In the course of a story, characters communicate with other characters and with themselves (what? you don't talk to yourself? even silently?) Because we're a verbal species, we often think of that communication as being primarily in words, aloud. But human communication is carried largely by nonverbal means, even during a conversation; you cannot determine, from the words alone and their dictionary meanings, what a given utterance means until you know how it sounds and how it looks in context.
Human communication regularly violates the formal rules of grammar and syntax in the word part, and expectations in the behavior part. A disgruntled employee may say to another disgruntled employee, about their boss, "Don't you just love the way he handled that?" An admiring grad student may say to another admiring grad student about their thesis director, "Don't you just love the way he handled that?" Opposite meanings, conveyed by tone, prosody of the phrase, emphasis, volume, pitch, rate of speech, facial expression, posture, etc.
In real life, those of us who don't have a neurological difference that makes some or all of the communications behaviors difficult to detect learn as small children how to "read" a conversational partner's face and posture and tone of voice and so on. Over the years we become every more expert at interpreting the shades of meaning and how context (as well as all those behaviors) affects it. We know that "I don't want to" had a different total meaning than "I don't want to" or "I don't want to" and we anticipate which one is likely to be used in which contexts. We know the prosody of whining, surprise, refusal, and other: where the pitch rises and falls, and how much; how much more strongly the emphasis is placed, as well as where it is. We can convey (and recognize) shades of scorn from mild distaste to savage attack. (Suzette Haden Elgin's books on recognizing and responding to verbal abuse are a great introduction for those who haven't looked at language this way--she's talking about "pragmatics.")
We also know the other physical behaviors that accompany speech and affect meaning. Many of these are unconscious and uncontrollable: changes in pupillary size as the pupil dilates or contracts in emotional response to both hearing and sight, tension and relaxation in small muscles of the face signalling interest, approval, anxiety, anger, revulsion and other emotions, speed of change of expression, mobility or immobility of the mouth, the appearance of perspiration on the brow or elsewhere in response to stress the conversation arouses, small and large movements of other body parts...neck, shoulders, all down the arms, torso, legs, etc. Immobility is a signal (which is why those with scarring or paralysis that limits spontaneous motion are often misinterpreted by those talking to them.)
If the person you're talking to is interested in what you're saying, eager to hear more--it's obvious. If they're bored by you or what you're saying, impatient to get away--it's obvious. (If it's not obvious, you may have one of the neurological conditions that limits easy access to social signals...or you may lack experience with that culture.) People in power (especially if they're in a group that has traditionally had power) are often much less observant of those outside their power group than those outside are of them. The slave needs to know the master's every mood, to survive. The master does not...until the slave sticks a sword in his back. Recent research proved what history has long suggested: those in power do not read the facial expressions of their underlings except for anger. Anger's a threat--they recognize that. But they don't recognize when an underling is sad, anxious, frightened. Other underlings do.
So: here we are, writers with characters who must communicate in the course of the story. We have readers who are, in all likelihood, a mix of those who are aware of communication strategies and those who just use them, without ever noticing. How do we convey that Bill is bored, Arnie is anxious, Bettina is annoyed but not fully angry...in the conversation, without saying Bill is bored, Arnie is anxious, Bettina is annoyed but not fully angry? Because--though we can get away with the occasional "Bill was bored, so he said..."--we can't get away with that very often.
We have only words and punctuation marks and typography (font changes, as from roman to italic) to play with. Unlike actors, who can use all the "sound" tricks even in audiobooks, and who can display the visual physical behaviors on screen, we're facing a page with printing on it. What now?
First, recognizing the behavior and context add to, and change, the meaning of spoken words--and having observed (you'd better have observed) how this really works in real life--we must include those behaviors--a few key behaviors, those readers will recognize--with most exchanges of words. We can't give the whole picture: pupils dilating, eyelids retracting, spinal extensor muscles contracting, abdominal muscles countering to produce a tight "core," shoulders lifting, when the hearer is suddenly scared, even as she says "No!" in a high pitched voice with an arc-shaped pitch change: readers would be running from the book before you got to the third actual, real life physical reaction.
An attempt to write out the whole complex of behaviors that goes with me yelling "STOP THAT!" to the horses from across the yard, or that accompanies singing "If Music Be the Food of Love" to my husband (as opposed to my voice coach) would bore anyone but a student of human communication. But as a reader, I want to be immersed in the story and feel the full-body tension of "STOP THAT!" and the languidness (combined with careful management of the music) and emotional intensity of the singing.
Observation can teach which of the many signals is just obvious enough for readers to have noticed (and thus recognize) and usually provides several for each desired conversational use. (Thus preventing "ho-hum, here comes another thump of the fist to show determination.")
Surprise, for instance, can be "behaved" with any (usually all, but pick one) of these: eyes widening, mouth dropping open, stiffening, startling. Dropping something also works. Individuals may have different characteristic ways of showing surprise (but will always have some of the species-wide ones) and to make a character different, a less usual controlled response may be useful. But be sure it's realistic and that you acknowledge the species-wide part as well. "Only the slight widening of his eyes betrayed his surprise...but Steve knew that the slow clenching on the colonel's fist meant it had been a severe one." Here we have a subordinate who knows his boss well reading the unusual signal and the one he can't control.
Combining the words of an utterance with a modifying behavior creates a more realistic communications-scene even if you do nothing with the words of the utterance. "I'm tired," he said, turning away from her. He took his jacket off the peg. "I can't go on like this." OR He took one more step, then leaned heavily on his cane, gasping. "I'm tired," he said finally. "I can't go on like this." You could write a hundred books in which ["I'm tired," he said. "I can't go on like this."], modified by actions and context, worked without any change in punctuation to provide a unique meaning for every book.
Choosing the words for both the behavior and the utterance allows even more specificity. Would this character, in this situation, speak with contractions or not? Would this character, in this situation and these conversational partners, use formal or informal syntax, vocabulary, terms of address, etc? As little, um, blunders with open microphones and hidden tape recorders have shown, politicians talk one way in formal speeches or interviews and quite another when they think themselves safely private. (So do I. So do most of us. Though I read today, in another venue, about a young man who wasn't hired because he kept calling the interviewer "Dude...") How a character speaks, and how a character behaves with that speech, is part of characterization. Those in authority expect orders to be obeyed; those not in authority hope their excuses will be believed. Dickens overdid it but you have no doubt, in his stories, what the full conversational context and subtext are. People cringe and bluster and swagger and so on.
My choir director and voice coach constantly urges us to be more expressive, more musical--"Overdo it," he says. "I'll stop you if you go to far." And we don't, timid modernists that we are. Well, not usually. But the same is often true with writers--once past the bombast of youthful writing, which tends to be all extremes all the time, many of us sink into cautious mediocrity of expression. Nobody cringes, nobody blusters, nobody swaggers...our characters speak their correctly defined words in grammatically correct utterances...and they're blurred to dullness thereby. We don't need to use the words "cringe, bluster, swagger" unless they fit--but we do need to recognize those behaviors in real life and find ways to make them come alive on the page.
(next rock: Punctuation in dialogue, or "how to make copy editors use up an entire box of red pencils.")
Human communication regularly violates the formal rules of grammar and syntax in the word part, and expectations in the behavior part. A disgruntled employee may say to another disgruntled employee, about their boss, "Don't you just love the way he handled that?" An admiring grad student may say to another admiring grad student about their thesis director, "Don't you just love the way he handled that?" Opposite meanings, conveyed by tone, prosody of the phrase, emphasis, volume, pitch, rate of speech, facial expression, posture, etc.
In real life, those of us who don't have a neurological difference that makes some or all of the communications behaviors difficult to detect learn as small children how to "read" a conversational partner's face and posture and tone of voice and so on. Over the years we become every more expert at interpreting the shades of meaning and how context (as well as all those behaviors) affects it. We know that "I don't want to" had a different total meaning than "I don't want to" or "I don't want to" and we anticipate which one is likely to be used in which contexts. We know the prosody of whining, surprise, refusal, and other: where the pitch rises and falls, and how much; how much more strongly the emphasis is placed, as well as where it is. We can convey (and recognize) shades of scorn from mild distaste to savage attack. (Suzette Haden Elgin's books on recognizing and responding to verbal abuse are a great introduction for those who haven't looked at language this way--she's talking about "pragmatics.")
We also know the other physical behaviors that accompany speech and affect meaning. Many of these are unconscious and uncontrollable: changes in pupillary size as the pupil dilates or contracts in emotional response to both hearing and sight, tension and relaxation in small muscles of the face signalling interest, approval, anxiety, anger, revulsion and other emotions, speed of change of expression, mobility or immobility of the mouth, the appearance of perspiration on the brow or elsewhere in response to stress the conversation arouses, small and large movements of other body parts...neck, shoulders, all down the arms, torso, legs, etc. Immobility is a signal (which is why those with scarring or paralysis that limits spontaneous motion are often misinterpreted by those talking to them.)
If the person you're talking to is interested in what you're saying, eager to hear more--it's obvious. If they're bored by you or what you're saying, impatient to get away--it's obvious. (If it's not obvious, you may have one of the neurological conditions that limits easy access to social signals...or you may lack experience with that culture.) People in power (especially if they're in a group that has traditionally had power) are often much less observant of those outside their power group than those outside are of them. The slave needs to know the master's every mood, to survive. The master does not...until the slave sticks a sword in his back. Recent research proved what history has long suggested: those in power do not read the facial expressions of their underlings except for anger. Anger's a threat--they recognize that. But they don't recognize when an underling is sad, anxious, frightened. Other underlings do.
So: here we are, writers with characters who must communicate in the course of the story. We have readers who are, in all likelihood, a mix of those who are aware of communication strategies and those who just use them, without ever noticing. How do we convey that Bill is bored, Arnie is anxious, Bettina is annoyed but not fully angry...in the conversation, without saying Bill is bored, Arnie is anxious, Bettina is annoyed but not fully angry? Because--though we can get away with the occasional "Bill was bored, so he said..."--we can't get away with that very often.
We have only words and punctuation marks and typography (font changes, as from roman to italic) to play with. Unlike actors, who can use all the "sound" tricks even in audiobooks, and who can display the visual physical behaviors on screen, we're facing a page with printing on it. What now?
First, recognizing the behavior and context add to, and change, the meaning of spoken words--and having observed (you'd better have observed) how this really works in real life--we must include those behaviors--a few key behaviors, those readers will recognize--with most exchanges of words. We can't give the whole picture: pupils dilating, eyelids retracting, spinal extensor muscles contracting, abdominal muscles countering to produce a tight "core," shoulders lifting, when the hearer is suddenly scared, even as she says "No!" in a high pitched voice with an arc-shaped pitch change: readers would be running from the book before you got to the third actual, real life physical reaction.
An attempt to write out the whole complex of behaviors that goes with me yelling "STOP THAT!" to the horses from across the yard, or that accompanies singing "If Music Be the Food of Love" to my husband (as opposed to my voice coach) would bore anyone but a student of human communication. But as a reader, I want to be immersed in the story and feel the full-body tension of "STOP THAT!" and the languidness (combined with careful management of the music) and emotional intensity of the singing.
Observation can teach which of the many signals is just obvious enough for readers to have noticed (and thus recognize) and usually provides several for each desired conversational use. (Thus preventing "ho-hum, here comes another thump of the fist to show determination.")
Surprise, for instance, can be "behaved" with any (usually all, but pick one) of these: eyes widening, mouth dropping open, stiffening, startling. Dropping something also works. Individuals may have different characteristic ways of showing surprise (but will always have some of the species-wide ones) and to make a character different, a less usual controlled response may be useful. But be sure it's realistic and that you acknowledge the species-wide part as well. "Only the slight widening of his eyes betrayed his surprise...but Steve knew that the slow clenching on the colonel's fist meant it had been a severe one." Here we have a subordinate who knows his boss well reading the unusual signal and the one he can't control.
Combining the words of an utterance with a modifying behavior creates a more realistic communications-scene even if you do nothing with the words of the utterance. "I'm tired," he said, turning away from her. He took his jacket off the peg. "I can't go on like this." OR He took one more step, then leaned heavily on his cane, gasping. "I'm tired," he said finally. "I can't go on like this." You could write a hundred books in which ["I'm tired," he said. "I can't go on like this."], modified by actions and context, worked without any change in punctuation to provide a unique meaning for every book.
Choosing the words for both the behavior and the utterance allows even more specificity. Would this character, in this situation, speak with contractions or not? Would this character, in this situation and these conversational partners, use formal or informal syntax, vocabulary, terms of address, etc? As little, um, blunders with open microphones and hidden tape recorders have shown, politicians talk one way in formal speeches or interviews and quite another when they think themselves safely private. (So do I. So do most of us. Though I read today, in another venue, about a young man who wasn't hired because he kept calling the interviewer "Dude...") How a character speaks, and how a character behaves with that speech, is part of characterization. Those in authority expect orders to be obeyed; those not in authority hope their excuses will be believed. Dickens overdid it but you have no doubt, in his stories, what the full conversational context and subtext are. People cringe and bluster and swagger and so on.
My choir director and voice coach constantly urges us to be more expressive, more musical--"Overdo it," he says. "I'll stop you if you go to far." And we don't, timid modernists that we are. Well, not usually. But the same is often true with writers--once past the bombast of youthful writing, which tends to be all extremes all the time, many of us sink into cautious mediocrity of expression. Nobody cringes, nobody blusters, nobody swaggers...our characters speak their correctly defined words in grammatically correct utterances...and they're blurred to dullness thereby. We don't need to use the words "cringe, bluster, swagger" unless they fit--but we do need to recognize those behaviors in real life and find ways to make them come alive on the page.
(next rock: Punctuation in dialogue, or "how to make copy editors use up an entire box of red pencils.")
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