{"id":1909,"date":"2011-02-22T08:32:29","date_gmt":"2011-02-22T13:32:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/?p=1909"},"modified":"2020-01-03T19:47:23","modified_gmt":"2020-01-04T00:47:23","slug":"dialogue-tips-for-the-mouths-of-babes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/dialogue-tips-for-the-mouths-of-babes\/","title":{"rendered":"Dialogue tips for the mouths of babes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, so the intent of this piece<\/a> is not to help fictioneers but to lament a trend in spoken English.<\/p>\n

It’s by Clark Whelton, who as a speech writer for NY City mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani (!) screened interns over a number of years.<\/p>\n

Around 1985, he noticed that college grads began to sound increasingly inarticulate.<\/p>\n

I agree, this is lamentable. (And what does this say about the future market for fiction? Whoa, let’s not go there . . .)<\/p>\n

But if we set aside our angst for a sec, we have some great tips here in how to write dialogue when the speaker is a teen\/young adult.<\/p>\n

There is, of course, the ubiquity of the word “like,” and the interrogative rise at the end of declarative sentences (personally, I wouldn’t end declaratives with question marks too often in my fiction; its the sort of thing that should be used sparingly; but if used sparingly is a great tool for conveying that speech pattern in a character).<\/p>\n

Another that is pretty well known — to the point of being widely parodied — is “Playbacks, in which a speaker re-creates past events by narrating both sides of a conversation.” Example: \u201cSo I\u2019m like, \u2018Want to, like, see a movie?\u2019 And he goes, \u2018No way.\u2019 And I go . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there’s the verbal tic Whelton calls “Double-clutching.” The example he gives: \u201cWhat I said was, I said . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

He also gives some examples from Catcher in the Rye<\/em>:<\/p>\n

All the way back in 1951, Holden Caulfield spoke proto-Vagueness (\u201cI sort of landed on my side . . . my arm sort of hurt\u201d), complete with double-clutching (\u201cFinally, what I decided I\u2019d do, I decided I\u2019d . . .\u201d) and demonstrative adjectives used as indefinite articles (\u201cI felt sort of hungry so I went in this drugstore . . .\u201d).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pretty nice little tutorial there, don’t you think?<\/p>\n

The trick will be to write this kind of dialogue without making your character sound like a nitwit, or worse yet annoying your readers. LOL<\/p>\n

Related: The Decline of the Imperative<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay, so the intent of this piece is not to help fictioneers but to lament a trend in spoken English. It’s by Clark Whelton, who as a speech writer for NY City mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani (!) screened … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[264,261,263,241,262],"class_list":["post-1909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-clark-whelton","tag-dialogue","tag-fiction","tag-writing-2","tag-writing-tips"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1909"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6407,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1909\/revisions\/6407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}