Overthinking speech patterns, the life, the story

[acerbictomes]

I've been writing a Dangan Ronpa fic that's mostly dialogue (or at least very dialogue-heavy), and that means it's sort of an exercise in speech patterns and character voice as well. Which is great, because I'm really into that kind of stuff, but also super incredibly hard.

I don't write a lot of Kirigiri types, so it's a bit of a stretch to get into her headspace, but she actually comes easier than Celes. Kirigiri's really precise, sort of not good at social interaction, and terse: not one to dilute her words with "sort of"s and "kind of"s and "I think"s. I don't think she'd use much slang, and her speaking style is semi-formal and removed.

Celes is much harder to write, because I tend to go for colloquial, slangy characters (Texas from Motorcity, Roxy from Homestuck) and sometimes I feel their voices blending into mine. I can get away with that with Roxy, who speaks with some of my slang and my speech patterns, but Celestia Ludenberg shouldn't sound like a girl straight out of SoCal Land.

 

So: This is what I'm going for when I'm writing Celes! Celes is sort of a haphazard thinker who makes a great deal of logical leaps.Where Kirigiri goes from x + 1 +1 = x +2, Celes goes from "public urination" to "BLACK PLAGUE". Her expressed thought process is more inferential and connotative than methodical: like, it makes sense in her head, but a huge chunk of the steps get left out. She baronesses sometimes (speaking like an anime baroness, all "you may" and "perhaps" and "thus") because she thinks it makes her sound cool, and like, has what my kindergarten teacher called "a great imagination". I think maybe her prose could go purple at times: she'd dip into metaphor and simile more than Kirigiri (who goes for detail). Maybe I'll do a thing where they describe the same guard, and Kirigiri notices the little details while Celes ruminates on his home life and constructs this whole little people-watchy story.

...Maybe I should stop writing about this fic and actually write it...

Comments

[cest_what]

I don't know Dangan Ronpa (although it's somewhere on my "should check out sometime" list), but this was really interesting to read. I love working through voice and speech patterns. (Writing Homestuck is amazing for that because, with pesterlogs and all the rules and patterns that constrain them, for once it's actually possible to get character voice exactly canonically right. Which is ridic appealing.)

[acerbictomes]

Man, Homestuck is the BEST for character voice! I love how voice in Homestuck isn't just punctuation & typing quirks (even though that's a huge huge amount), it's level of usage and little phrases that characters get stuck on (like Roxy's ____ to the ____ construction, Jade's "ummmmmm" and stretching out her words), even how people get less eloquent when they move from chat clients to dialogue. It is brilliant and I will never be able to do it, /chinhands, and trying to match fic to canon voice is basically the funnest thing ever.

[cest_what]

Ahaha, yeah, ok, "exactly canonically right" is an overstatement. But still, I've never written for a canon that lent itself so well to voice mimicry as HS, or one that forced me to think about speech patterns as a part of characterisation so much. Which I love.

It's also so interesting to try to translate pesterlog speech to regular dialogue: trying to work out how you can render Kanaya's deliberation and lack of punctuation, or Roxy's drunken typoes and line breaks in the middle of clauses, or Karkat's allcaps ranting. Where you have to compromise and where you can use cheats to convey a similar effect.

[acerbictomes]

Yes, this. It's always hard to pinpoint character voice in TV canons, because scads of different writers work on those, and a fair chunk of book and movie canons just have all the characters speak exactly like the writer does. And Homestuck's differentiation of character voices really do force people to think about speech patterns, which is excellent, because basically (well, for me at least) how you speak is how you think.

Translating pesterlog to dialogue is so weird. I see people who mess around with formatting so the colors are the same, or write dialogue in quirk, or just throw in a cursory "SHE SPOKE REALLY DELIBERATELY" in there and write regular dialogue. A Hand in Holding Hands had quirked, colored font as part of like, a weird troll biology hissing voice (if I remember it correctly), which you don't see often.