Daily Entertainment

[boston_bruiser]

I am three for four in finals. Come 1730 PST, I will be four for four and this quarter will be over.

(Chem 2A, as it so happens. GO AGS.)

From kd7sov:

What kinds of things do you need to keep in mind to write your pup's dialogue correctly? Do they never use contractions, or substitute one consonant for another, or avoid words that start with vowels?

Comments

[boston_bruiser]

Writing Voodoo's dialogue is kind of hilarious, actually. He's well-educated, but he talks in this verbal stew of slang words and military colloquialisms/acronyms and double negatives and contractions that would make any self-respecting English teacher pull their hair out in frustration.

(If you want a laugh, look at his early threads where I tried to type out his accent. NEVER AGAIN.)

John's is standard cowboy talk. He has a tendency to drop it when he needs to be forceful, though.

Mako's...Mako's basically as close to no-frills dialogue as my pups come. Keep in mind, he was written for a children's show, so what dialogue he uses tends to be straight and to the point.

[mnt_mike]

As an actualfax Bostonian...I fear.

[gavin62truck]

Tommy speaks quickly and gruffly with a typical urban working-class accent that manifests itself in dropped g's, lots of y'knows, the occasional 'like,' and everything being goddamned. (Let's pretend it's a true New York accent, because sometimes I can hear Denis Leary's Masshole tones come through.) When I first started playing him I used to drop every single g, but now not so much. He keeps his vocabulary simple, although he might throw out a three-syllable word now and then.

Lou is more well-spoken than Tommy, even though he's just as blue-collar. Basically, he uses his words better.

[mnt_mike]

MASSHOLES UNITE!

...

er....*SMOKEBOMB*

[alas_a_llama]

I am the grumpiest Eric.

I was supposed to be doing a night shift tonight, and now my boss is saying the bar might not even be open tonight due to Sudden Snow (it's March, man, since when do we get snow in March?) and associated transport problems.

Which, if that ends up being the case, sucks, because money is delicious, and can be exchanged for resources and items of value.




So, dialogue.

Atton reduplicates. A lot. In fact, in general, he kind of talks in free-association circles, where he'll say something and then link it onto something else that's only tangentially related, and then just keep going until eventually he manages to meander around to the point again.

Also, he tends to use glottal stops and shorten 'your' and 'you're' to 'y'.

Although not mentioned much in RP, Atton's voice is really toneless.. He doesn't emote much with his voice. This is totally not because Nicky Katt is a terrible voice actor. Totally.

Yugo, like, totally peppers his speech with 'dude' and 'bro' and 'man' and 'awesome', dude. Phoenix also does, but not as much.

Leonardo, Seamus and Leo are all fairly no frills and straightforward. Leonardo has a tendency to ramble at breakneck speeds when he's explaining something.

Teddy is extremely no frills. He is deadpan, and nearly monosyllabic at points, and when he isn't, he's attempting to convey information and (sometimes) emotion in the span of as few words as possible. He's not very talkative at all.

Not in-bar, and quite probably never will be, but Ramiel's voice is a perpetual rumble. He sounds pretty much like distant thunder constantly, and also incredibly severe.

[yakalskovich]

... money is delicious, and can be exchanged for resources and items of value.

That is very true, and excellently put! **applauds**

[1nv1nc1ble]

Mark doesn't use profanity. Which is occasionally tricky, because there are scenes where I would be cursing until the air turned blue. But the worst he has gotten in canon is a "Jeez" or "Heck." My logic on this is that Debbie did a good job of impressing on him that some words aren't appropriate at an early age, and he chose to live by that through high school. There is probably also a school policy against profanity at Reginald Vel Johnson High School.

Mark also uses "dude" a lot in conversation. To me, his voice sounds like a pretty standard American teenager, with just a little of the California surfer coloring his tone. A little like Keanu Reeves in "Point Break," except, you know, without the wooden acting.

[cameoflage]

Yeah even before I acquired Thurlow I had a pup who originated in the 19th century and the same swears that I or a modern-day character would use in his shoes would have carried a lot more weight against that backdrop. I had to sort of relearn how to express that someone was pissing me off without using swear words (or minced oaths).

Swearing! Sometimes it isn't workable.

[ceitfianna]

Will is meant to sound like he's from medieval England and I try to write his accent like I hear it in my head. Where he is now is different from when I first started playing him, his words run together and he punctuates with Ayes. With him, I try to not let a lot of modern words slip in, but I know it does happen, he's one of the characters I fret the most about reading like I want him to.

Charles sounds English, because James McAvoy isn't good at American accents and so does his best Patrick Stewart. His word choice is formal with bits of slang thrown in but not that many. I think he sounds dorky when he adds in slang. The thing I consider with him is how he's taking into account the thoughts he's hearing since he knows how to do that without being obvious, its a tricky balancing act.

Jane is also another formal one, more so than Charles and with her, I'm always aware of who she's talking to and what would be the proper thing to say. As well as the ideas of the time, because language is key to her and she's one that if I'm not feeling at my best won't be possible.

Sameth goes from fairly formal and slightly medieval to kind of dorky teenage boy. I don't do anything too special with his language other than using Charter as a curse.

Moist plays a lot with language but his base role is someone who's educated. The trick with him is remembering that he's from the Disc and using gods as a curse and details like that.

William's speech is a little rough and I always try to remember the cadences of the movie when I write him. That means that sometimes he drops gs and uses ain'ts or drops out words especially when he's angry or unhappy. He does try to speak better at times, because he has some issues with not being educated.

Demeter doesn't have anything really special to her speech, the ways she's a goddess comes out in what she says not how she says it.

Tumnus has a formality and almost stylization to his speech that's hard to explain but is part of him and shows that he's from Narnia. I'm not always as good at remembering to have him make comments by the Lion's Mane or things like that but I try.

The Pirate King has a specific energy and humor to his speech that comes from being written by Gilbert and Sullivan. This is one reason I don't play him very often, it takes work to get him right and sustain him, because he can't hear his own music or realize he's from a musical. He's just bigger than life.

[notinthebook]

Emma can be very abrupt. She doesn't really have a discernible accent or particularly complicated vocabulary: her dialogue is blunt and occasionally sharply sarcastic. She's prone to distancing herself by calling Henry "kid" and if she ever used endearments, that time is long over. She doesn't actually swear much, aside from the ABC-approved "bitch," "hell," and occasional "bastard," because I try to keep her dialog true to what would actually be written for her.

Unlike Danny who calls everyone and especially Steve "babe" as casually as anyone else would say their name. For him, it's not an endearment so much as it is punctuation, just like the "huhs," "alrights," and "understands" he tosses liberally into every rant. And he does rant. He has a knack of picking out bizarre metaphors ("you're like a Pac-man in cargo pants") and harping on what anyone else would consider insignificant points. Every now and again he pulls out a big or rarely-used word, presumably for effect, although he rarely seems to notice. Like Emma, he doesn't swear all that much. And he's a smartass.

(Actually, that probably goes for all of mine.)

Jack may be the only one I have with a really different style of talking. Annie Proulx writes out his accent, so I do, too, dropping gs and changing "to" to "a" more than half the time. He tends to drop the "I" or "you" from the beginning of sentences, like "went for a ride today" instead of "I went for a ride today." He's a talker, too, but not in the same sharp way Danny is. Jack will just sort of keep going, half talking to himself. And he swears, like, a LOT.

Wolfwood has a particular way with words that shifts depending on what he's presenting to the other person. He can be extremely charming and attentive, full of jokes and stories, king of the superficial, but he has a way of sliding it right around into something much smarter and sharper with no warning. In a more pensive mood, he'll muse on deeper subjects. Either way, if you pay attention, he leaves clues to what he's actually thinking about.

Caspian is old-fashioned, and British Narnian. He'll use phrases like "dash it all" and refer to his female acquaintances as ladies without even a grain of irony. He is unfailingly polite, and doesn't always understand sarcasm or get jokes. On the off chance you find him in a situation where he turns on the kingliness, his language will get a great deal more formal.

[crabbycustomer]

Every time a new update to Homestuck with Karkat in it comes out, I am reminded that I am not creative enough with his swearing and insults. Even at relative calm he is a bottomless font of insane metaphors and pejorative phrases. I steal as many of them as I can.

Just lately:

KARKAT: YOU APPEAR TO BE JUMPSTARTING A FACETIOUS DISCUSSION ABOUT SOME SORT OF HUMAN ECONOMIC IDEOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK, WITHOUT HAVING THE SLIGHTEST CLUE THAT YOUR VEHICLE IS PARKED SQUARELY IN THE NOBODY GIVES A FUCK ZONE.

KARKAT: YOUR CALLOUS AND NONSENSICAL REMARKS ARE DERAILING US FROM THE DELICATE SUBJECT AT HAND.
KARKAT: WHY DON'T YOU BE USEFUL AND SAY SOMETHING REASSURING TO OUR SAD MUTUAL BUDDY, YOU WAILING JET ENGINE OF INFANTILE STULTILOQUENCE??????

Also:

KARKAT: GOD I'M SO STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID

[herr_bookman]

Pfft, you are plenty creative. I have to put pauses between the times I thread with you because I'm laughing so hard the oxygen cuts off to my brain.

(and also the tweaks to my analog to an empathy bladder, but that's neither here nor there)

[varadia]

X doesn't use contractions. She has a very hazy grasp of slang and generally doesn't use much of it, and when she does I often emphasize that it's pronounced carefully because it does not come naturally to her and she worries about getting it wrong. She has a small vocabulary when she's not on a mission, and her grasp of 'feeling' words is minimal at best. Figurative language is right out. Her sentences are short, and sometimes she turns clauses into sentences of their own.

Raven randomly punctuates his sentences with 'I think', 'perhaps', and 'yes', also 'not so much that' and 'are/is for being'. He uses a lot of non-English grammatical structures badly translated into English. This is not a mistake. He also doesn't use contractions, and prefers elliptical references to things rather than coming straight out and saying them.

Dean Winchester has a more expansive and energetic way of talking, not least because he's using the image of friendly and gregarious to distract people from asking anything serious, or realizing he rarely says anything of importance. He'll drop g's sometimes, he swears a lot (but to varying degrees), with women he will invariably be flirty, and in the absence of flirting or business talk he often has no idea what to do in a conversation. He's got a lot of slang and a lot of pop-culture references ready to go. (The only one of my characters that does! RELIEF. Er.) Sarcasm and mockery are also often the order of the day.

Michael has three modes of conversation. 1) When she is pretending to be human. It's very chatty, light, lots of contractions and slang, a lot of laughter and smiling. Mockery and teasing are permitted. 2) When she's just being an angel but not Michael the Archangel (official seal TM). This one is more formal, the vocabulary tends to be larger and lend itself to big and occasionally obnoxious words, contractions are still allowed, but slang gets fairly minimized. No laughter, fewer smiles. 3) When Michael is Doing Her Job. Lots of fake!Elizabethan, thee, thy, thou, etc. Super formal, everything is a pronouncement, no contractions and no slang, a lot of longer sentences.

Diana moves back and forth between formal and informal, largely depending on if the conversation is something more suited to Diana of Themyscira (and Princess/Ambassador) or whether it's Wonder Woman who lives in the US and has friends that are also not part of a niche culture that lives on an isolated island. She'll swap between these modes within a conversation or within a sentence, depending on context and who she's talking to. Contractions are a-okay! Unlimited vocabulary = a-okay! Comprehension of science and magic both? Yup! (Thanks, JLA!)

Nynaeve gets to use contractions, has specific swearwords and insults she uses, has a very specific framework for how the world works, and tends toward bluntly saying what she thinks regardless of politics. She phrases a lot of things as commands.

Galadan has very formal speech, uses lots of big words, tends toward the ironic, and will frequently (when I can see it) have multiple meanings or shades of meaning to whatever he comes up with. He uses slang, but only of specific places and times, and usually with an eye toward sarcasm, irony, and mockery.

Sam Tyler has a UK vocabulary with Mancunian leanings, thankfully mostly modern. He tends toward a sort of 'straight-man' delivery, concentrates on technical details, has a grasp of slang that he's become careful about not using because 1973, uses profanity, and tends toward a straightforward conversational style unless he's dealing with suspects, Ray Carling, or Gene Hunt.

[kd7sov]

I don't actually have any idea why, but I've been realizing lately that Raven's speech patterns have somewhat influenced my own. Half a thought followed by "so", for instance. This has occasionally caused some discomfort and misunderstanding.

[newredshoes]

Done with finals as of yesterday afternoon! (Got the wooziness of having been drinking last night to prove it, oof.) You'll get there soon! *\o/*

I often get frustrated with my pseudo-Shakespearean pastiche, because it's clear to me just how many amazing words and constructions we've lost since the Elizabethan era. Like, I've done sandbox threads where we've mixed text from the play with our own, and there I'm just like, "Well, that's Shakespeare!" (I am not too hard on myself for not actually being William Shakespeare, though. That way lies madness.)

But yeah, with Harry there's always the status issue to think, whether he's addressing a person who gets "you" (formal) or "thou" (informal/inferior). He also loves interjections, like "by the devil!" and "i'faith!" and "marry!" (I try not to go overboard with those, but they're fun. It's hard.)

I lose track of everything if I try and actually stick to iambic pentameter, so I don't -- if it sounds like it would sound good in his voice and accent, I go with it. Sometimes things become glaringly modern to me, but... if I obsess about it, it loses all its spontaneity, and the fun of playing with other people. So I guess mostly it's instinctual, though I've practiced a lot, thanks to hands_unclean and other Shakespeare-pastiche projects.

[camwyn]

For Gordon, I need to remember to keep his dialog pared down. He doesn't generally volunteer information or provide extra explanations- if he understands what he's saying, he tends to figure other people do as well. He also doesn't tell people things if he doesn't think they need to know them, and he avoids talking to people who make him angry or who he doesn't respect, so I have to adjust his dialog for each pup he interacts with based on what he thinks of them.

For Shephard- oy. That boy is complex, speech-wise. I can start by pointing to item two on this post of things to remember when writing him; Shephard has a very definite cussing pattern that I have to adjust based on his mood. The man cusses about as naturally as he breathes, so it's kind of important. Profanity aside, he drops his terminal G sounds regularly and tends to shorten words, particularly by taking off initial or terminal vowels ("Ain't gon' lie", "Didn't see nothin' 'bout the place", etc.). Half the time he doesn't even take the time to fully pronounce words like "can" and just swallows the vowel instead, which is why "c'n" shows up a lot in his dialog. He drops a lot of pronouns when I have his dialog in my head, too, particularly "I"- I tend to write those in for him more often than not because the sentence sounds fine and can be followed when it's being spoken, but on the written page it's confusing. Basically, he speaks very fast and has what sounds to most Americans like a really backcountry accent, so I have to shear out a lot of word parts to reflect that. And then I have to be careful not to get completely obnoxious about modifying what I'm putting on screen, because seeing Marvel comics writers put what they think Southern accents sound like on the page tends to make me want to punch people. Just enough needs to get written to indicate that sounds and syllables are going missing; changing the spelling of words to reflect the different phonetics in play is pushing it too far.

Oh, and one other thing: if he addresses someone as "friend", rather than their name or their title or their rank or a cuss word, then very bad things are about to happen.

As for Ellen, she's got a good vocabulary and avoids profanity to an incredibly high degree. I think the worst word she's ever called anyone is "bastards", and that was the aliens who kidnapped her and removed several of her internal organs and installed a second spleen. I'm not even sure she used the word to describe the Andale cannibals or the Enclave. When she called out her father on all his mistakes and everything he'd dumped on her by dying when and how he did, she put all of her venom into "Dad, you stink!!!" Under extreme emotional stress, she develops a stammer- either the first syllable of a word or the repetition of a short word or two ("I saw the- the- I saw it happen").

Mordin: .... ahahaha oh God. Mordin speaks fast, leaves out unnecessary words, and chooses words that mean precisely what he needs even if they're a bit much for his target audience. He also speaks extremely precisely; there are no dropped syllables or sounds or glottal stops. Pronouns and articles, yes, syllables, no. He'll use contractions when appropriate, though. Generally it's safe to assume that whatever I'm writing of Mordin's dialog is being pronounced at a speed somewhere halfway between "normal New Yorker" and "John 'Motormouth' Moschitta, Jr.".

[damncompass]

Orion is very formal, and honestly, sometimes I forget that there are different ways of saying things in the Potterverse. (Also, he's just so reserved.)

Joshua.... is an odd combination of an old soul and someone who never got out of his teens. (Comes from never being able to be a kid, I guess.) Thus, his dialogue is half scientific techno-babble (which is hard as hell, honestly, I don't get the Higgs Bosun AT. ALL.) and half childish giggling with a few seventies phrases thrown in there for spice, as well as the odd German or Latin. Also, he tends to shrink and hide from his sister verbally. I definitely know who controlls the reins there.

[sdelmonte]

First overall rule: remember when your pup is from. Avoid any slang or words that don't fit. Unless your canon is written just wrong enough (PotC) to allow for the occasional lapse.

Knox: He's from pseudo-NYC. So he's more or less me, if a bit more colorful. He's always been easy to write.

Howard Stark: Not much slang, even of his day. He always has to sound like a businessman instead of a scientist. Has some of his son's speech patterns without the snark.

Cy: A master of slang in ways I will never be, but it's enough to keep his speech patterns very informal even on formal occasions. And always throw in exclamations!

Charlie: An odd quirk of Denny O'Neil's scripts is a lack of contractions. Not in the X-23-Data "doesn't get them" way as just a way of writing. But I like to have Charlie stay that way.

Gibbs: By far the hardest to get because of his 18th century nautical/piratical speech patterns. Always best to keep the movies in mind, and maybe Gaiman's 1602.

[aberration]

This is actually the biggest hangup I have about writing characters, and I can get really bogged down about exactly how they would phrase things, what words they would be most likely to use, how their voices sound, etc.

Elle is the easiest, a lot because at this point she's so departed from canon that... well, there's a degree to which she feels more like my own creation, and I've developed a specific style of speaking for her that comes pretty naturally. But it tends to manifest as Elle speaking in short, incomplete thoughts, a lot of the time taking words or phrases she's heard before and trying to use them to express her thoughts or feelings, which can be... complicated, as the language Elle has to use often wasn't built for what she's trying to say.

Asami is difficult because the way she speaks will sort of change depending on whom she's speaking to. She'll usually be at least a little more formal or polite at first, and in some settings will keep that up, but in others she'll pretty much talk like a normal teenage girl. But given her world, I also have to keep in mind things like words or phrases she wouldn't use.

Leslie is still more difficult, mostly because in the show she says goofy things a lot and I feel a lot of pressure to also try to think of goofy things! And her manner of speaking tends to be very earnest and energetic all the time. But it is mostly that I am sad I'll never think of something as silly as "gazoinksbo" :(

Marceline has this really nice voice, and fortunately tends to talk like an American teenage girl, with similar use of slang and expressions. Mostly I tend to think of the way she speaks as being sort of rhythmic in my mind, even if she's not actively singing. She's also probably the most openly and knowingly sarcastic of my characters, and also at the moment the most likely to be deceitful, so this basically means I have to at least mentally mark when she's speaking truthfully and when she's just messing with someone, which won't necessarily sound all that different.

And despite my lack of playing him, I actually found Manny's style of speaking fairly easy to slip into, despite that it is rather particular - 1930s/noir-ish dialogue with a lot of flirtatious endearments and witty remarks, and occasional uses of Spanish. (Though he's really using Spanish the whole time and the English is just for my benefit. But okay.)

[misslucyjane]

The hardest part with all of my boys is to keep them from sounding too modern.

While the Merlin writers didn't try for period-esque dialogue, I still don't want Merlin to sound like a 21st-century teenager. I try to keep his references to things someone from his vaguely medieval time period would know, and his tone should be intelligent, a bit sarcastic and not too worldly since he did grow up in a small Saxon village. (Probably Saxon. They never call the country England so it'd be yet another anachronism to call them English.)

Steve, of course, needs to sound like someone from the 1940s, but I try to keep that to the same level they use in the movies--he tends to say "fella" instead of "guy," for instance. He does cuss, but doesn't do it in front of ladies (because c'mon, soldier in WWII never swearing? Ha. This is when, for example, words like m*therf*cker came into the common vernacular) His dialogue in the movie tends to be direct and to-the-point, but in the comics he has some of the most beautiful speeches, so I let him vacillate between the two depending on circumstances. And of course, he often doesn't understand that reference :).

Bilbo needs to sound like both a children's book character and a Tolkien book character. Hobbits in general don't seem to have the same formal diction that, say, Men of Gondor do. Bilbo himself tends to be wry, and while I think Martin Freeman disappears quite well into Bilbo, movie-Bilbo still has a few of his mannerisms.

Lydia is probably the easiest of all of them, being a modern teenager from California with a really big brain. While on the show she tries to hide her intelligence (smart girls are intimidating, doncha know) I decided that in Milliways she'll let herself be herself.

[kitchen_maid]

Amy's from a vaguely medieval kingdom in a fairy tale world, that's canonically pretty riddled with anachronisms, and she's been coming to Milliways for years now. So while I mostly anything too modern or slangy, to some extent, anything goes. (Thanks to exposure to Parker Lee, Amy's daughter once told a nursemaid to "shut the front door." The poor woman was very confused.) Amy's capable of affecting a very stylized Regal tone when she wants or needs to, but that's rare within Milliways unless she's being silly.

Meg at some point picked up the verbal tick of putting "yes" and "no" at the end of the sentence rather than the beginning, and will generally say "I'm not, no," instead of "No, I'm not." (I've occasionally caught myself doing the same thing, thanks to her.) She very rarely swears, and she never uses God's name unless she's talking about God. She also speaks French, which sometimes sends me to Google translate or searching my brain for my college French. She can be incredibly deliberate with her word choice.

Both Lily and Remus are English and magical and in the 1970s, none of which I am. I try to remember all that when I'm writing them, though I probably get half of it wrong, and I don't always remember in the middle of a tag that it's a biscuit and not a cookie for example (but I do cringe a little every time I reread that tag). I deliberately use "Muggle" expressions for Lily, as she was raised in the Muggle world and didn't exactly grow up hearing people invoking Merlin's various belongings and body parts.

The TARDIS . . . well, she can translate all languages ever, apparently, but she's never had to SPEAK them before, so playing her involves breaking down words, mixing up tenses, using round-about descriptions of things, and picking the wrong definition of words that mean more than one thing. (Say something to her about having "lots of time," and she'll take that to mean you have put time in lots like those up at an auction.) It's fun! And occasionally exhausting.

[missginnytonic]

The one time I remembered the biscuit/cookie thing Ginny was offered biscuits and gravy and I remembered to have her freak out at that idea.

[death_gone_mad]

Amascut is almost always playing a role. And while I can use that as an excuse to play her however I feel like, I try not to, since those roles need to be consistent. (and I just realized I am RP'ing a goddess who is a serial RP'er. What is my life?). Sarah, the role she is playing in Milliways, hasn't really solidified into a role of its own. For now it is inspired by Amascut's Sumona guise since she needs to explain away why she is good at the things she does.

That being said, she tends to stick to human women from the pseudo-Middle East, but because that pseudo-Middle East is on another planet entirely, the only thing I can say for certain is that influences her choice of clothing and her climate preferences. The game's devs gave her an accent when they started putting voice acting in the game, but who knows what that accent will sound like to someone from Earth? So I tend to ignore it.

She does occasionally slip into her own personality though, and its full of crazy and talking through a chorus multiple echoey voices. This may indicate that she is large and contains multitudes or it may just be standard scary supernatural fare.

[thebattycakes]

I looove writing voices, it's probably my most favorite thing to do. *G* I am a dialogue whore and if you read any of my stuff this is pretty self evident and one of the leading causes to my writing long. I just... *LUFFS*

Some of my guys have similar styles of speech, and yet sound very different and so sometimes I have to make sure I'm not slipping to far one way when I'm writing for another.

Bill Pardy- I love Bill's accent, and I love to play with it. It amuses me to no end how it thickens when he gets tipsy, and it's a great tool when he's pissed off. Southern small town boy that he is, Bill drops a lot of d's and g's, is prone to "aint's" and double negatives, makes up a lot of contractions, and has words fall out of sentences sometimes. He's got an easy manner to how he speaks, but I also love how he surprises when it's something serious, or something that means a lot to him, he'll take the time to really put his words together. He doesn't see himself as a great speaker, but he's got a lot to say. He's more of a thinker than he sometimes lets on.

Hellboy- Hellboy is a blue collar guy who picked up most of his speech from television and soldiers. He grew up on a military base, and I can see him hanging out with a lot of Joes and those are the guys he reflects most when he talks (he misses the Band of Brothers guys in the bar a lot). He'll drop a g here and there, will slip in an 'ain't' sometimes, and tries to act more gruff than maybe he is. Hellboy is very image conscious, and so he tries to project the tough guy which comes out when he speaks. He also is a tough guy, so it's not always an act. But then of course, there's always that part of him that works hard to fit in and not y'know, scare, people, so that's a thing to play with, too.

He's a complicated guy, okay?

The thing I try to put in sometimes and don't always is his vocabulary. There are words that Hellboy doesn't know, or gets wrong, but the way he says it is the way it's Said, and no one can correct him; pamcakes, industriable, etc. Sometimes those things are hard to write, because it seems like a typo on my part, but really it's Red being Red.

Like Bill, there are times when Red makes an effort to really say what he's feeling or thinking. In those times he's slow about it, and sincere, but also he's Red, so there's bound to be a funny or crack in there somewhere even as he's opening up. That's always fun when it comes up.

Logan- Logan is gruff and short with his words. Why use a sentence when a single word will do? Or, even better, when a look or action says the same thing? The funny thing about Logan is he's terse and stoic, and doesn't seem to say a whole lot, but he always says what he means or what he's thinking. He's not going to beat around the bush on anything, and he doesn't take a lot of time to gather his thoughts, they're always right there and you can take them or leave them. He's another guy fond of 'ain't' and who will drop the occasional consonant on the end of a word, mixes in 'ta' and 'yer', and will call a lady "darlin'".

Puss in Boots- Puss in Boots is probably the hardest accent for me to write. He's so dashing, and verbose, but in a completely Puss in Boots kind of way, and sometimes it takes some doing to get him to sound right. Plus, the Spanish. I've had four years of Spanish (2 in high school, 2 in college), live in New Mexico and my dad speaks it, and yet I fail so hard at it. It's sad, really. And worse than my speaking it, is me writing it. Luckily Puss rarely goes full on español, but even those words he slips in here and there are sometimes hard to do as I agonize and fret over their usage and meaning. Even when I know it's right I cringe at the thought of being wrong.

He's a flirt, and suave and dashing and all that has to come out in his speech. He's also cunning and crafty and so there's sometimes that sly manner about him. "That's" becomes "Dat's", he uses "Eh", and lots of interjections.

The Tick- Writing the tick takes Mountain Dew. LOTS OF IT. Pop-Rocks, Pixie Stix and some chicken fingers, too. That is how The Tick sounds.

Make sense? Of course it doesn't. He's The Tick, sense and sanity go out the window when writing him.

Charlie Kenton- Charlie... I'm still getting a feel for Charlie. He's fun to write, but his voice right now is hard to describe. He's blue collar, he's bull shitter, and he's not as good as he thinks he is. His speech comes with the least punctuation finagling of any of mine, it's plain and not overly verbose. He's a fast talker and has problems listening, so he'll talk over a person, or around them, and generally doesn't hear much of what's being said to him.

Art Mullen- Art has such a calm, easy manner about him, even when he's pissed off. He's sardonic and sarcastic, and does it with a Kentucky drawl that tickles me to write.

Rather than raise his voice Art shortens his sentences and uses rhetorical questions to make the point that he's mad at you (usually you in that sentence is Raylan). He'll cuss and curse, but never sounds like a sailor.

[ladysingsthe]

I just, :DDDDDDD

[bjornwilde]

Ben Was/is my pup with the strongest accent. It took be a while to decide on rules for consistant speech patterns and ultimately I just went with dropping Gs and using contractions as often as I could, even inventing some as needed. He also does not swear but would come up with his own words to serve the same purpose, such as "dad blamed". If he is using words others would recognize as swearing, things have gotten bad.

Val is enthusiastic and almost a cheer leader in personality. To do her voice I tend to imagine her bouncing a bit as she talks.

Hank has a large vocabulary but at this point tries to hide it so people will listen to him. He's learned that showing off his intellect tends to result in people avoiding him or teasing him. Eventually I fear I am going to need a thesaurus for when he turns furry and can no longer hide.

Andrea is snarky and quippy but friendly and professional. She likes to make little jokes to break tension but also talks and carries herself in friendly a manner. Unless you are harming or threatening innocents. Then she is all up in your business.

Jess is sort of Sex and the City meets La Femme Nikita with a dash of film noir. Or at least she is in my head.

Thalia is always cautious and ready to punk out.

[ladysingsthe]

If I have never confessed this before, DOING IT NOW:

Puck's dialogue is a big gigantic Shakespeare pastiche interspersed with nonsense. (How have I not played him since November??? Would anyone be into fae nonsense time in the near-ish future?) From my Shakespeare word bank: not a grize, certes, mark (pay attention or listen), anything having to do with feet bearing verses. My top reference sources are Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Midsummer (duh!), and ... eh, sometimes Hamlet.

That having been said, some nonsense is just ripped off from Shakespearean constructions, or what I think Shakespearean constructions sound like: "A very solid thing to swear upon ... or to rest upon, if the swearing should prove tiresome, or rest beneath if it proves more tiresome still. I am satisfied." Puck fucking loves nonsense. I have also been known to write narration and dialogue in iambic pentameter, but I am not at all consistent with scansion.

Meanwhile, Ava has all of two episodes from which to pluck dialogue, so writing her is all one big experiment in trying to figure out what feels true to her voice and what's too far afield. Good: Occasional "dudes," smiling a lot while being baffled, ending sentences on the uptick? Bad: One pop culture reference too many, saying "like" too many times, picking the wrong SAT word, ending every sentence in a tag on the uptick?

It's a process.

[ceitfianna]

I'm always up for Puck nonsense since he does love tormenting my pups.

[souffle_girlek]

Glorfindel - tends to have more formal language, though unless he's gearing up for a fight it's difficult for him to remain both serious and on-topic. He is like most elves - he will happily argue all sides of an debate (unless one of those sides is being held by Morgoth and/or Sauron, they're always wrong), and can spend days refusing to share his own opinions with continuous logic loops.

Katya has two... three forms, due to English being the bar's standard language and Russian being hers. There's her speaking English that she's translating herself from the Russian in her head, which sometimes will lead to a stilted word choice or the odd slip back into Russian if she's in a hurry or excited. Which is often. There's her speaking Russian, usually to someone else who also speaks Russian (and with me using the 'and here she's speaking Russian just go with it 'cause I have no idea' clause because I cannot speak/write Russian at all) where her language becomes quite a lot more fluid, full of slang from quite a lot of eras (she picked up what she liked and held on to it even if decades had gone past). She will only curse if she's looking to hurt the person she's cursing at - otherwise she's in, like, the G-est of G-rated language ever. The third option is when she's either in front of the boss or in a fight - clipped, precise, and foul-mouthed as the stereotypical sailor.

Ace is perfectly capable of pulling of the most beautiful English diction you have ever heard. She will most likely never use it, dropping consonants or even whole sections of words and using late-70's early 80's slang (which is now badly outdated where she's living) and generally not giving a damn if she is incomprehensible.

Oswin speaking reminds me of some quick, flighty creature - very fast and to-the-point. She has a proven ability to change between English accents. She can curse, but it tends to be the emphatic and short type rather than anything drawn out and creative. Oh, and if she can work flirting into it, she probably will. She rates up there with Jack Harkness in her ability to flirt with sentient beings on two legs.

Haymitch has a bit of a southern drawl that gets a whole lot worse when he's drunk (alternatively, he has a horrendous southern drawl that sometimes gets better if he's less drunk). He also has this horrendous habit of calling everyone by pet names unless it's a) President Snow or b) something seriously serious and he's dead sober. Otherwise it's all 'sweetheart' or 'boy' or 'son' or 'darlin' and so on and so forth.

Bones is another one of my pups that is capable of the most perfect English diction, but tends to abandon it at the first chance for a Georgia drawl (if only to piss off Spock). This is taken to the most awesomely hilarious extreme in 'This Side of Paradise'. I used to have a link, but I can't find it.

Balthazar tends towards being very gravely, very slow, with as much of being a smart-ass as he can get away with without looking like (much of) an idiot.

[herr_bookman]

Way back when (three months ago, yipe), I looked up every phrase Autor ever uttered to ensure that his speech didn't cross timelines. He was formal and snippy and politely insulting.

Now that he's found the library and spent sometime in the bar, he's all like, "yeah, w/e. Imma troll you on my T-minus. Lolz! Modern day idiom." I can probably pinpoint the threads when the change happened, if I look. Whoops.

[mnt_mike]

Mike doesn't swear if he can manage it. And you know the shit is real, yo when he drops an F-bomb. Aside from that his speech is probably the closest to my own, rife with run-on sentences and lacking in fundamental punctuation. One thing he says usually reminds him of something else, and he sometimes finds it hard to not follow those tangents.

Something I am also guilty of doing.
A good representation of this phenomenon can be found in the video for "One Week" by The Bare Naked Ladies.

Raph sounds like he's from the Bronx, or at least he's supposed to. To me this means gruff language and the dropping of Gs from most gerunds. Unlike his brother, Raph has yet to meet the F-Bomb he didn't love. Sometimes I have to remind myself that he's not quick on the uptake. Usually though, my not being all that quick on the uptake myself handles that for me.

Splinter doesn't use contractions, or shortened nicknames for his sons. Everyone is full name all the time.
...except Sallie.

I also try to keep in mind that his English is heavily accented, and as such he comes off really rather dry.

Aang is 12. I think that's the hardest thing about trying to play him. Well that, and he's 100 years behind a world with 1850s level technology.

Bumi has the same sort of technology issues that Aang does, but...no where near the same degree. When I'm trying to write Bumi I just keep in mind the fact that he's older than you are, knows more about everything than you do, and more often than likely is trying to picture you naked.

It should be pointed out that what Bumi thinks is not always congruent with reality.

Ida just really doesn't like people, and it's one of the reasons I find her so hard to play. She's the meanest character I have, and considering I also play The Loompas that's kind of saying something.

The Loompas cannot speak without singing. SO...there needs to be music with a basic emotional theme to it before they can converse at all. This is problematic at the best of times.

[mix_it_up]

... there are just so many ellipses in Asami's head right now.

[inlovewithwords]

tl,dr: I love fiddling with speech patterns.

Any child I write, I need to remember: child. This can be difficult, as I was atypical (though my speech patterns were far less so), but with my Superman Returns spawn I get away with that based on "even if he's 'normal' his brain is mildly overclocked by the yellow sun," aka not a natural genius like many Bats, but sharp and just... processes faster.

Lois depends hugely on which version I'm writing--which is part of why I refuse to touch Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. I just don't have her voice. As a rule, she is easily the closest to my own speech, except when I get analytical and pedantic. Comics (pre-nuboot) is harder-edged that SR and more mature/polished than Smallville. She's usually pretty relaxed, curses but not extensively unless called for. SV especially is so close to mine it's like breathing, sometimes. She's only a few years older than I am, and a lot of the same attitudes/opinions, so I just blunt and brass it up. But if she sounds like me (or vice-versa), guys? There's a reason I took to her.

Tavi is... special. He's usually informal, but Aleran informal is not 2013 Earth informal. Also, as he grows up, he is subtly transitioning to more polished speech. He does get dry and pedantic and analytical sometimes. The hardest is finding that formal/informal line with people who aren't close friends. And, of course, his idioms are Aleran: he swears but not heavily and it's always home-patterns. I tend to avoid 'damn' because of the lack of religion in Alera, so that concept of karmic post-death punishment just doesn't exist. The other thing when I play Alerans is translation: some words just work differently. 'Magic' is used once in the books, in narration, and it was probably an oversight. 'Sorcery' means non-crafting; elemental stuff gets grouped with crafting. Language frames thought--a point brought up in the books, in fact, so I try hard to remain true to that. Totally new and unrelated concepts he hears the words and can ask; things like 'king' or 'emperor' he hears as First Lord, etc. I have determined that with long exposure he can hear and understand the other nuances now, but for some reason consciously sticks to Aleran phrasing anyway.

...and that was unnecessarily long. Lois is more rambly than Tavi, I have to remember that too.

[genarti]

Ahahaha oh man. So many things, although of course if I have to consciously think about them all the time it means the character's voice isn't solid enough in my head for me to feel comfortable playing them.

Thor is formal. He was raised in a court environment, and he was raised to speak and act in ways that reflect and reinforce his status, and the language he's speaking is getting translated into whatever the other person's hearing anyway. He doesn't use a lot of slang, or at least not Earth slang. That said, he's not too formal -- he does use contractions, if less often than your average person, and whether he uses titles for someone or not is pretty situational.

Because he's not speaking or hearing English, I have to be careful about his language confusions. Idioms can trip him up, or slang terms or jargon; homophones won't, though, even if it would be funny, because they're not homophones to him. And overly literal interpretations of a term only work if it might stay overly literal if the term were translated into a different language.

Also, he doesn't lie, not even white lies. But he does tactfully omit things, and use some kinds of empty courtesy that are automatic. It's all based on courtesy (and sometimes a desire to not broach a subject he doesn't want to talk about), not conscious manipulation, though, unlike some of mine.

...More later; I meant to do all of mine, but work keeps eating my time.

[bbq_platypus]

Jim is easy to write for since I can hear clearly in my head what Gene Wilder sounds like. If I can imagine him saying it in the sort of laid-back drawl he consistently went with in the film, we're good to go.

With Borgel, I just need to consistently keep Daniel Pinkwater's style in mind. One part Borscht Belt, one part that-kooky-uncle-you-like.

Leela was raised in a non-technological society completely isolated from other civilizations. Idioms need to be avoided. For whatever reason, she rarely uses contractions (though sometimes she does).

Kane's manner of speaking is both erudite and melodramatic. HAM is the operative word.

Tuco talks like a Sergio Leone character. Manly and cynical. I throw in the odd Spanish phrase here and there as well. I should do it less - he only does it once or twice in the movie.

Caius may be the one whose voice is the least conspicuous.

Garyn can be a hard voice to pin down, despite not having many frills to the way he speaks. Gruff, dry, and abrasive is what I'm going for most of the time. Very plain in a grumpy sort of way.