(Using Small-Town Settings to Deepen Character Connections.)

Even though my ego is pretty healthy, I felt more than a little trepidation when I decided to have a British main character in my second novel Love Walked In. Not only that, but I wanted him to narrate half the book in first person.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m not British. I am originally from northern California, an area of the US known for not having any accent at all beyond overusing “hella” and referring to our freeways without prefixing them with “the.”

So why did I feel qualified to do something so bold? Well, I’m married to an Englishman I met 16 years ago this month. (Aww!) I’ve lived in the UK on and off for most of my adult life, and I have also worked as a recipe translator for British cookbooks being published in the States, where I get paid to be pedantic about big and small cultural differences.

But still, I wrote my MMC Leo Ross holding my breath just a little bit. You see, British people have opinions about how they’re portrayed in American media. Which is fair, given that most of the impressions we get seems to be from Hugh Grant rom-coms or Outlander. Not to mention the travesty that is Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney accent as the chimney sweep in Mary Poppins—British people still resent that one even though it’s 60 years old!

(That said, British stereotype us, too. One of the first people I met when I studied abroad asked me if I owned a gun. I asked him if he owned a bowler hat and a pinstriped suit. We called a truce.)

Fundamentally, I think if you’re going to write a British accent, it’s really worth aiming to be as accurate as you can, simply because you’d hate reading someone butchering an American accent. Also, learning about Britishisms is genuinely really fun, like learning a foreign language where you understand a lot already and don’t have to conjugate verbs or come to grips with the subjunctive.

Here’s what you’ll want to consider as you formulate your British character:

Voices in Your Head

Conveying an accent in writing is both easier and harder than it seems. On the one hand, your reader isn’t going to hear your character, but on the other, you have to help them “hear” the voice on page. 

So let’s think about this—what is an accent, really? My answer to this is totally unscientific—please don’t haul me up in front of a linguistics department! But in my lived experience, what we think of as an accent has three parts: the actual accent, as in how we say words, dynamics, as in the rhythm of phrases and sentences, and the vocabulary, which isn’t just nouns and verbs and adjectives but also cultural references.

The first one is going to come much more into play if your book is turned into an audiobook, and then you’d better hope you have a gifted narrator (I am very lucky to have the talented Kate Handford and Stewart Crank). But when you’re writing the text itself, you’ll want to lean into the other two.  

There Is No Such Thing as a British Accent

The United Kingdom is made up of a multitude of regional accents—not just the ones from the home nations like Scotland and Wales, but much smaller areas, and they can vary in a big way across distances that seem nonexistent to most Americans. For example, the northern English cities of Manchester and Leeds are only 45 miles apart, but the two accents are strikingly different. It’s the same with Scotland—I find people from Edinburgh mostly understandable at first meeting, but the accent in Glasgow is a lot more intense. I have nodded and smiled through conversations with Glaswegian taxi drivers while having only the smallest clue what they were telling me.

Another thing: British people really don’t like to talk about this, but social class also comes into play here. Think about the how the aristocrats and the servants sound different in Downton Abbey, or Eliza Doolittle’s journey to change her accent in My Fair Lady. When I was writing Love Walked In, I wrote two characters who are both from London, but one is from a wealthier background and the other grew up with more working class roots, so they use different slang.

So when you’re planning your character, you need to do some thinking about their backstory. Where exactly did they grow up? What did their parents do for work? Where did they go to school? All of this might change how they talk.

Watch, Listen, Learn

Have I terrified you enough? Now I have some good news: It’s really easy to find good examples of all the different British accents online. This is your permission to watch A LOT of YouTube in the name of research. I’d focus on shows that are made to be consumed by British people: game shows like Taskmaster or Would I Lie to You, or panel shows like Have I Got News For You.

Even better, try to find a standup comic from a similar background to your character and watch a lot of clips of them performing. It’ll give you a feel for all the parts of their accent: the slang they use, the cadence of their speech. For example, if you want to write a character from Newcastle, Sarah Millican is both hilarious and has a strong Geordie accent. If you’re looking for someone who sounds like a younger, contemporary version of Hugh Grant, Ivo Graham is who you might need. 

In Conclusion, A Few Wild Generalizations

British people are deeply afraid of looking stupid…

and therefore are the unquestionable masters of indirection and understatement. No being too serious or earnest, because then someone might make fun of them, or “take the piss.” A British person will say the worst kind of catastrophe is “not ideal.” When they’re thrilled about something, they’ll say it’s “not bad.” Imagine a nation of swans, coolly gliding on the surface and frantically paddling underneath.

…unless they get drunk.

All those bottled-up emotions have to go somewhere, and they usually explode after a few pints. British people get messy, and you can have a lot of fun with a drunk character losing their treasured composure.  

And never underestimate the British capacity to make things awkward…

…because they’re so self-conscious that they will conversationally trip over their own feet.

…or to take ordinary words and turn them into insults. Or words for being drunk.

Seriously, the number of slang terms for inebriation could fill a small thesaurus on their own.

Check out Sarah Chamberlain’s Love Walked In here:

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(How Do I Develop a Character’s Voice?)

I didn’t think about what it meant to do all this looking back, so often framed through the experiences of famous men, while the present-day pop culture was focused on developing “it” girls for the purpose of devouring them whole. As an adult, though, I can see that this particular period has shaped what I write—and how.

I gravitated toward the Sunset Strip, long known as a beacon for both rock stars and groupies alike, with all those clubs and bars nestled together in just a few blocks under the glow of neon lights. The 1970s saw the rise of the “baby groupies”—girls in their early teens appearing on the arms of men who were on their way to becoming rock legends. Girls who were still children, whose experiences were brushed off with “it was a different time,” or “she wanted it,” no nuance invited.

My debut novel, The Cover Girl, begins in this era, telling the story of Birdie Rhodes, who becomes a model at 13 and meets a rock star when she poses for his album cover at age 15. He seduces her and convinces her parents to let him assume legal guardianship so he can take her on tour.

Most important to me was centering Birdie’s experiences, not only during her time with the rock star, but long after, showing how the relationship shapes the rest of her life. Perhaps paradoxically, the main way I approached this was through her lack of spoken dialogue.

This silence came naturally; the novel began as a short story, and even then, Birdie only spoke in italics, and not until the final section. I was several chapters deep into my first novel draft before I really thought about why it felt so natural and decided to embrace her withholding as a conscious craft choice.

Fully developing Birdie’s silence meant challenging myself as a writer and thinking about craft more deeply than ever. The smallest word choices and grammatical constructions made the difference, allowing her summaries and internal reactions to flow with traditional dialogue and ensuring these conversations followed their own natural rhythm so that the reader could be lulled into this world rather than pulled out every time someone spoke.

Click to continue.

This created its own tension with showing versus telling—a risk of telling too much. I made a tradeoff. By having Birdie tell in one way, I could show something else. This included:

Illustrating power imbalances.

Birdie’s silence exists before she meets the rock star, showing how she is shaped by her environment. She is the only child of older parents and a young model; as such, it’s drilled into her early and constantly that she should be seen and not heard (a message that hadn’t changed much by the time I was a teen 25 years later). She comes to know where her value is.

And while she states in the narration she knows no one is interested in what she has to say, withholding her own voice is another way to show how deeply she has internalized this. Her silence also demonstrates the imbalance of the relationship the rock star pushes her into, illustrating it in a way that doesn’t sexualize her more than the world has already. Everything goes through him: He knows everything, he has all the answers, and she’s subject to it all.

Developing an unreliable narrator.

Throughout The Cover Girl, the reader has access to the traditional dialogue other characters speak to Birdie, but in response, she summarizes, telling the reader what she said and making them reliant on the accuracy of her recollection, or she reacts in what appears to be an aside, leaving the question of what was actually said open to interpretation.

At the same time, Birdie struggles with memory, forcing herself to forget certain things or people for her own psychological safety as she avoids the truth of what happened to her. Her silence conveys to the reader how limited her version of events is. She could say anything, but the fact that she doesn’t think what she might say is worth sharing says everything.

Conveying the long-term impact of trauma.

Birdie’s time with the rock star shapes the rest of her life; her coming-of-age takes decades because of how her growth is stunted. When it falls apart, the rock star has something to go back to. Birdie’s formative years are spent in his charge, and her frame of references for the world are mostly limited to her modeling career and the time spent with him.

Her lack of dialogue then becomes a way to show what was robbed of her. Her youth, her identity-defining experiences, her ability to know herself—she missed out on all of this, and for most of her adult life, the only way she can move forward is through repression. She can’t talk about the reality of her life, literally or metaphorically.

The truth is, stories like Birdie’s are often treated as inconvenient footnotes or as fodder for taking down powerful men. Her existence is defined by the importance of someone else, making me look back at all that nostalgia programming that brought her into my life and wonder: What exactly was I supposed to be nostalgic for, anyway?

So much of The Cover Girl is about trying to find the words: to say what happened, to call a predator what he is, to fill in the hazy outline of a memory. It’s about finding your voice to speak the truth, and extending that metaphor into dialogue not only challenged me as a writer, but it brought me closer to Birdie. In a world that tries to silence girls like her, she found a way to roar back—on her own terms.

Check out Amy Rossi’s The Cover Girl here:

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(How Do I Develop a Character’s Voice?)

Banter is a specific subset of dialogue with a teasing or playful tone. It’s dialogue with an edge and sometimes, depending on the characters, it even has teeth.

As a rom-com author, I know my readers expect to find good banter when they open one of my books. But what makes for good banter? To explore what good banter needs to be successful, let’s look at five ways to ruin good banter.

How to Ruin Good Banter in 5 Easy Steps

1. Technical Issues

To write effective banter, it’s important to master the technical parts of dialogue first. Dialogue needs to clearly indicate who’s speaking so the reader doesn’t get confused. Too many dialogue tags, too few, or too many alternative words for “said” can all impact the effectiveness of dialogue.

As you read back through a section of dialogue, check first to make sure it’s clear who is speaking each line. Vary the dialogue tags, gestures (the actions or movements a character makes around a line), and lines that have neither. You can also change up where these indicators are located—at the start, end, or even in the middle of a line of dialogue.

The goal is for the technical setup to be so seamless that readers are never pulled out of the story to notice your hard work.

2. Imitation Conversation

Have you ever read a transcript for an interview? Even the most entertaining conversation loses its shine when recorded word for word. The second way to ruin witty banter is to make it too close to actual dialogue.

As Anne Lamott puts it in Bird by Bird, “You’re not reproducing actual speech—you’re translating the sound and rhythm of what a character says into words. You’re putting down on paper your sense of how the characters speak.” Banter needs to sound like an actual conversation, not be a literal conversation.

3. Bad Rhythm

Like dancing, dialogue doesn’t work without a good sense of rhythm. Banter is snappy and tends to have a faster pace than typical dialogue. But it also needs to be balanced out by various line lengths to avoid sounding stilted and boring.

The best way to test rhythm is to read it out loud. Listening will reveal where the interplay between the characters shines. It will help you see where to slow the pace by adding a dialogue tag or physical gesture—like a character taking a sip of water or fidgeting with something.

Bad rhythm is what stops the banter from bantering.

Click to continue.

4. Lack of Characterization or Uniqueness

The most common piece of advice I hear regarding dialogue is to make each character’s speech be something only they would say. Of course, this isn’t possible for every line of dialogue in a book. But a quick way to ruin banter is to have such generic lines that they could be said by any old character in any old book.

Sometimes when I’m in a groove, writing banter is easy, as though I’m eavesdropping on an actual fictional conversation. Other times, I simply write basic prose in the first draft, then push for more in edits.

Is there another way for a character to say that they’re tired? Is there an analogy or comparison they could use that relates to their job or interests? Does this character have an extensive vocabulary? Do they tend to speak in complete sentences or choppy fragments?

The better you know your characters, the easier it will be to write dialogue that sounds unique and uniquely like them.

5. Missing Subtext

One of the things that makes banter really sing is what the characters aren’t saying. It’s the unspoken current running beneath the words.

How does he really feel about her? What secret is she keeping? Why is he reacting so strongly at this moment?

This work requires not only knowing your characters but keeping in mind their motivations as well as the things they do and don’t really want to say. When writing conversations between Wyatt and Josie in my book If All Else Sails, I tried to remember at all times how they felt about each other, how they each wanted the other person to think they felt, and what they really wished they could say to each other.

While this is subtle work, I think of it like infusing the banter with the kind of depth that really brings it—and the characters—to life.

In her book, Wired for Story, Lisa Cron states that “when a story enthralls us, we are inside of it … and the last thing we’re focusing on is the mechanics of the thing.” Great dialogue—and especially great banter—is usually doing several things at once and doing them so well that readers don’t even notice.

The goal is to work so well at crafting your banter that readers don’t see the hard work—they’re too busy lost in the moment.

Check out Emma St. Clair’s If All Else Sails here:

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(Find more Killer Writers conversations here.)

“Writing has changed a great deal since you started.”

 “I wrote my first eight books on a 1958 manual, portable Olympia—solid steel. I started out in the newspaper business in the 70s, tapping away on a typewriter. We had copy paper and carbon paper. We had paste pots with a little brush stuck down the middle—cut and paste. It’s all different.”

“There’s something to be said for that tactile experience.”

“When I was doing magazine stories, I’d have pages all over the floor of my apartment living room, and I’d be on my hands and knees trying to figure out where everything went. To this day, when I’m working on a book, I have chapters laid out on the floor because I’m trying to find if I’ve duplicated something or if I should move something. I still print and edit. I print it out every day. I just finished yesterday hand-editing the draft that I’m doing. For some reason, I can’t really edit on the computer. I have to hold the manuscript in my hands and duplicate the reading experience. I see things when I’m reading the manuscript that I don’t see on the screen, including typos. I think it was on Facebook, a young writer was asking the other day, ‘What are you supposed to do, print out the whole book? And then you have this giant stack of pages?’ And I was like, ‘Well, you kind of do it chapter by chapter.’ I felt like I was from another era.”

“Or another planet. You started as a newspaperman?”

“Yeah, I was doing paid summer internships in Southern California for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook chain, covering city council meetings when I was 19. I’ve just always been a writer. I’ve been a writer in lots of different formats—magazines, television sitcoms, screenplays—and my ultimate goal was books. It took me a long time to work my way to getting my first novel published.”

“And it did well, your first novel.”

“Yeah, it did. Not as well as Hoagy did, but my first novel was actually a coming-of-age novel called Kiddo. It got a rave review in the Sunday Times Book Review. I got my own page with my picture and the whole thing, but I didn’t marry a movie star, and I didn’t become a millionaire. My first murder mystery, The Man Who Died Laughing, was based on an experience I had. One of the things I did along the way was ghostwrite a memoir of a real-life murder in the late 70s that took place in New York. It was a major tabloid murder. I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember this, but it was Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“He allegedly killed her in Room 100 of the Chelsea Hotel, knifed her in the bathroom. It was her mother’s story. I learned a lot from that experience. That’s how I got the idea of a young novelist who had achieved great success, married a movie star, and then got writer’s block, fell on his ass, snorted everything away—his marriage, his career—and as a last-ditch fallback, his agent talked him into ghostwriting a memoir of a famous comic from the 1950s. It was called The Man Who Died Laughing, and it was nominated for an Anthony Award.”

“That was your first mystery.”

“Yep. My editor, Kate Miciak, called me up, and I said, ‘What’s an Anthony Award?’ And she said, ‘It’s awarded every year at Bouchercon,’ and I said, ‘What’s Bouchercon?’ I didn’t know anything. I wasn’t part of the mystery community at all. It didn’t win, but my third one, The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald, did win an Edgar Award and an American Mystery Award. At that point in my career—this was the late 80s—I would sit down every day, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was doing. I really didn’t. After I won the Edgar, I realized that I actually did know what I was doing. I just didn’t realize it.”

Check out David Handler’s The Man Who Swore He’d Never Go Home Again here:

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“Let me ask you a couple of questions, then, about knowing what you’re doing. A lot of our readers are writers-to-be, and they want to avoid plot dumping—which you don’t do. You’ve got snappy dialogue moving the story forward. When you first sit down to write a scene, do you start with what needs to be said, or with who’s saying it?”

“It varies from book to book. I try not to crowd too much. I’ll try to keep the pacing going, and whatever will keep that going and move the story along.”

“You carry a lot of the story in the dialogue.”

“I do. I write pretty good descriptions. My prose is good, particularly in the Hoagy series, but my strength has always been dialogue. That’s why I got paid a lot of money to write TV—because I wrote good comic dialogue. But in a weird sort of way, I feel like a bit of an impostor as a mystery writer, because I don’t really consider myself a crime writer. I consider myself a writer of character fiction. I create interesting, smart characters—people I’d want to know more about, or people who have a lot of secrets. I create this ensemble. It’s a story about these people, and somebody ends up dying. I don’t start with the murder. I start with the characters.”

“You start with ensemble first.”

“That’s the most important thing for me—coming up with my ensemble of characters. What is going to happen? I don’t quite know how I’m going to get there, but I have a basic thumbnail idea. I know pretty much who’s going to die and why and who did it, but the fun part is creating all of the different characters and their interlocking relationships, interlocking pasts, their motives—and making them all plausible.”

“In your dialogue, there’s a lot of emotional subtext. How do you say what needs to be said between the lines without beating the reader over the head?”

“I do a lot of trimming. I just try to be as low-key about that sort of thing as possible. When I first started out, I used to try a lot harder to be funny. I was coming out of TV, where you were used to doing five jokes to a page. My dialogue now tends to be a little more reflective.”

Click to continue.

“And you accomplish multiple things at once.”

“You have to. One of the things you have to learn how to do is to accomplish more than one thing with your dialogue and your description. You’ve got to get heart in there, in addition to humor and information. If you’re not moving the story forward, then the scene has no purpose.”

“And you use yours to plant clues, give misdirection, suspicion.”

“Without hitting people over the head. I worked with some amazing people when I was doing movies. I wrote two projects with William Goldman, and one of the things he taught me is that if you’re not moving the story forward in each scene, then the scene has no purpose.”

“Even the funny scenes?”

“We used to get into arguments. Remember L.A. Confidential? One of the most famous scenes is the Lana Turner scene. Kevin Spacey and Guy Pearce are at Formosa Café, and Pearce thinks the woman is a hooker pretending to be Lana Turner. Turns out she’s really Lana Turner. She throws a drink in his face. Hilarious. Bill said that scene should have been cut because it didn’t move the story forward. And I said, ‘But everybody loves that scene!’ He didn’t care. He was a purist.”

“Something that struck me in The Man Who Swore He’d Never Go Home Again is how distinct your characters’ voices are.”

“I make notes about each character before I start writing the book.”

“You don’t even need dialogue attributes. The voices are that clear.”

“It’s really important to write good characters. That’s what I try to focus on—making them individual.”

“And you make them sympathetic—even the murderer.”

“Yeah, I don’t write monsters. I think we’re weak and greedy and want things we can’t have, or think we should have, or carry a grudge. I try to make the murder an outgrowth of a character’s flaws and weaknesses. Over the drafts, I work on making them as fleshed out as possible.”

“This is book sixteen in the Hoagy series. What was different this time?”

“I went all the way back to the beginning—before the before, in a way. When Hoagy walks into the Blue Mill Restaurant in Greenwich Village and sees Merilee. They lock eyes, and their lives change. Lulu the basset hound isn’t even in the picture yet. Merilee’s about to pick her up in a few days.”

“So even after all these books, you’re still discovering new ground.”

“I got to explore Hoagy’s childhood. We knew almost nothing about it before. His family had operated a brass mill in Connecticut for five generations. But we didn’t know why he and his father hadn’t spoken since high school. I also brought in his childhood friend and high school sweetheart, Maggie McKenna. She calls to tell him the town librarian—who really saw his gift early on—has died. That librarian was a big figure in his life.”

“Sometimes writers turn dialogue into soliloquies. How do you know when to divide it up?”

“I’ve written like 34 books. At this point, it’s instinct. I just know when something needs to be broken up—or when we don’t even need it.”

“Do you ever break the William Goldman rule and keep a line just because you love it?”

“Yeah. I’ve got running gags and Lulu things I can’t resist. But I’ve learned to pare them down. A little bit goes a long way. That took me a long time to learn.”

_____________________________

David Handler is the Edgar Award-winning author of several bestselling mystery series. He began his career as a New York City reporter. In 1988, he published The Man Who Died Laughing, the first of his long-running series starring ghostwriter Stuart Hoag and his faithful basset hound Lulu. http://davidhandlerbooks.com/

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(How I Write Compelling Characters in Spy Thrillers.)

Can two people love each other and still betray each other?  InThe Poet’s Game, Alex Matthews and his wife, Anna Kuschenko, are trained to use lies and deceit in the course of their intelligence work, and they ultimately contend with a dark secret that will forever keep them from being entirely truthful with each other. How does a couple that uses deception in the normal course of their professional duties, approach intimacy in marriage?  

The Secrets in Three Fictional Marriages

The marriages portrayed in The Odyssey, Rebecca, and Berlin Game artfully depict the tension between love and deception, and I studied the texts to see how the authors succeeded.

Odysseus’s wife Penelope, often described by the epithet, long-suffering, is surrounded by suitors seeking her hand in marriage during her husband’s 20-year absence. He is gone and presumed dead. Penelope defends against the suitors’ entreaties, but it becomes increasingly difficult for her to remain steadfastly faithful. When Odysseus returns, he appears in disguise as a beggar, recognized only by his household’s elderly swineherd. He hides his identity from Penelope. Is he suspicious that she betrayed him and he doesn’t want to reveal himself while he investigates? His deception is one of the epic’s curiosities, but Odysseus’s withholding makes their ultimate reunion more satisfying and Odysseus’s deceit adds dimension to his character.

Odysseus’s behavior is a good example of what John Le Carré said of complex characters: “The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.”

Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 romantic thriller, uses suspense and deceit in a marriage differently. The unnamed first-person narrator, a naïve young woman in her 20s who is a companion to an older woman in Monte Carlo, happens to meet a vacationing wealthy Englishman, Maxim de Winter, a 42-year-old widower. They fall in love, marry, and he brings his new wife back to his estate in Cornwall – Manderley. Maxim’s household servants, and particularly his spinster housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, take an immediate dislike to the young wife—comparing her disparagingly to the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca, who died a year earlier in a sailing accident. 

At Mrs. Danvers’s suggestion, the new wife dresses in Rebecca’s clothes to please her husband, who mourns the dead Rebecca. But rather than please Maxim, he is angered. The new wife suspects something is not right in their marriage, but she is helpless to discover what is wrong. Only a freak storm one night that sinks a ship off the coast results in the discovery of the missing sunken sailboat, and Rebecca’s body. The discovery causes Maxim to confess to his new wife that his marriage to Rebecca was a sham. Rebecca was cruel and selfish, took many lovers, and on the night that he murdered her, Rebecca confessed she was with child from a beau.

Click to continue.

Layers of deceit are drawn back in the final scenes and all that was hidden from the narrator about Rebecca’s death comes to light, drawing Maxim and the narrator closer together. Jeopardy of the shared secret deepen their bond.

Len Deighton’s 1983 novel, Berlin Game, features the loving couple of Bernard Samson, a middle-aged British intelligence officer working for MI6, and his wife, Fiona, also an MI6 intelligence officer. They have two children, live a respectable middle-class London life that is filled with the demands of parenting, family and friend obligations, and office scandals of adulterous colleagues. Samson is charged with exfiltrating an important East German asset and in the process confronts uncomfortable evidence that there may be a KGB traitor among his MI6 colleagues. Samson’s suspicions of treachery are confirmed when he is arrested in East Germany as he helps his asset escape, and is confronted by his wife, Fiona, dressed in a KGB uniform. She joined the enemy as a young college student drawn to communist ideology.

The villain in Berlin Game is the wife. But, in spite of Fiona’s treachery, her relationship to Samson has all the appearances of an affectionate marriage with young children, an active social life, and the little intimacies of a hard-working couple. 

How the Secrets in Fictional Marriages Move Stories

In each of these marriages, one character’s lies and deceptions deepens the complexity of the relationship, and provide the surprises that make for a compelling story. One partner hides an important detail of their life, and the revelation of that detail operates to bring the couple closer together, or thrust them irreversibly apart. The reveal provides an insight into what a character wants from the spouse—Odysseus wants to test Penelope’s fidelity, Maxim wants to protect his new marriage, Fiona wants to hide her treason. Deception and a surprise reversal in the relationships propels the plots of these stories.

Exposition is helpful to establish scenes and context, but dialogue provides the beating heart of the relationship and deployed effectively reveals the dynamic between husband and wife. Dialogue is used to imply, suggest, and hide and always for the purpose of adding to the unstable relationship between spouses. When characters come in contact with each other, sparks fly and the reader is riveted by the uncomfortable arguments and unexpected intimacies. The appearance of trust masks the inconsistencies and lies that point to betrayal. The best scenes are laden with uncertainty.

A character’s hidden motives make use of complex maneuvers to maintain the dark secret, all the while under cover of a gauzy film of intimacy and love. The layering of intimacy and artifice creates three-dimensional characters who come alive on the page. 

Check out Paul Vidich’s The Poet’s Game here:

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Then, whenever I was watching a show that wasn’t quite to my liking, I’d start thinking of that same word.

Then, whenever I sat down to work on something of my own—yup, here came that word again.

The word was “SHARP,” but it doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Lemme back up.

It might be helpful to know that, back in those playwriting days, I was specifically a horror playwright. I point this out because the mechanics of a horror play are a little different than your garden variety stage drama or comedy. Sure, the principles are the same—you’re trying to tell a good, satisfying story just like any other playwright—but there are a few additional expectations that make writing a horror play just a little bit harder. After all, you’re also looking to conjure up suspense, dread, and fear in your audience, and those are really challenging emotions to evoke without the benefit of a forced camera perspective or a narrow frame or post-production special effects or one of those soundtracks where everything gets really quiet AND THEN GETS REALLY LOUD.

When writing suspenseful, speculative stories for the stage, where you mostly only have the benefit of some props, a set, and whatever the human body and/or voice can do, you have to learn a few additional tricks. You have to learn how to fashion suspense and instill dread and fear using only your two dramatic fundamentals: characters and circumstances.

That’s where “SHARP” came in. Not only was it a short and pithy descriptor for that feeling a good, dynamic story gives you, it was also a handy acronym for a few key ingredients to keep in mind. Things that were present in the plays I was enjoying. Things that were absent in the ones I was not. Things I wanted to make sure my own work contained.

Lemme back up again, though.

What About the Nonsense Word?

I can hear you asking, “Wait, but the title of this article says it’s a ‘nonsense’ word! WE WERE PROMISED A NONSENSE WORD!”

The thing is, I’ve always been bad at leaving well enough alone; it wasn’t long before I started thinking of other letters to add to my pithy catchall. “SHARP” quickly expanded into the far more unwieldy “SHARPAWIDUS,” which I’ll admit, isn’t quite as snappy and sounds more like either an obscure dinosaur or a dubstep DJ (but perhaps I repeat myself).

Still. It gets the job done for me. “SHARP”—later “SHARPAWIDUS”—became a sort of checklist. Not a prescriptive formula or anything so crass; more like, an Aristotelian collation of elements I’ve observed are particularly satisfying, and which I can consult whenever I feel like I’m stuck in the writing or revising trenches.

I’m not a playwright anymore (at least in any dedicated way; you can’t ever truly leave the theater behind). Now I spend my energy and time writing books, my first and truest love. And despite the fact that every novelist has an unlimited budget when it comes to elaborate set pieces and special effects, as well as an ability to direct the audience’s eye to specific things no matter how small, I find I still constantly refer back to the lessons I learned as a playwright to help craft a style of suspense that’s necessarily rooted in character and circumstance.

In fact, my newest book, When the Wolf Comes Home (wherever books are sold, April 22, 2025), was written in an explicit attempt to marry both approaches. I wanted to embrace the novel’s ability to create elaborate set pieces of action and chaos and external threat, but also ensure that as much of the breathless, seat-gripping, palm-besweattening suspense came as much from the characters and their circumstances as any no-budget play I’ve ever written. (So far, early response seems to indicate that I did my job—Stephen King even called it “a classic”—for which I’m exceedingly grateful and gratified.)

When Writer’s Digest asked me to write a little about creating suspense, then, I figured I could trot out the old classic tricks like “short sentences,” “onomatopoeia,” “escalating action,” “show the bomb under the table” (all of which are classics for a reason; they are definitely effective tricks you should use) . . . or I could introduce you to my friend, SHARPAWIDUS, in the hopes that, at the very least, it’s ridiculous enough to help you unlock your own nonsense word to describe the things you think should be in a good, suspenseful story.

I should probably tell you what the hell this all means, though, so lemme back up a bit more.

SHARPAWIDUS

Stands for:

Stakes
Humor
Anticipation
Resistance
Plots
Animosity
Withholding
Interruptions
Decisions
Unsustainability
Stichomythia

Some of these might need some elaboration, so, you know the drill by now. Lemme back up one more time.

Stakes

This one’s obvious, I know, but it’s amazing how often remembering stakes is the key to everything. Think they’re high enough? Raise ’em. Is it the next chapter? Raise ’em again. But what does it mean to raise the stakes?

It means you’ve gotta give your character(s) something they clearly don’t want to lose, and then make it more and more likely they’ll lose it. Better yet, make them lose it and see what else they stand to lose now. Whether it’s their safety or their innocence or their understanding of the world—or whether it’s an arm or a head or a loved one.

As soon as we really feel what matters to your character(s), the more we’ll begin dreading the idea that we might have to get it taken away. That’s where the suspense comes in . . . and then rises as we watch the character(s) try to deal with / prevent their losses in hopefully unpredictable ways.

Humor

This one might be the hardest to calibrate. Too much humor and your suspense deflates. Not enough humor and the experience becomes a slog. The trick, I find, is to make sure the humor is grounded—or, to put it another way, that it’s coming from the inside, not the outside.

One way I like to think of it is to remember that no character wants to be in tension . . . but you as the author don’t have to give your characters what they want. If the tension is still there after the joke fails to dispel it? Oooh, that can make for some exquisite suspense.

Anticipation

Another obvious one, almost to the point of redundancy, but it can be helpful to remember that when we talk about “suspense,” we really mean a feeling of anticipation. When we know something is going to happen next and we want to know how it plays out.

You can help facilitate this feeling by putting approaching landmarks on the story timeline. Give the characters things to anticipate, whether they’re big events (the prom is next week!) or tiny reactions (she’s going to be so mad at me!). Mix this ingredient with a little bit of Interruptions (see below) and you’ve got some combustible suspense fuel.

Resistance

Not in the Star Wars Rebel Alliance sense, but rather something more internal. In fact, this idea actually comes from acting training. Some of the best notes I’ve ever received as an actor were reminders to resist the story you’re trying to perform.

A few examples: The most compelling way to play drunk is to try to act as sober as possible; the most realistic-looking way to perform a fall is to try to remain standing while your body goes down; the most effective way to elicit sobs from the audience is have your character desperately try not to sob.

Taking the premise of this idea into the writing realm, then: If there’s an emotional state you hope to create, or a payoff you hope to reach, the more your characters can actively resist it—until the absolute breaking point—the more engaged and invested your reader will become. Note that this doesn’t mean avoiding or ignoring the situation; I like the word Resistance because it very much implies an active fight against what may or may not be inevitable.

Plots

Note that it’s “plots,” not “plot” (nor “plotz,” bubbeleh). I don’t mean this in a “Good books have a story” way. You already have a story; why else would you be writing? Rather, to activate that story, make sure your characters are plotting things. It doesn’t have to be George R. R. Martin-level schemery, but it’s often not enough to say every character needs a “want”—try giving them each a private plan they’re actively following, too.

The suspense comes from wondering which plots, if any, will succeed, and watching them ricochet in unexpected ways. To quote William Shakespeare (another playwright of some note): “O, ’tis most sweet, when in one line two crafts directly meet.”

Animosity

It’s great when someone central to your story dislikes something—or someone—so much that it propels them. The thing I like about this word is it implies an activating, animating force. It feels more dynamic than just plain old hate.

Also, hate is hard to hide; animosity can be tucked away for later. It can create false pretenses, betrayals, uncomfortable alliances, etc. All the stuff of good, suspenseful drama—particularly if the reader knows about this animosity but other characters don’t. (I find this is a particularly useful element to keep in mind when juggling an ensemble.)

Withholding

Here’s a technical one. Whether it’s depicting a character’s reaction before revealing what they’re reacting to, or ending a chapter on a cliffhanger, or having someone remember something important but not revealing the memory until a choicer moment, withholding bits of information from the reader is a great way to keep them on the hook for more.

The tricky part is to not overdo it, because then it can start to feel like a cheat. Or worse, we can forget what we were supposed to be waiting for in the first place.

Click to continue.

Interruptions

This is a big one, and it’s kind of like the external version of Resistance. If you want to keep people on their toes, don’t let your scenes end the way they’re supposed to. There’s probably an ending or a button that feels *correct* to you, which means chances are the reader feels that way, too.

That’s a great opportunity to knock people off balance a little. Interrupt that *correct* ending with something that forces the characters to make another, messier decision, big or small (We love Decisions!). I like to use Interruptions as a rule for dialogue, too.

In life, the opportunities to monologue are few and far between. One of the best acting observations I ever got (from director Anne Bogart) is something I’ve carried over into my writing: Almost always, the person you’re talking to knows what you’re saying before you finish your sentence. Choose the moments where a character can speak uninterrupted very, very wisely. (See also “Stichomythia” below.)

Decisions

If I can be grossly reductive for a moment, I think the main reason we love stories is because we’re creatures who learn by example. We’re fundamentally compelled to see how hypothetical situations and/or conundrums might play out. (That’s why stories where the reactions seem arbitrary or ungrounded can feel almost like a betrayal.)

As such, the more Decisions you can force your character(s) to make, the better. As long as those Decisions feel believable, or at least intriguing, we’ll keep leaning in to see what happens next. There’s such delicious suspense to be found in waiting to see what a character will do . . . and also then whether or not they did the right thing.

Unsustainability

The worst things in life are the best things for stories, aren’t they? If there’s a situational element or a relationship or a character trait in your story that we just know is going to fall apart, we’re gonna be watching with glee and/or horror for the moment we’re proven right.

Stichomythia

One more technical one. This is a dramaturgical term describing when two characters trade alternating lines of dialogue in what would otherwise be a single verse speech. What it really means, though, is that great, tennis-match-feeling of characters trading short, snappy reports until the exchange builds to a climax. This is a wonderful technique for dialogue writing (see Interruptions) above, but the concept of stichomythia can carry into the structure of a good suspense scene, as well.

Rather than play a rising event through one character’s POV, try breaking it up into alternating character perspectives, so we get a more panoramic sense of a situation that’s bigger than one person can take in. This helps things move faster and also allows you for all sorts of mini-cliffhangers that ratchet up the tension even further.

(I think, as far as text layout goes, Stichomythia might also be another word for “skimmability,” too. This might be controversial, or even heretical, to say but in a good action scene, skimmability can be an asset. You want your reader to feel a certain rush trying to find out what happens next, and short lines that alternate information make for a great way to build a breathless momentum.)

***

And there you have it! “SHARPAWIDUS.” What do you think? Too unwieldy? Too general? Too obvious? Hopefully I backed up enough to give you enough runway to—

Oh wait! I totally forgot one more letter! One more essential ingredient to suspense. Maybe even the most important one. Namely:

WEREWOLVES

I mean, what is a werewolf but a ticking time bomb? A character who knows a bad thing is going to happen at a predictable, but unstoppable, time—and also a character who can’t always be themselves. A shapeshifter. Every good suspense story needs a shapeshifter, right? 

Take, for instance, When the Wolf Comes Home. It’s a story of a young woman named Jess, who’s a frustrated actress living out in LA, working the graveyard shift at a depressing 24-hour diner. One night, after a particularly dreadful shift, she stumbles home, only to find a scared little boy hiding in the bushes. Before she can figure out what to do with him, a horrifying wolf-like monster attacks her apartment complex, and Jess winds up running for her life with the little boy in tow. She quickly realizes this monster is the boy’s father and, unfortunately for her, he’ll stop at nothing to get his son back. Jess is about to learn that when the wolf comes home . . . no one will be spared . . .

Did I mention it’s available wherever books are sold, April 22, 2025?

Thanks for reading.

Check out Nat Cassidy’s When the Wolf Comes Home here:

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The post How One Nonsense Word Helps Me Craft Better Character-Based Suspense appeared first on Writer's Digest.

A lot of stories have been told over the millennia. There is no shortage of repeats and overlaps. But voice can be unique. Voice can distinguish a work from the pack. And voice can lead to writing that only works because it comes from that specific voice. That’s the gold standard.

(Tips for Creating Voice in Your Writing.)

My favorite comics and shows all have it. Dave Chapelle, Maria Bamford, Nate Bargatze. The original (British) version of The Office, Atlanta, Succession. Those stories, those points of view, that dialogue, and those characters only work when presented in their specific, unique voice.

#2. Character counts.

Character is a subset of voice, specific facets of a singular vision. If you cluster enough shining facets together you create a gemstone. Story doesn’t matter if we’re not invested in the characters. It’s the characters we root for, root against, and remember. Much more than story.

The examples are plenty in stand-up and narrative storytelling. Dana Carvey delivers an entire cast of characters in a single stand-up set. You can probably name a few. The famous characters depicted on Saturday Night Live stay with us even when we can’t remember what they said. Roseanne Rosannadanna, Stephan, Darnell Hayes, Linda Richmond. Make them specific, and they will be unforgettable.

#3. Story services voice and character, not the other way around.

If you have a glass of wine, voice and character are the wine. Story is the glass. It holds everything together. You need it. It has to be sound. But what you enjoy, what you feel, is the wine. Story, in and of itself, is rarely what’s most important. Or memorable. The importance of a story-first approach is shouted in how-to books and writing seminars and especially by film and TV executives. But if you create three-dimensional, consistently behaving characters, and set them on conflicting paths, story should take care of itself.

If you ever hear a character say, “I can’t believe I’m going to say this but…” it’s because they’re acting out of character to fit into a pre-ordained template. And often when that happens, the viewer or reader feels the inconsistency and loses interest.

#4. Brevity.

This is paramount in stand-up. Comics refine and hone to deliver their material with not only the fewest words, but the fewest syllables. Television comedy is the same. So is writing novels. Get to the point. Get to the joke. Get to the emotional moment. And in general, start your story as late as possible and end it as quickly as possible.

In working on sit-com scripts, the first scene we all thought was necessary often was cut during production. Or in editing. The audience is smarter than you think. Start the story in motion—they’ll know what’s going on.

#5. Be kind to yourself.

Writing is making mistakes and fixing them. We all write garbage. All first drafts need work. Sometimes a lot of work. Sometimes a toss in the garbage. Don’t beat yourself up when you write something that doesn’t work. Don’t get down when you figure out that you should have gone another way. Those realizations are something to celebrate. Yes, it means you have more work ahead but that’s okay. You’re making it better. The real value in writing is the writing.

I’ve heard of writers who don’t like writing. I don’t understand why they do it. If you don’t like writing, there are other ways to express yourself. Other jobs. Know that it’s a process. Accept that it’s a process. Once in a while something brilliant just flows seemingly out of nowhere. But that’s not the norm. The norm is making mistakes and fixing them.  

#6. Relatability is key.

A character’s wants and needs must ring universal. Seinfeld is a perfect example. Everyone likes to say it’s a show about nothing, but that’s far from true. Seinfeld is a show about selfishness. Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer are the most selfish characters on the planet. That’s why the show has such universal appeal. We understand the selfish impulses those characters feel.

Whether it’s lying to a prospective love interest to make ourselves look better or regretting a hastily made decision like quitting a job. Most of us have the good sense not to act on those selfish impulses. In Seinfeld they do act on them, which is what makes the show so funny. And don’t confuse likability with entertaining. George Costanza is not likable. Kendall Roy is far from lovable. But their behavior is lovely to watch.

Click to continue.

#7. Everyone has an opinion.

When you put voice and character first, it’s sometimes hard for readers or viewers to “get it.” We’re hardwired to be wary of something new. Out of the ordinary. Sometimes something new is loved right away. Often it takes time.

So be careful when soliciting others’ opinions. Any one opinion may or may not have value. But one of my favorite sayings from TV writing is: If you’re at a party with 12 people, and 12 people tell you you’re drunk, then you’re drunk. If everyone gives you the same note, it’s probably correct.

#8. Structure is bullshit.

The idea that a certain signpost in your story has to happen on a certain page number is absurd. As a young writer, I read all the story-structure books and, after 40 years of working as a professional writer, I can tell you this: All those books are written by people who can’t write narrative fiction. Or they can and they’re just trying to pad their bank accounts.

What’s worse, is some non-writing people with authority (film and TV execs, publishers, editors) read those story structure books and try to apply the books’ professed wisdom to the work they’re overseeing. The result is rarely good. Story should be developed from the inside out. It can be a messy process, but that’s okay. Characters need to behave consistently. If you hammer them into place to fit a story template, their integrity will shatter. And your viewers will disengage.

#9. Show don’t tell is overblown.

Another outsider’s note. Something people learn from a book or in a writing class. It’s only true some of the time. Sometimes viewers or readers want to be told, especially to move things along. Sometimes it’s better to show. Showing can evoke more emotion. But neither show nor tell is best for all situations.

It’s human nature to like having stories told to us. That gets back to voice. We love when someone can take us to a new place in an interesting, moving way.

#10. Work ethic.

I began my professional writing career writing stand-up material for myself. I then wrote television. I’ve written stage plays and screenplays. Now I write novels. One thing is true for all mediums—it’s a job. Or as I like to say, “It’s a butt-in-a-chair job.” Treat it like one. Write when you’re inspired and, more importantly, write when you’re not inspired.

We all have bad days. We all get off track. We all have doubts. But you won’t have anything if you don’t write. Some people set goals by time. I do it by word count. Power through, day after day, whether it takes one hour or 14. No shortcuts. No formulas. No antenna-like receiving from the universe. Just write.

Check out Matt Goldman’s The Murder Show here:

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(Using Internal Dialogue to Reveal Character.)

That’s not to disparage witty banter between fictional friends and family members, of course—the more WB the better, I always say—but there is something special about two strangers gently and flirtatiously goading each other into mutual smiles, and then mutual feels. It’s one of the things that makes us readers smile goofily at the page, after all.

But how do you write it? Do you have to be a naturally funny person to get it right? Read on for a few quick tips on verbal sparring that could make your next rom-com zing.

1. The tease

I think of teasing as the cornerstone of witty banter. Perhaps the heroine is stick-shift challenged as in my new release Worst in Show or the hero eats his sandwich with a knife and fork like in my debut Love at First Spite, both of which are situations that lend themselves well to a light jab. Find those spots and go for it. Think about what you’d tease your sibling or your friend about (or perhaps there is something your younger self did that you now laugh about) and use those situations to your advantage.

There is a caveat here, however. Whether your love interests already know each other or have just met, whether they are friends or enemies, on some level they must like each other for the tease to land as witty banter. They might not know they like each other just yet, but the underlying feeling still needs to be good-natured. Without that, a tease can quickly sound rude, lose all playfulness, and create a power imbalance. A good way to ensure this doesn’t happen is to also include…

2. Self-deprecating digs

No one likes a person who can only dish it out. One of the main functions of witty banter is to build a quick connection and familiarity between the lovers on the page. After all, as authors we only have so many chapters to work with. 

Characters (like people IRL) who can joke about their own shortcomings are more likely to be perceived as relatable, humble, and friendly, and consequently, that primes us to interpret their teasing as benign. It also adds another quintessential ingredient to the relationship—vulnerability. So why not let your MC crack a joke about her terrible cooking (who doesn’t remember Bridget Jones and the blue soup?), let her love interest agree with a teasing remark, and then build on that, perhaps with another ingredient of witty banter, namely…

3. Puns

My rom-coms tend to be on the more light-hearted side of the angst spectrum, so while I know they’re not for everyone, I love me a cheesy pun. Case in point, Leo in Worst in Show makes liberal use of them as his online alter ego, engaging Cora in a riddle battle that speaks to her childhood nostalgia and thus sets her at ease. Since witty banter adds an aspect of cleverness to the characters, puns are also a great way to show off their quick thinking and situational awareness.

Now, early in a relationship, innocent word puns might feel most natural, but as the romance arc progresses, might I suggest its more risqué cousin, the double entendre? Perfect for upping the flirting game, witty banter with double entendres lets the characters entertain the possibility of moving beyond friendship and tests the romance waters by how their sparring partner reacts. Cue light blushing and meaningful gazes. They might even extend the repartee through intentional misunderstandings (is she talking about cucumbers or cucumbers?) or, my favorite…

4. Surprising honesty

Characters engaged in witty banter must be prepared for anything, but some of the best dialogue comes from one character responding in an unexpected way. Admitting faults, feelings, and/or desires in response to, say, teasing about mismatched socks will take the conversation in new directions that keep both the characters and the readers guessing. Honest communication is energizing, sexy, and inviting—great primers for witty banter.

So why not mix and match? Let your hero and heroine tease a little, twist some words, make a suggestive pun, then bam—truth bomb! Not only will it keep the dialogue fresh, but it infuses the relationship with vitality and forward motion. Because in the end, what we really want is for the two to get to know each other better and to find out how they fit together, and you can’t do that without honesty!

5. Speed

My final tip is more about the craft of writing banter that flows than about its contents. Witty banter runs like water. It’s quick, it’s snappy, and it doesn’t contain excessive information. For me, that means I scrap most dialogue tags. No “he said” “she said.” We typically know who is talking anyway, and if needed, an action beat does the trick—a sassy tilt of the chin, a raised eyebrow, or maybe a suppressed smile to avoid letting your rival know you’re melting a little at his wordplay.

I also highly recommend scrapping first names in dialogue, and never more so than in the banter-y kind. If only two people are conversing, their words (and, if needed, an action beat) should make clear who is talking, and if you listen to conversations around you, most people do not use first names when talking to their friends and partners. It just doesn’t sound natural.

Which brings me to my concluding recommendation. If you want to write witty banter that readers will love, read your dialogue out loud to yourself. It should be concise, roll off your tongue, and make you smile. Bonus points if you read it to someone else and it makes them smile. That’s when you know you’ve really done it—you’ve nailed your witty banter.

No pun intended. 

Check out Anna E. Collins’ Worst in Show here:

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(Using Internal Dialogue to Reveal Character.)

I recall taking a writer’s workshop in which we were taught to consider what a character’s likes and dislikes might be—what they might like to eat and wear, their hobbies, their activities, and even to make a list of these likes and dislikes. While I don’t typically write all this out, I become quickly familiar with my characters’ likes and dislikes as I spend more time writing about them and writing their dialogue. As they interact with other characters, the contrast between these voices and the interplay and dynamics between them also help me to define their individual personalities even more clearly.

As a new writer, who has also been a psychotherapist for more than 25 years, one of the most challenging things to learn is that one needs to express the character’s inner voice outwardly. They can’t just be thinking and thinking some more. No one’s interested in that. It’s like watching a movie, there needs to be action, and that action needs to express who each character is. The action may be quiet or loud, small or expansive, but it needs to exist on the page to keep the reader engaged in the narrative.

Developing a character’s voice is akin to an artist’s first sketches of each subject in their painting—first they draw and paint with broad strokes, later developing the sketches with paint in much greater detail as they continue to progress with the painting and spend time with their subjects. For me, I definitely do not have each character all worked out in the beginning of the story, but I do have a strong sense of each of them which then becomes more developed over the course of the story. That’s where a fair amount of editing takes place, not just in the story itself, but in more clearly defining who the characters are. 

For example, in Klara’s Truth, Klara’s cousin, Hanna, is a character I went back to many times. While she is quite suspicious of Klara’s motives upon initially meeting her in my final story version, this was not the case at first. While it felt like Hanna’s heightened level of suspicion of Klara made sense for the tension and suspense of the story early on, it later became more important for the characters and the story for them to get along.

Check out Susan Weissbach Friedman’s Klara’s Truth here:

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The character I spent the most time developing was Klara, the protagonist. I knew she had a lot of potential inner depth, but that she would start out with a strong lack of awareness about herself and others, possessing a great emotional void due to her lack of nurturing relationships in her life up until that point. Once she meets her Aunt Rachel, her late father’s sister, who is immediately sincere, warm, and loving with her, she slowly begins to thaw. This thawing happens in steps which together multiply Klara’s willingness to even consider being open. 

As Hanna slowly allows her guard to come down, spending more time with Klara and even warming to her, that’s another step forward for Klara. Discovering her father’s deep love for her before his death when she was only six years old is another important step in Klara’s process of emotionally unfreezing while beginning to connect and trust others. These steps then prepare her for a possible romantic relationship with Filip which she flip-flops over several times, having tremendous difficulty making this type of consistent emotional commitment.

I knew I wanted Aunt Rachel’s character to be maternal and loving toward Klara—the mother she never had, and I knew I wanted Filip’s character to be patient and caring, while still setting appropriate limits of what he was willing to tolerate in Klara’s hot and cold behavior. I was also cognizant of making most of the characters in Klara’s early life disconnected and aloof, like her mother and grandfather. Although, I did want her to have an experience with a loving adult, her father, even though it was only for a short time, which she could later remember.

Writing this brings more acute awareness to me about just how intertwined my characters’ voices and the story are. For me, each moves the other forward. I did not start out with an idea about exactly how this story would evolve or end, and I did not begin with a concept of exactly which qualities each character would or wouldn’t have. As the book progressed, I found that each of the characters’ voices became fuller and more varied, less two-dimensional and more three-dimensional. 

While Klara is the clearest example of this evolution, I believe that each character possesses both strengths and weaknesses, some possess more strengths while others possess more weaknesses, but it’s not simply one way. I think this more accurately reflects real life. While this can make things more confusing for all of us, it also makes them much more interesting.

The post How Do I Develop a Character’s Voice? appeared first on Writer's Digest.

If you don’t know what that means, I don’t blame you. I don’t rightly know what it means, either. “Blink” has meant about what it means today—a quick fluttering of the eyelids—since at least the 1330s. Blinking is something that eyes do, not something that takes a direct object. If we dig deeply enough into the Oxford English Dictionary, we can find a transitive use for blink—“that dog never blinked a bird in her life”—which means to turn away from, or to avoid, which is roughly how it’s being used in the line of dialogue above. But that usage is from 1742, and it’s from a specifically sporting context. It is not from 1692.

(Katherine Howe: On the Golden Age of Piracy.)

Yet, if you recognize that phrase, it’s likely because you have read it in The Crucible. Arthur Miller used “blink” artificially, as a verb that takes a direct object, but more importantly he used it as a signifier, a performance of archaic speech that was not, itself, archaic. It is supposed to jar on our modern ears, to indicate to us that the text is operating in a different time. We accept Miller’s invention of “I cannot blink it” because we are willing to trust him, to participate in his representation of Salem in 1692. The phrase’s wrongness, or meaninglessness, might irritate a historical novelist (ahem), but it achieves its larger purpose: situating the reader within a remote period of time, without obscuring its intended meaning. Any writer working in a historical period not her own will confront a similar challenge—the balance of writing dialogue that seems historically accurate, while still being decipherable to the reader.

I say “seems” deliberately, because in some instances, words have older usages than we expect. But in many respects, the actual historical accuracy of a given piece of dialogue is irrelevant to the writer’s project. It’s no use to argue that “cool” has meant classy, fashionable, or attractive since 1918, for instance. If a writer were to deploy “cool” that way in dialogue in a story set in 1919, the word would fail. It would feel like an anachronism despite not being one. But the feeling is enough—a reader would trip over “cool” in 1919 and in so doing, be pushed out of the story. The writer would have sacrificed verisimilitude for accuracy.

One path toward writing effective historical dialogue is to read primary sources that contain historical dialogue. Abigail Williams, in the course of the public examination of Rebecca Nurse during the Salem panic, says “Yes, she beat me this morning.” Rebecca Nurse replies “I can say before my Eternal father I am innocent, and God will clear my innocency.” Spend enough time in the primary sources of Salem, and the speakers’ voices emerge clearly—historical, yes, but not with the stiff formality or fakeness of a Masterpiece Theater performance. People living in the past were people, after all. They used slang. They felt emotions. Rebecca Nurse comes across as more formal, more reflective and educated—“You do not know my heart,” she says at one point—because that is what she was, an older woman, long a member of the church, accustomed to a certain degree of authority. Abigail comes off as a child, enraged and disempowered, which is what she was, being 11 years old and bound out to service—“she beat me! She hurt and pinched me!” In most cases, spend enough time reading and studying the way people actually talked, and the dialogue will come naturally.

But not always. In some cases, the emotional impact of a way of speaking in the past won’t necessarily translate in the present, and for a writer of historical fiction, emotional impact is key. The best example I can think of which grapples successfully with this problem is Deadwood, the HBO series set in a Gold Rush mining camp in the 1870s.

On Deadwood, every other word seems to be “cocksucker.” It’s the lingua franca of this extralegal settlement of grifters and swindlers. People shout it at each other in rage, they mutter it in resentment. And because the word is so evocative, so visceral, even our relatively jaded—or perhaps inured—21^st Century ears never fully acclimate to it. Each use of “cocksucker” shocks us, reminding us that we are absorbing a story set in a lawless place, among desperate and often dangerous people. But it also feels period-appropriate. It’s not an insult we commonly wield today. We mutter enraged curses under our breath at people who cut us off in traffic, but most of us—I’m willing to bet—don’t mutter “cocksucker.” The word accomplishes what the show’s writers need it to do, by shocking our sensibilities while also rooting us in the story’s moment in time.

However, I wouldn’t call Deadwood’s use of “cocksucker” accurate exactly. More accurate, if we trust what the sources have to say, would be to have the characters say, “God damn” or “God damned.” That’s how this population of people would have actually talked, peppering their discourse with casual curses of a more explicitly Christian variety. But our sense of the impact of “God damn” has changed in the past 150 years. While we might still live in communities that caution against taking the Lord’s name in vain, for the most part “God damn” or even “goddam” is a curse that has lost its power to shock. It doesn’t stop us short anymore, not the way it would have in the 1870s. (Recently I slipped up and used the phrase “God damn” in an upper school assembly at a high school in the South, and it took me a minute to understand why the kids all tittered when I said it.)

When writing the dialogue in A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself, my challenge was to create the sensation of reading an 18^th Century adventure story without creating a replica. Actual 18^th Century books can be a bear to read, with great blocks of text unbroken into paragraphs, sprinkled with repetitive Biblical references, and all dialogue recounted. When Hannah finds herself in amongst a lot of dangerous pirates in 1726, I block out all the instances of “damn” because that’s what would have happened in an 18^th Century text, but the dialogue and setting is written with the immediacy that a 21^st readership demands. Verisimilitude takes precedence over accuracy. The reader’s sensation, both emotional and historical, is of greater importance than the fidelity to the archive, even if my gut instinct, as a historian, is to privilege what the primary sources have to say. But the reader will out. The book, this book, is what matters.

I could not blink it otherwise.

Check out Katherine Howe’s A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself here:

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