Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. (36 page)

Every year when we begin the Shakespeare unit, my ninth graders take one look at the dialogue and inevitably ask, “Did people really talk that way back then?” And my inevitable answer is “No way.”

Characters in books, plays, movies, and TV shows don't talk at all like people in real life. Dialogue for real people is full of stammers, stutters, and verbal clutter such as
like
, as in “He was, like, no way, and I'm like, yeah we are.” Real people ramble when they speak and natter over details no one cares about: “The bus was rushing straight toward me, and I didn't know what to do. I remember that it was Tuesday because my oldest has his lessons on Tuesdays, and I was taking his clarinet to him because he'd forgotten it
again
. The boy would forget his head if it wasn't attached. So anyway, the bus …” Yeah. Real people rarely say anything worth putting into a book — not without heavy editing, anyway.

But here's the thing — a lot of people
think
they speak well. They don't notice the annoying verbal clutter, the rambling, the number of times they say
um
, or the fact that they start every other sentence with
You know
. So when they read or hear dialogue that doesn't have any of that stuff in it, it sounds good and natural to them.

Good dialogue
sounds
natural without being the slightest bit natural. It's all part of that illusion of reality you're creating. There are a number of ways to create realistic-sounding dialogue, even for unrealistic characters, and a number of traps to avoid.

All of us have little verbal tics we use when we speak. As noted above, we end our sentences in
yeah
? or say
Goodness me
! a lot or misuse the word
literally
, as in
My boss will literally
kill me if I'm late again. Our problem is we use these tics too often, and they would become annoying on the printed page.

You can and should assign speech tics to your characters. The key is to use them
sparingly
, as in no more than once or twice per scene. You want to give the flavor of a speech tic without annoying the readers with it.

Supernatural characters can have their own otherworldly speech tics. We already saw Hogsqueal's odd slang in The Spiderwick Chronicles. Gina, the fashionista vampire in Lucienne Diver's
Vamped
, has a number of teenage girl speech tics, including the words
like
and
totally
. In chapter four, Gina says, “What I mean is, we're, like, beyond the law. Renegades, right? No reflection, so probably no image left behind on pesky security cameras.” The word
like
doesn't appear again in dialogue for the rest of the chapter — or in the next. Gina's dialogue retains the flavor of teenage dialect without actually
being
teenage dialect, and it gets the idea across in print very nicely.

In a more extreme example, Dobby, the house elf from J.K. Rowling's books, avoids pronouns for himself and other people, referring to himself as
Dobby
instead of I. He also addresses Harry in third person indirectly and by his full name Harry Potter. In
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
, for example, Dobby says, “Dobby has come to protect Harry Potter, to warn him, even if he
does
have to shut his ears in the oven door later …
Harry Potter must not go back to Hogwarts
.” This speech tic makes Dobby's dialogue quite distinctive and, as I said, a little extreme, but Rowling gets away with it because Dobby is an extreme character. She wisely avoids this with her main characters.

Okay, this one can be a delicate topic, but it needs addressing. Some novels have explicit swearing in them, and some don't. Which it is depends on what the author has decided is appropriate for the audience. If your book doesn't use swear words, you can safely skip this section.

In English, swearing revolves around two things: bodily functions and religion. Other languages have other standards for swearing. In China, it's a dreadful insult to call someone a turtle, for example. Swearing is based on the forbidden — in English-speaking cultures we're not allowed to say our swear words because the concepts they're based on are considered impolite, disgusting, or profane.

This gets tricky when you have a character from another culture, say from the other side of a mystic gate. What if that culture treats sex as a public act but drinking is considered private, and even a little shameful? The tricky part isn't creating the swearwords, actually — the tricky part is getting away with having a character who stubs his toe and yelps, “Drink!”It can be done. You just have to use it consistently and have other characters react appropriately, forcing your reader to accept it.

One way to create new swearwords is to leave the powerful ones alone but create mild ones for your culture.
Oh my God
or just
God
are common mild swearwords in our culture (though they used to be much more powerful), and a number of paranormal books have characters swear in the plural, saying
Oh my Gods or Gods
, or mentioning deities by name instead.

Finally, in a supernatural setting, swearing might have consequences that go beyond social censure. Not that long ago, people were reluctant to mention the devil's name in case calling it out got his attention. (“Speak of the devil, and he is like to appear.”) The ancient Greeks were equally reluctant to call on the death god Hades for the same reason. J.K. Rowling's characters dislike saying the name of the dread wizard
Voldemort
aloud, and everyone reacts as if it were a dreadful swearword. And in a world where magic or the gods are real, swearing might create real consequences. In
The Sword in the Stone
by T.H. White (which is high fantasy but still worth mentioning here), Merlin experiences a moment of frustration toward young Arthur and shouts, “Castor and Pollux blow me to Bermuda!” He instantly vanishes and reappears a moment later, hair and robe wildly disheveled. When Arthur asks what happened, Merlin only replies, “Let that be a lesson to you not to swear.”

Conversation has a natural rhythm, a give-and-take that's not always easy to capture perfectly on paper. Your dialogue should always sound natural. One of the best ways to see if it does is to read it aloud to yourself. Does it sound natural? Could an actor say it on a TV show and sound normal? If not, go back and revise. Try saying the words aloud first and write them down second. Become a one-writer show. You'll need some privacy — or a lack of concern for what others think of you — but you might like the results. However, this rule applies more to human characters who live in our world.

Readers are willing to accept that characters who aren't human, or who didn't grow up speaking human languages, won't speak the way the humans do. (This is why Hogsqueal's speech patterns are funny — they're the opposite of what readers expect.) Dobby the house elf's speech patterns are outlandish and don't really pass the read-aloud test, but Rowling pulls it off because Dobby isn't human. The same goes for Thimbletack's rhyming couplets. These characters, however, can't occupy center stage for long because their strange dialogue tends to overwhelm everything else that's happening in the scene. There are ways to show odd dialogue without overwhelming the character.

One convention to show otherworldliness is simply to avoid contractions and add a touch of formality to the dialogue. This makes it sound like the speaker's first language is something other than English and the speaker is therefore speaking carefully. Look at the difference between these two sets of dialogue:

Here, the otherworldly centaur speaks like a modern American, despite his professed ignorance of American culture. But we can shift it a bit:

This is serviceable enough — the lack of contractions makes his dialogue sound more formal, more careful, as if English weren't his first language. However, it still comes across as a bit stilted, so we can modify the centaur's dialogue a bit more:

The touch of formality in the third version adds yet more otherworldliness to the centaur's speech patterns. All we need is a touch, though. We don't want to go too far:

Too far. The near-Shakespearean language overwhelms the dialogue like too much garlic in a soup. A taste is plenty.

Naomi Novik uses this technique with her dragons. Most of her dragons speak with a formal lilt, but Temeraire, a Chinese dragon, speaks even more formally, which accents the fact that he's an alien among dragons as we see here in
Victory of Eagles:

Novik is one of the few authors around who uses semicolons in dialogue, incidentally, and this small touch serves to accent the fact that we're in a different time and place. In this passage, Requiescat's dialogue has a bit of formality to it, but it's not completely so — the phrase
old fellow
is slangy, or it was for the time. Temeraire, however, uses much more elevated dialogue, complete with extra-complicated sentence structure, as we can see when he says, “you may get out at once” (instead of a simple “get out”) and “How dare you … behave like a visitor, and all the time it is a challenge?” (instead of “How dare you pretend to be a visitor when all the time you wanted to challenge me?”). Temeraire's careful speech doesn't fall into the ridiculous — Novik is too careful for that — but it does show us that he is neither human nor native to England.

You can also add elements from another language that you're familiar with. Play with grammar and word order to give sentences an exotic feel. Perhaps your dwarves have a Germanic bent and their sentences reflect Germanic influence. “Come you in. It will soon give rain” is German translated straight into English, for example, and could sound very much like a dwarf with a Germanic background.