This week’s rebroadcast draws in posts from 2011 and 2013 to look at the relationship between how we speak, how we write, and how we write speech.
Write the way you speak
As he loses his voice to cancer, Christopher Hitchens writes about the idea of literary voice:
To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class can talk? I mean, really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect.
I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend. The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.
College was the first time I started writing how I speak.
Or, more accurately, college was when I stopped trying to write the way I thought I should write. Whether through explicit instruction (topic sentences, Roman outlines) or imitative insecurity (we all had a Hemingway phase), any unique quality in my prose had been flattened. The occasional quirks were mostly borrowed from Spy magazine, whose pithy precision I worshipped without really understanding.
A freshman year newswriting class probably changed me more than anything. J54 taught us how to align fact-bearing sentences in a deliberate pyramid structure so that the story could be truncated at any point without losing its meaning.
We learned the rules. We wrote the articles. The process was almost automated; given the same facts, any two news writers should generate very much the same story.
I hated it. I revolted. Why should I waste my time writing something anyone else could have churned out?
Writing isn’t harder than speaking, but it’s lonelier. It’s a conversation with someone who isn’t there.
When you’re writing, you end up hearing your own voice a lot. I think that’s why so many people struggle with it. We don’t like to be alone with our thoughts. They scare us.
But in the same way people don’t stutter when talking to a dog, it helps to envision a friendly reader at the far side. Let writing be talking with someone you like.
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Writing vs. Speaking
For screenwriters, John McWhorter’s TEDTalk on texting grammar is a useful reminder of the differences between how people talk and how they write.
Speech is made up of word clusters with no discrete punctuation. Because speech is almost always dialogue — you’re usually speaking with somebody — it’s structured in a way that allows interruption.
Compare that to written language, which is by its nature an unbroken monologue with punctuation to demarcate how thoughts should fit together, allowing complex sentences like this one with nested clauses (and even parenthetical asides) that you’d likely never attempt in speech.
As screenwriters, we’re often writing speech. Our goal is to make it feel unwritten.
With dialogue, I generally aim for a slightly optimized version of how people would actually talk. That is, I consider many ways a character could express an idea in that given moment and choose the one that works best. Not only am I looking at the “meat” of the line — the reason why they’re saying it — but also how the line ends. Ideally, each line of dialogue invites the next line, either through an implied question or challenge (“You wouldn’t say he’s arrogant, though.”), or patterns that suggest what’s to follow.
MARY
I just adore Reggie! His wit, his charm...
TOM
His money.
MARY
His money is adorable.
The danger is that being too clever can make something feel written — the audience becomes aware of the writer, rather than the character. You have to consider the genre and the audience. One of the most sobering jobs in a rewrite is killing dialogue that is terrific but wrong.
Back to the video: McWhorter argues that texting is best thought of as “fingered speech.” It looks like writing, but it’s an emergent form of language that is quickly developing its own conventions. I buy it.
I also really enjoyed McWhorter’s earlier book, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. I wrote more about that back in 2009.
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