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66 Part II: Realising That Character Is Everything
Conveying Individuality and Character
through Dialogue
As a writer, your task (if you choose to accept it) is to create convincing dialogue
and therefore individual, believable characters. To do so you need to
develop one of the most useful but also difficult skills when writing dialogue:
using different accents, dialects, slang and speech quirks.
The need to create credible dialogue is particularly acute in certain genres.
For example, when you’re writing historical fiction you need to capture something
of the way people spoke at the time, and if you’re writing science fiction
or fantasy you need to find convincing ways to make different cultures speak,
or even invent imaginary languages, such as in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the
Rings (1954).
But you don’t need to travel in time and space to worry about this aspect
of writing. In today’s multicultural societies, any contemporary story seems
contrived and false without some characters who don’t speak Standard
English with Received Pronunciation. Plus, speech has become more informal
over the years, and nowadays many people use slang and local idioms more
freely.
The way people speak depends on their country or region of origin, education
and where they live now. In addition, characters need to have their own individual
ways of speaking, with different phrases and mannerisms.
Feeling for foreign accents
Finding ways to convey an accent isn’t easy. In this section I talk about a
couple of the easier approaches before showing how you can use some more
subtle ways to improve your dialogue.
The simplest method, if you don’t feel able to tackle accents, is just to write
a line like, ‘He said in a strong guttural accent’. Or you can be more specific;
for example, saying that the character rolled his ‘r’s. However, without some
reminder or trace of an accent in the dialogue itself, readers are likely to
forget and not hear the accent in their heads.
Some writers therefore prefer to use phonetics to convey the way a person
speaks. For example, if you want to render the voice of a character who speaks
with an American accent, you can put ‘Bawn Street’ instead of ‘Bond Street’;