It can be easy or it can be hell

 

My characters are talking to each other. They are a team, so they have to.

Dialogue can be easy or it can be hell.

And how to make them all sound different – more like themselves and not like the other guy. It ain’t easy. The ideal is that you should be able to tell who said what without the dreaded he saids and she saids. Nice work if you can manage it, as someone once said.

I usually get the words down and then add necessary tags so that we don’t get totally lost about who said what to whom. Then I look to make it more interesting and that means adding some action. What are they doing while they have this dialogue? How are they feeling? Is that coming across in what they say, or have I got to resort to telling readers how my characters feel? Maybe I can get away with saying she is angry if I say “her anger rose until it boiled over in a splurge of boiling hot words.” (A bit wordy but you get the idea.)

I like to add northern dialect to some of my characters, but its easy to go overboard with it. I know what they’re saying, and I hear it around me most days but dialect may not carry to the far corners of the world. Sometimes I toss in a glossary at the end and leave it at that.

It’s a balancing act I find entertaining.  Once I’ve done my best shot, I leave it and go back a day or two later when I do a read through. I have to do this. This time I’m glad I did because I’ve found characters talking about something that hasn’t happened in their world. I know it’s going to, but they shouldn’t know about it yet. So easy to get confused with time lines. They almost deserve a post to themselves.

Historical dialogue and Versailles

Every now and then I see an article about language in historical novels, and can't resist reading them. Lindsey Davis says we can be pretty sure that people in 1st-century Rome didn't speak like one of Cicero's speeches when they were talking to their friends, arguing with their landlords or chatting up a girl.  Equally I'm pretty sure people in Anglo-Saxon England didn't talk over the morning pottage as if they were reciting Beowulf. 

Formal records and poems avoided slang and colloquialisms back then just as they do today - but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. Some authors think colloquial modern English gives a much better 'feel' for the people and their world than the stilted dialogue you sometimes see in historical fiction. I'm somewhere in the middle on this. I like a "timeless" feel if that is possible. I think it can be achieved by avoiding modern  slang and using the odd phrase that has a ring of the time about it, as long as it is not overdone, can add the "historical" feel.


The same can be said about dialect. If American novels get by writing in what I call modern "New Yorkese" then what's wrong with me adding a touch of my local Northumbrian or Geordie to the pot? I don't understand many of the "New Yorkese" references (I still have no idea what Nora Roberts is thinking of when she writes of a character wearing a watch cap) but I try and ensure that readers can understand the dialect phrases I use - and I try not to use too many!

Tried the new tv historical Versailles last week, but didn't like it. Lots of little niggles - actors I did not know, no attempt via the dialogue or its delivery to indicate it was all happening in France - lots of characters who looked very similar. (OK, I'll allow that brothers often do look like each other). All that hair was such a turn-off - I kept thinking of head lice and leaning away from the tv set.  Raging venereal diseases was very likely judging by the amount of sex portrayed in almost every possible permutation, in the first half hour of the programme. Plus which, not much actual story. A pity. Must see what Kate Williams has to say about it - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07ff99m

Eating out

Yesterday we had three hours of sunshine, which saved my sanity. We also went to a local restaurant avec chambres, called Auberge Lou Peyrol, for a meal.

It is in the small village of St Marcel du Perigord and it's run by Guy and Fiona, who met in Zermatt when working at one of the big hotels there.

Fiona is English and Guy, French, so we're not afraid to try out our poor French, knowing that there is a menu Anglais if we need it.

The terrace has been closed for three weeks due to the constant rain, which means a big difference in income for them. Eating on terraces or the street in towns is so common in France, and usually adds hugely to the covers. We see folorn tables and chairs outside eateries in England now - but it is only because smokers have to be accommodated somewhere!

Our meal was lovely, as expected, full of small surprises. A frothy something or other in a small glass to tease the appetite, then foie gras for dh and saumon d'Ecosse pour moi, followed by cochon for him and chicken for me. Creme brulee with strawberries for dessert, and a small glass with strawberry liquer beneath yogurt with the coffee.

We didn't want expresso, nor a double expresso, so I asked for cafe Americano, which brought recognition. Here it is a cafe d'onger, I was told. (That is how it sounded, so I hope it is not spelled so very differently.) The name of the auberge translates as the cauldron or cooking pot. It's not in my French/English dictionary, just as I never found the word bolly, which is what the people of this region call a roofed terrace. Evidently lou is their equivalent of the definite article le or la.

So, with wine, l'addition was 102 euros.

DPOV 3

Writing DPOV means using words and expressions the character would habitually use. They won’t explain what they already know
It stops you writing of another character: "She was stupid," because your DPOV character can only guess that the new character is stupid. But there are ways around it. Characters have body language and facial expressions, so your DPOV character can read those as well as the reader.
Introspection or internal questioning is a temptation in DPOV and sometimes I take some of it out when I re-read, because its way too easy to go on too long and become boring. No one wants to be boring, do they!

That’s about it for DPOV from me.

As a taster for the next topic, which will be on accent and dialect, if I can manage it, here are some starters…
"There's a difference between Geordie vowels and words, and Tynedale or mid Northumberland, and north Northumberland," says Kim Bibby-Wilson from the Northumbrian Language Society.
"So you get "dinna" for "don't" up on the Scots border and "dinnit" further south. You get "divvent" in most places."