As subject title says: How do people talk?? I have an unique problem. Some background. I am a hard of hearing male. I lost most of my hearing when I was 5 years old. I do use a hearing aid which amplifies noise and I supplement this with lip reading. I also know American sign language (ASL) which I learned in my 20s. My specific problem is that I do NOT know how people talk!! When I read a book, is that actually how people "talk" in real life? When I watch t.v. I read the closed captions (think sub titles) which I have been told are not accurate. Is there a book which explains how people talk? The word choices they make, and the slang they use, etc? Are there rules for this? I do know what tone, cadence and VOLUME are (the only one I could show in print was volume, ha). I want my characters to be believable and they have to talk like "real people" for this to occur, right? So....help please! Greatly appreciated!
Perhaps find an especially highly rated episode of a TVshow/movie on imdb that you can view with subtitles and THEN google a specific episode's script to compare? Straight off the top of my head - the Sopranos would be good one if you dont mind and remove all the swearing from the equation that is, and just take the dialogue interaction. That had some of the best, most natural dialogue I've listened to in a tv show.
Goodness, there's a question. The sheer number of languages, dialects, accents, and class-related nuances is simply mind-boggling. Realistic dialogue is one of the biggest challenges facing any writer, let alone one who faces the challenge of not being able to hear the myriad of variations. I don't know whether this is a good starting point, but as one who spends a fair bit of time with a (largely) deaf mother, the main things she picks up on aren't the subtleties of language, but simply the tones - agression, humour, solemnity, whatever. Might it be better for you, rather than trying to better writers with a natural advantage, to play to your strengths and concentrate on the things that make a difference to you when speaking to people? Presumably, like my mother, you have to concentrate as much on non verbal communication as verbal?
Can you still remember much from before you developed the hearing problem? In my case my earliest memories begin when I was 6 but I know a lot of people can remember back much farther than that quite clearly.
The truth is different people talk differently. It is influenced by their; upbringing, social status, education, setting, social groups etc. among others! There are lots and lots of variations on how people talk, this thread may be too limited of a format to cover all of them. Luckily, there is a lot going behind the scenes when people talk, there is the body language, the eye language, the subtleties of movement... as what people try to achieve most when they talk is to communicate what they think and how they feel. All of these are open to observation. I'm not sure if there is anything more I can recommend at this stage.
Have you tried picking up screenplays? Because it's not so much about how all people talk as it is how they talk in a certain genre. There's a lot of "free" ones online which I guess I shouldn't link to. There's a few screenplay collections you can buy from Amazon too.
One of main I things I learned about writing dialogue was that written dialog is not the same as a conversation in real life. Real conversations have an ebb and flow to them depending on the two (or more people involved) and their individual speaking traits. We interrupt each other creating overlapping words which would be a mess (but not impossible) to write, lose our train of thought, wander off on tangents, and pause as we're thinking. I found one book on Amazon with a horribly long title, but you can take a peek at the Look Inside to see if it might be useful: Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen. Other ideas are to read a lot and examine how different authors handle it. The late Robert B. Parker was famous for his snappy and witty dialogue. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, whether writing together or alone, use highly complex words (I have to look up words all the time with them, but I don't mind) and paragraphs, but it fits the characters. Hope this helps. SB
In some kind of order: I don't really remember specific conversations from my youth. I remember situations like when my dad was on a business trip for two weeks and I didn't know he'd been gone - I thought he was leaving the house before I got up and returning when I was asleep. It's possible both my mom and dad thought the other one told me, it's also possible that they did tell me and I didn't understand but faked my way through understanding so I didn't look stupid. The issue with close captions or subtitles is that people talk too fast and the captions are usually abbreviated so that the meaning is clear but the wording is more written than spoken, if that makes sense. I had not thought of screen plays but I will look at those. My specific issue is that in my story, I cannot seem to get the characters to talk "normally" and I thought it was because I don't know how people talk normally - maybe the real issue is trying to write dialogue that's "real life" when that's not possible in print because "speech" and "print" are two different things.... Bah, I'll just go ahead and if/when I get to the publishing stage, an editor can take over and re-work some dialogue if necessary.
Not exactly. When we write dialogue, what we actually write is an idealized abstraction of real speech. This is why you shouldn't base your dialogue too closely on real life conversations. In real life, people forget their words, use the wrong word, interrupt each other (by accident, not due to tactical decisions or because it's part of the flow of dialogue), go on unintentional tangents and/or forget what they meant to say, use awkward, inappropriate or inaccurate expressions, and so on. A few people are adept at saying exactly what they want the way they want to say it, but usually there is an element of chaos and imperfection in human verbal communication that we tend to mostly ignore in writing. Fictional dialogue tends to be streamlined and carefully planned, because the priority is to clearly communicate relevant information (such as a specific ideas, a character's personality or mindset, emotions, etc) without wasting your reader's time. In this sense, dialogue is actually closer to what we're doing right now: Writing messages to each other with time to think about what we want to say and the ability to correct our statements before committing to them. Actual realism is of lesser importance, and may even be a disadvantage. The trick is to create the illusion that the dialogue is realistic even if it's far too polished and flows too efficiently. Tone, cadence and volume is trickier, but those are things that aren't conveyed well in writing in the first place and often the reader will fill that stuff in on their own. (I have had so many misunderstandings over the internet because someone felt a message I wrote had a tone different from what I intended.) To some degree you can say that certain words imply a certain delivery: For example if I write a sentence full of curse words and end it with an exclamation mark, most would assume it's supposed to be delivered in a loud, forceful and aggressive manner. But ultimately, writing isn't well equipped to properly convey how something sounds - we can only do so by analogy. The fact of the matter is, I could not use words to express loudness or cadence to a deaf man any more than I could explain to a color-blind person what red looks like. The good news here is that you probably not at as much of a disadvantage as you may think. As far as dialogue is concerned, at least, I'm not sure the insights you lack due to to your condition are that vital. Simply imitating the way dialogue is usually written should serve you quite well. Honestly, I would expect you to have more trouble with portraying the experience of hearing in general - say, the impression of a very loud sound or the feelings that certain sounds evoke, if you haven't heard them yourself.
Ha! I use a hearing aid that amplifies noise. I can "hear" the sound, but my problem is I cannot interpret it. As an example, my name is "Scott." I was once standing besides a patient that was calling and calling and calling my name - "Scott" - while I stood right besides the couch she was laying on. I'd "heard" my name for 40 plus years but I did NOT interpret it properly and merely assumed she was vocalizing (she was a loud person who screamed a lot) and my co-worker across the room had to get my attention and tell me, "Scott, she's talking to you!" Oh!! I was really surprised by that. If there is one word I should have responded to, it's "Scott." Any other word, I understand not getting it, but my NAME??? I assumed I was conditioned to respond to that specific word. Guess not..... With regards to explaining color, there is a way. Get some rocks/stones and have them at different temperatures. For example, an ice cold rock/stone or a piece of ice could be the color "white" while a really hot rock/stone could be "red" or "orange" and other temperatures could represent other colors. It's not exact but it's the method I've used with patients and clients.
Interesting. I can't say I completely understand what you are describing here: Are you saying that you can perceive sounds but not assign them meaning intuitively? That is still just analogy, though: It conveys certain associations we may have with a color, but doesn't give any insight as to the experience of seeing that color. Red is not actually "warm." It's not any temperature, because colors are not tactile in the first place. For that matter, warmth does not have a color: It's something you feel rather than see. There is a word for this: Qualia. A subjective experience that can't be described by its own qualities. You can tell if something is a qualia when the word in itself is what describes the experience it represents: You know that something is red because it's red. You know that something is warm because it's warm. You recognize pain because it's painful. You know that salt tastes like salt because it's salty. But it's impossible to actually describe these experiences beyond that.
It looks complicated to explain you how people talks... I mean try to describe sexual orgasm to the other gender (good luck ˆˆ). Therefore, I suggest you to read a lot of dialogue in books (as SilverBear said), then wrote some and ask lots of feedbacks on that particular subject. The only way to write something well is simply to do it until it works. Last but not least, do not forget that you are different therefore you can add something we can't (so don't try too much to write like normal people cause you risk to lose something there). Hope it helps and good luck
Interesting dilemma you have there. People can speak very differently depending on who they are. My brother and I have the same level of education, both in science, and obviously had the same upbringing, but we speak nothing alike. Not only do people speak differently from each other, they also speak differently depending on who they are speaking to. I change which words I'll use if I'm talking to my wife or coworker, even if I'm telling them the same thing. Another weird thing you may not realize is that people write conversation very differently than how they actually sound. This is true for all mediums as far as I can tell. The most commonly uttered 'word' in most conversations is almost always some variant of "um."
Alternate thought: Perhaps, for your first novel (or even two or three), why not write from the POV of a hard of hearing/Deaf character? There are a lot of things that go into writing a good novel, and dialogue is just one of them. So just sidestep the issue, at least for now. If you don't want to do that, I do think that just writing it and getting feedback on what you wrote might be a good option too. I'd suggest finding local writer's groups and getting a beta rather than waiting till you're submitting it to publishers to get feedback. Generally, and especially for first books, publishers will expect manuscripts that are basically ready to publish. Clunky dialogue might be a make-or-break difference in getting published and getting rejected.
No. Perhaps if you're watching the sort of stuff made by the likes of Ken Loach, but the way people talk in books and films generally, is not accurate. In real life people fluff their words, they stammer, they um and ah and go off on tangents. In real life people interrupt one-another, finish off other's sentences. They way people listen in books and film isn't accurate either. In real life people don't hang on the speaker's every word. They lose interest (especially when it's me that's talking) and rarely keep eye contact. Real life conversation is mostly dull and awkward, which is precisely why it's not reflected accurately in film and literature.
