Character Exercise 3 - The Flavor of Speech: Sounding Real

Here comes your character. She’s Irish – Hispanic – Vietnamese – a Maine congresswoman, a shrimp boatman from Louisiana, a black professor in an Ivy League college who retains traces of her Chicago slum childhood in her speech. Your character is eager to have the conversation that the structure of the story demands. Or maybe she wants to tell the story, as in a first-person narrative. Either way, you want that speech to have its own flavor, to suggest the character and background of the person uttering it, without using much phonetic spelling because it can be hard to read. Characters in fiction, like real people, have to come out of a context that is convincing and intriguing – even when that context is imaginary.

Exercise:

First, read through the excerpts on your handout, “Speech Fragments.” Observe how the speech fragments convey a sense of accent or national, regional, race, class, or cultural distinction mainly through word choice and arrangement. Easily understood foreign words and names can help, too. What do these fragments suggest about the individual speakers by conveying the flavor of their speech?

Now, take the three character sketches you wrote for the “Who’s There?” assignment. Develop each sketch further by adding dialogue for your character, remembering to give your character a “flavor” through his or her speech patterns. Your reader should be bale to get a full sense of the character, not just through your description, but also through the way he or she speaks.

Assignment Due: post three character sketches (300 words each) flavored with dialogue.