, I always heard
Gary speaking in Barry's voice.
For my other characters, I had to find some other voice. For
example, the voice of Doctor Garrett Allison is, to me, that
of Michael Jordan.
That's right, people. When I write, I literally hear voices
in my head.
As a beginning writer, and not a very good one, I read some
advice somewhere saying you might want to cut photos out of
magazines and use them when writing your physical
description, in case you can't form a mental picture of your
characters. I've used this technique, and with some
modification I've extended it to voices.
As an author, you should always play to your greatest
strengths while working to improve your weaknesses. I know
many authors who think visually, and I envy them that. I've
read some stuff that can make you feel you're skiing down a
snow-covered mountain when it's actually 85 degrees in your
flat and you've never skied in your life.
One author told me that when he writes, he literally sees
movies in his head, then just has to type them really fast
because that's how they're playing. Lucky him! My novels
first come to me in snippets of dialogue. Every character
has the same voice at that stage. (My voice, of course.)
Tight dialogue is one thing I enjoy when I read. Here are
the characters at some sort of verbal showdown. I know them,
I know their motives, I can read between the lines and know
what's being left unsaid. I can just feel the tension in the
air. I'm not so much mentally picturing bulging veins and
angry glares as I am just feeling the spoken words.
I also have an excellent memory of voices. I always have.
Like a dog remembers scents or an artist colors, it seems, I
can remember voices. If I hear an unfamiliar song on the
radio but I've ever heard that singer before, I can tell you
who it is. I can tell you that the guy doing the voice of
Gomez Addams in the original Addams Family cartoon is now
doing one of the voices in the Tasmanian Devil's cartoon
series. I can spot an actor like Andreas Katsulas no matter
what species of rubberized alien he's playing, because I
recognize his voice, although really that's no great
challenge in his case.
(For the record, if you've read The Chronicles Of A Madman,
Ahriman looks and sounds like Andreas Katsulas. Clyde
Windham is Dennis Franz. Wendy Himes is some girl who sold
me some horse feed about ten years ago.)
But just "hearing" the voices (if you're able) isn't enough.
The words themselves will be different depending on who's
speaking them, even if they're relaying the same
information.
To get back to Vigilante Justice, Gary Drake doesn't use a
lot of words. He almost never describes his own feelings,
and if he does he always feels guilty about it. He speaks
with a Southern drawl. He tends to use a single swear word,
and that word is "fuck."
Marjorie Brooks, on the other hand, mentions feelings and
uses whichever swear word is the most accurate, except that
she never says "fuck." Doctor Allison doesn't use as many
contractions as the rest of us do. These are things I kept
in mind as I wrote their dialogue.
Who remembers Mr. Spock? His speech sounds like written
language, very grammatical and correct, and that's
deliberate. He's a scientist, he's logical, and for him
language is only one more tool to be used with as much
precision as possible. That isn't just a different style of
dialogue; it helps define his character.
In my The Chronicles Of A Madman, Ahriman used fewer
contractions than the rest of us and he avoided sentence
fragments. He probably even knew the difference between who
and whom or lie and lay. That's because he's intelligent,
you see. It kinds of goes with the territory when one is
evil incarnate.
During an edit I did of a sci-fi book, I saw that the author
wasn't using contractions in dialogue. I made many
suggestions that he change the dialogue of the humans to use
those contractions, except when military officers were
giving orders, because order-giving officers tend to be more
"serious" and "thoughtful" than folks just being regular
folks.
I also suggested to this author that he change nothing about
the "stilted" speech patterns of his aliens. English isn't
their native language, you see, and one thing I've noticed
from living in China is that the locals don't use nearly as
many contractions as I do. So I thought that added realism.
Plus, the contrast should help keep the readers keep
everybody straight even if they aren't consciously aware of
why.
I remember in one edit where I read some character saying,
"I am an historian." Oh, I hate that phrase. I hate anyone
ever putting "an" in front of a word that begins with the
consonant "h." It's terribly pretentious and I don't like
it. As I kept reading the book, I quickly learned that the
character in question is terribly pretentious. Nobody else
in the book was throwing "an" in front of "h" words. It was
a deliberate contrast on the author's part, and it worked
quite nicely.
CONCLUSION
I suppose the point of all this is, remember the difference
between narrative and dialogue.
In the case of narrative, you're simply trying to describe
what happens. There is a famous quote of some sort that
says, "Great writing is like a window pane." Stick to that
maxim unless you feel you have a good reason not to. If
you've got what it takes to make your writing style superior
to the conventional, and if your story allows it, let that
style be an asset of your writing. Otherwise, just stick to
the rules until you master them.
In the case of dialogue, you're trying to write something
that sounds like what the characters would actually say, but
a bit more organized because "real" speech can be boring.
Give every character his/her/its own voice.
Am I joking when I say "its?" Not entirely. The Chronicles
Of Madman contains a short story, written in first person
from my dog's viewpoint. But then again, I would never call
Daisy an "it."
There's a stylistic decision you can make in narrative, by
the way. I always refer to animals as "he" or "she." Some
authors always use "it."
In dialogue, you can let some characters always say he or
she, and let others always say it, to contrast the feeling
with the unfeeling. (My heroes never call an animal "it.")
In the end, the goal is always the same. Make your writing
as easy to read as you can. Keep that in mind, and always
keep learning, and you won't go wrong.
Copyright 2001, Michael LaRocca
About The Author
Michael LaRocca's website at
http://freereads.topcities.com was chosen by
WRITER'S DIGEST as one of The 101 Best Websites For Writers
in 2001 and 2002. He published two novels in 2002 and has
two more scheduled for publication in 2004. He also works as
an editor for an e-publisher. He teaches English at a
university in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, China, and
publishes the free weekly newsletter Mad About Books.
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