Writing: Dialogue and artifice · 2:29am Mar 7th, 2014
I just got schooled by bookplayer on a Rarity story I'm writing:
Now, none of the lines are OOC, they just don't have much voice to them. It's especially jarring because Rarity has such a distinctive voice. If this was untagged, there's no way I could tell this line was from Rarity and not from Fluttershy or Pinkie. Which isn't a problem if it's some of the lines, but in this story it's almost ever single line Rarity has.
None of Rarity's florid language is there, her tendency to use "darling" and "dear" as pet names, her slight British-isms... it's not something she would /never/ say, it's just something that a lot of other ponies would say that exact same way.
Point being that writing dialogue that a character might say might be realistic, but it isn't as good as writing dialogue that a character might say, and no other character would.
You know, it's one thing I adore about writing the mane 6, is their voices. I've never managed to write a character with a voice half as distinct and interesting as theirs are. It's sometimes a struggle, but it's also often a delight.
Dialog of course should be real: suited to the character, and to their thoughts and feelings regarding action, scene and history.
But (I believe) it must also be artificial: interesting in itself to the reader. Witty, droll, unusual or arresting in phrasing, and so on. The result is aesthetic tension between the naturalness of the speech and the artifice of dialog.
Rarity's a fun character to write because she does this sort of thing all the time. Sometimes deliberately, but often instinctively--she loves being the center of attention, and she knows what it takes to get there.
I usually write her--well, in the voice of a personal friend who actually happens to be English and a professional costumer (also a trained opera singer, middle-eastern dancer, cook and falconer, among other things). But since you don't know Tracy I'll say that she comes across as a hybrid of Oscar Wilde and Dame Anna Russell:
With some Dorothy Parker when she's on the warpath.
1902945 I think that was deliberate. Even apart from the words they use, they differ in accent, volume, and tempo. I think the mane 6 were designed to be as distinct as possible. The downside is that it is odd for any of them to be friends with any of the others.
I have terrible problems with Pinkie. She has a distinctive voice, but I'm always afraid of overdoing it. All of the mane 6 sound like parodies of themselves, but Pinkie especially.
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Watch some old George Burns and Gracie Allen: you'll pick up on it right away.
This is very short, but it's worth a buttload.
Something to also remember about Rarity: she is not actually upper class, but bourgeois (albeit upwardly-striving), and her speech should reflect this fact--in that subtle British way which Nancy Mitford illustrates in her slim yet helpful volume U and Non-U.
The distinction lies in the choice of words that people of the upper classes would make as opposed to those that people in the middle class would. As the reviewer says:
While Rarity's distinct way of talking is certainly important (as it is for all the characters, and I agree with you that it's a fine line between hitting the nail on the head and making them sound like a parody of themselves), I think that what she says is the more important matter, not just how she says it. I mean, yes, if Rarity doesn't sound like herself than of course you want to correct that, but I'd consider that a more cosmetic or surface issue. Rarity is more than just how she talks, right? If you nail her character/personality (revealed by more than just how she talks), and how she sees the world and interacts with others, then I feel readers won't notice the lack of her recognizable phrasing. If she acts like Rarity, makes Rarity-type mistakes and blunders, then in my opinion you're fine.
I think it might be when we get across Rarity's unique way of talking, but fail to under-gird it with solid character portrayal (giving her actions, thoughts and feelings that are distinctly Rarity) that we end up creating parodies of the characters, because then what stands out the most is their dialogue, and not their character-revealing/character-reinforcing action, which is what should be the focus. That might be why often times the characters in the show feel more like actors playing themselves as opposed to simply being themselves. They hit all the major points (Pinkie being random each appearance, for example) but there's something vital underneath they're missing, and the fans end up saying "she felt off this episode", or that she was a caricature of herself.
Could be wrong though. *shrug*
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I need to say that Bad Horse did a wonderful job on that part. The fic was third person limited, and I never felt for a second I wasn't seeing things through Rarity's POV. The language and actions there were spot on, even using language more like her dialogue should have been.
It was just the words coming out of her mouth that lacked her unique vocabulary. It wasn't enough to ruin the story, but it was something that I kind of noticed, so I commented.
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Oh, of course, I would have mentioned the same thing, I'm sure, had I noticed. While reading it something probably just felt a little off, right? You realized what it was and pointed it out. It's just that with Bad Horse (not to talk about you like you aren't here BH) saying "I've been schooled", I wanted to make sure he didn't feel like just because he missed this one aspect, he had missed something fundamentally important to the quality of his story, like that he had screwed up in a big way or something. That now his Rarity wasn't really Rarity. Didn't mean to imply you didn't know what you were talking about.
There's a meta joke in here about how Rarity in particular would insist on deliberately keeping her style up and reminding everypony else exactly who was talking to them.
The show and fics thereof are actually some of the best case studies of creating characters with different voices for dialogue. It's something I've always wondered how to do well and now I have something to work off of.
I would say that establishing and upholding speech patterns is not only one of the best ways to charaterize a character, but also one of the easiest ways to slip up - though on the upside, the slip-ups are more obvious to you than they might be otherwise. Unfortunately, they can also be very obvious to the audience, especially if they're looking out for such things.
Every one of the mane six has a speaking pattern, above and beyond any accents or such nonsense. This means that some fairly high percentage of things they say are non-identical - that is to say, stick them in the same situation, and even if they say "the same thing", they won't say it the same way.
I'll note that this is something pretty much everyone screws up on. The show's writers screw up on this - I've noted in several of my episode analyses that this is a problem with throwing in the whole mane six, as oftentimes they give them very generic throwaway lines rather than actually putting thought into who should say what. A huge percentage of fanfics screw this up; even good writers make mistakes that stick out, or put things in characters' mouths which sound wrong.
When I write, I try to hear the words in the voices of the characters - if I can't, then I feel like something has gone wrong. I don't always succeed, but I try, and I've rewritten entire conversations because the characters didn't speak properly. Indeed, the feedback on the original final chapter of Crepes that I wrote, after I handed it over to my friend Bribri, was that the characters didn't sound like themselves. He was totally right and I ended up rewriting the entire final chapter as a result, as it was extremely dependent on dialogue and the flow of the conversation, and some of the changes changed how the characters would react to each other.
Admittedly this also sometimes leads to me writing a conversation several times to get things going. Real conversations kind of take a meandering path, but a story needs to sound both authentic and have proper pacing. Having two character talk for 5,000 words is only interesting if what they're discussing is really interesting; an ordinary conversation won't cut it.
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Another interesting aspect of Rarity is the fact that she actually IS acting, in character. In other words, Tabitha Saint Germain is not playing RARITY, she is playing Rarity playing the role of Rarity, because Rarity herself is a creature of some amount of artifice. She slips between them from time to time, and really she doesn't have only one role for herself; she has a number of them for different situations. Heck, she sometimes acts when she's just around by herself.
Makes me think of another great actor:
I usually find myself reading the dialogue out in my head, and if it doesn't fit the rhythms, tones, word usage, usual range of emotional content, etc., then I know it needs work.
Unfortunately, I've started to think I rely on dialogue too much, but I suppose there are worse things to become reliant on.