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72 Part II: Realising That Character Is Everything
Getting quirky with speech quirks
Many people have particular ways of speaking that are often separate from
their accents or regional dialects. Such quirks depend not only on the characters’
age, education and background, but also on the work that they do
(different ways of speaking are appropriate in different jobs). Teenagers often
speak very differently at home than with their peers. People also acquire
a fair amount of work-related jargon that can slip over into their ordinary
everyday speech.
Clichéd phrases such as ‘at the end of the day’, ‘I personally’, ‘it’s not rocket
science’ and ‘at this moment in time’ are often used in speech and can be
appropriate for a particular character. But be wary of using these too often.
Examples of characters in fiction with favourite phrases that function as
speech quirks are Jay Gatsby’s ‘old sport’ in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby (1952) and Mr Micawber’s ‘something will turn up’ in Dickens’s novel
David Copperfield (1850), among many others.
Think carefully about the way your characters speak, and note down your
decisions in the following areas to keep handy:
✓ Tone of voice
✓ Speed of speaking
✓ Choice of words
✓ Particular favourite phrases
You can use quirks to make a character’s dialogue individual. This can be
extremely useful when a number of people are present in a scene, because
you can use the individual ways of speaking to distinguish the characters.
(See the later section ‘Don’t All Shout at Once! Coping with Crowds’ for more
on dialogue and groups.)
Don’t overdo speech quirks. Mistakes can be a useful way of making characters’
individual voices stand out, and can sometimes be funny or endearing,
but they can also become irritating if overused. You want to keep your dialogue
easy to read, so that readers can concentrate on the story instead of getting
bogged down in trying to work out what people are trying to say.