Most of us write more formally than we speak. That's fine. I'm down with fragments and whatnot in dialogue. What I'm wondering is, do the two clash if a character with common speech patterns waxes poetic about the night air in her narrator hat? I suppose answers would depend greatly on the framework, so I'll mention that she's not writing her memoirs years later. There are no devices like that at work. It's just an intimate, first person account with some inner monologue present in the narration. ETA: (If everyone pretends I didn't dangle that participle, we can all stay friends.)
The common misconception is that dialogue is supposed to be realistic. That's not actually true. Dialogue isn't even a rough approximation to real speech. Dialogue is more of a caricature of speech then anything. So the trick with dialogue is to have it imitate speech well enough that it's believable, but no so good that it becomes distracting and jarring to read. So that's where the art comes in. It becomes the writer's job to figure the best way to blend both dialogue and prose to create a smooth narrative.
I'm not really worried about my dialogue. It's one of the few things in my writing I'm proud enough of to be confident. This is the first serious piece I've attempted in first person though, and I'm fretting over bits of narration. She wouldn't speak about stepping out into the desert air at night with the embellishments I would normally use to describe a setting, and I'm unsure of how close her narration should be to her speech. ETA: In fact, that's pretty much the entire problem: settings, backdrop details, etc. How observant and vocal should she be about the room she walks into? How do I decide how eloquent she can get as a narrator before she no longer sounds like herself?
I could probably use some examples, if anything comes to mind. I'm having trouble coming up with applicable analogues. The last five books I read that were written in first person were Post Office, Lolita, Fight Club, Don't Look Back and In One Person. Bukowski didn't exactly use dialogue: "She said she wanted to go home. I told her that was fine by me." The whole book was one narrative remembrance after another. Nabakov and Palahniuk's characters were so stylized they don't apply to the question. I didn't care for Armentrout's narration at all. That leaves John Irving. He sort of didn't bother. There was no poetry to it, no embellishment, no style beyond the sort of vocabulary used in the dialogue, which was sparse. So is that the answer? Don't get fancy in first person?
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes is written in first person with a female MC, and it had enough description in it, or at least gave the perception of having enough, that I was satisfied with it. (I'm the sort of reader who likes description.) See if there's something in it that might help you. ETA: The voice might be helpful, too, now that I think about it.
On it. Downloading now. Thank you! It's been in the back of my mind that I really should read some first person romance before I get much further into this story. In fact, I'm almost up to the part where it could be crucial. I'm in touch with my feminine side, as they say, but that's not the same thing as knowing what it's like to be the female in a burgeoning relationship. Obviously.
I'm trying to get a handle on your dilemma here, @Rzero. Is it that your narrator has complex and sensitive feelings and thoughts, but doesn't possess the verbal vocabulary to express them? (I imagine that's quite common, actually.)
Almost the opposite, really. She has the vocabulary and insight to express herself well. The thing is, we speak and write in very different ways. I'm fine with most of my narration so far, but I had her walk outside tonight, and I hit a brick wall. Everything I wanted the reader to know about the night air and the moon and the desert felt out of place. She wouldn't speak of these things the way I want to narrate and establish her physical surroundings. How far from her established speech patterns and mannerisms can I veer without it sounding incompatible? Here's a snippet where I didn't have to describe anything external: (This in NOT open for critique. It's rough, and it's going to stay that way until I type "The end.") Waking up the next morning was considerably less of a shock than the day before, but it still took me a while to acclimate to reality. I lay there for God knows how long, just trying to shake off the amnesia. A part of me still thought that maybe I could just snap out of it if I concentrated hard enough. The big difference today was that now some part of me didn’t want to snap out of it. What a brain fuck. I closed my eyes hard and then popped them open, hoping to burst from this surreal circumstance like a sleeper from a dream. I tried again, clinching my eyelids, my face, my entire body until I saw spots and heard a rumbling in my ears. My shoulders and fists trembled with the effort. I held my breath, equally desperate for it to work and terrified that it might. Finally, I snapped open my eyes and inhaled sharply, the only effect a sparkling head rush. Dim, short-tailed shooting stars leapfrogged before my eyes as my vision returned. I was still here. I still couldn’t remember. These are things she's thinking and feeling and doing, and they don't clash with the dialogue. Moonlight in the desert is a whole other bag. Originally I just had them out there doing what they were doing, and then I realized as I often do, that I wasn't painting the picture. That's where I got stuck. How do you talk about moonlight without making observations a character would never say? How florid can I get about her surroundings without it sounding like I, the writer, am describing it instead of her? I'm almost 100% sure I'm overthinking this, because that's what I do, but I can't get past it. Maybe someone should just pat me on the head and send me to bed.
Okay, so if this is first person, why would you want to describe something the character either doesn't notice or doesn't care about? That, unfortunately, is one of the downsides of first person. You can only write what that character sees, feels, or thinks about. Maybe forget the moonlight? If it's important for the reader to know about it, you could have another character mention it. But if your character would never notice, or care much about the moonlight, maybe it's best to leave it alone? Otherwise, just use her own thoughts—couched in her own perspective. Gee the moon looks great tonight. Ah, the moon is a ribbon of silver across a velvet sea. Wow, I can see almost as good as I can during the day. And etc.
Maybe I'm not saying this right. She does see it. She's there. I want the visual. This will come up throughout the book, not just with the moon. It's not about whether or not she cares. It's about whether or not readers will find it jarring or out of place if she describes things poetically in the narration, when she doesn't speak poetically in her dialogue. Her dialogue is fine. Can I flower up the narration with language she might conceivably use telling a story, or should I try to keep the narration identical in style to her spoken dialogue?
If you're in a close POV, whether 1st or 3rd, the general expectation is that everything gets filtered through your character and you only record the things your character would pay attention to. There are good reasons to defy expectations, but if you're just looking for what the expectations ARE? Yeah. I think the expectation is that if your character wouldn't notice the moonlight, you don't mention the moonlight. Sorry.
I don't know where this is coming from. She sees the moon. It's big and bright. She notices it. I never said anything about her not noticing it. This isn't just about the moon anyway. I'm asking about the style of the language. I'm talking about minor shifts in style between narration and dialogue. I want to know if they should match exactly or if there's room for vivid or poetic description that she wouldn't use if she were speaking aloud. What am I saying wrong here? How can I convey this better?
Traditionally in close POV the voice of the narration is the voice of the character, so your dialogue and narration should match.
I know what you mean. I am not an expert but I am a voracious reader and IMO the style should match if the MC is the narrator. That is based on personal experience as well. I pretty much think the way I speak. You could have her same something like, "My Dad would just say it's blue, but I think it's a wonderful shade of [whatever she would say]". So she can change her style by comparing herself to others. That would work for me.
Okay. Asking the same question several times helped me form a pretty strong opinion, and I mostly agree. The scene was finished hours ago anyway.
I think in first person the voice of the narrator/character comes from the prose and not the dialog. To me, you're looking at things backwards. Or maybe I am. I tend to believe the rest of the prose holds a lot more weight than any dialog. Your character is telling a story and not just rehashing what was said. The voice in first person is extremely important. I'm not really sure how the dialog doesn't match up unless you are trying to put too much into the dialog. The voice is in the story. That's where you create it and let it thrive. Just my take on it.
Thank you. @BayView too. So here's my better, less crabby response. We were rounding dawn here. I wasn't even aware how tantrum-y I was getting. I wasn't quite as frustrated as I sounded, but I apologize. So yeah, I think they have to match. I eventually realized the obvious, that the answer was in the nature of the question. If it feels unnatural, it will likely read so too. More importantly, if I don't like it, I should change it. The solution, unsurprisingly came from reestablishing trust in my understanding of the character. I'm not a writer who can hold a conversation with my creations. Someone had a neat thread about that exact technique going the other day, and I wish I could, because it sounds like a handy exercise. In my case though, they're too much a part of me. I understand her because she's a version of me. In fact, I've only ever had one or two character whose eyes I could see through so clearly as hers. Unfortunately, most of this applies to the villain as well and takes me to some dark places, but I guess that's my process. We all use a wide array of vocabulary, varying degrees of formality and various other changes in speech patterns throughout our day. We speak differently when shooting the shit over breakfast, debating politics at a bar, explaining an article we read on a complex issue, engaging in an emotional argument with a significant other, etc., etc. Our characters are no different. I have her using clever language with less formal patterns when trading playful quips. When she hears a piece of music she's never heard, she gets juxtapositionally romantic and analytical about it. When she argues, she brings out the "ten dollar words", and destroys dissenting opinion with weapons of logical destruction, even when she might be wrong. When injured or inconvenienced, she's curses like my dear, departed grandpa. Guess where she learned all that. She's basically girl me. (There are more differences than gender between us, but I know how she feels, thinks and speaks.) I make great effort to reconcile these differences as facets of a complex personality. It's all a part of who she is as an autonomous, thinking, feeling, reacting being. All I have to do to match dialogue to descriptive narration is to feel the way she feels in the moment and focus entirely on observation and reaction while doing so, consequently ignoring my writer's omniscience (the hard part.) That fixed it. She noticed the moon. She said something insightful about it, and I was back on track. I have at least two scenes to which I must now retroactively apply this revelation during editing, but we can call this one sorted.
What you're saying applies either direction, but really I was doing just the opposite, or at least trying to do so, by putting natural, believable, true-to-character dialogue in direct conflict with my desire to embellish visual descriptions in the narration in ways that felt untrue to the character. It was most specifically a problem when describing environment. I have to find ways to convey the picture I want to paint in the mind's eye of the reader without putting on my poetry hat and ignoring the character. I can do so by focusing on observation and reaction. It's a different technique than I'm used to, but I can make it work.
I see what you're saying. Here's something to consider. As people look back on events, they're older, wiser, and have had time to think about things a lot more. So while it wouldn't be something she'd notice in the moment, if there were years of reflection between when the events happened and when she is retelling, some inconsistency in personality is to be expected.
This is an intriguing point. I want it to sound more immediate, the type of story we read and feel happening in the present even though the narration is written in past tense. The principle still applies though. As soon as you're out the other side of an event, you immediately see it for more than what you experienced in that moment.
When I wrote my last book I was concerned with a similar situation. Writing in first person almost as a memoir I wondered if the narrator would reflect her growth as she started out at a low education level and became a well traveled educated woman. When I tried to show that change I was beat down by every beta reader I came across. I realized the reader would see the early (lack of education) narrative as flaws, so I changed to my form of correct grammar and completed the task. Now I said all of that for this point. Your character may have to fudge her limitations to include the things that all readers are looking for. Like the setting, and so on. After all your readers need flesh or fantasy.
I read the 'Look Inside on Amazon and I love it. I remember how much work it took to show the lack of basic grammar and then to show the growth through the years. I think I will try it again on a short story.
I have no idea what @Thundair 's original was like, or why betas reacted the way they did. But I do always advocate 'trust the author.' It would be different if the author is making unintentional grammatical mistakes, of course. But if the character is doing so? I would like to think beta readers would realise the author did that for a reason, and go with it. Just saying, these are grammatical mistakes and all grammatical mistakes should be corrected isn't really on point, is it.
With 1st pov, the narration itself is a form of protected speech just like dialogue (lyrics, poetry etc): where her dialogue is unique to her, her narration should follow the same unique voice and way of viewing the word. Authors above are right saying it's your character narrating. I have three different 1st pov narrators in one of mine: a mechanic, an accountant, and an MI5 operative, each dialogue and narration is tailored to their style and language quirks.
