Episode 048 - Building Great Protagonist and Antagonist Voices with Jeff Elkins
October 13, 2020
Jeff Elkins, The Dialogue Doctor, talks about building great protagonist and antagonist voices. He discusses how to build a villain voice that complements and contrasts to the hero's voice, how to use quirks to help define a character's voice, and how secondary characters can empower the change you want to make in the protagonist.
Jeff Elkins is a novelist, ghostwriter, and editor with more than 10 novels on the market. During the day, he leads the writing team for a company that simulates difficult conversations for professionals to practice. He also helps authors improve their dialogue in order to engage readers more fully through his podcast The Dialogue Doctor, and through one-on-one consulting.
"Sometimes your dialogue needs to be used to move your character forward and move your character's voice forward." -Jeff Elkins, The Dialogue Doctor
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Jeff Elkins. Hey Jeff, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Jeff: Hey, I'm good, Matty. Thanks for having me on. I'm really excited about being a part of this today.
[00:00:12] Matty: I'm pleased to have you here. So just to give our listeners a little bit of background on you ... Jeff Elkins is a novelist, ghost writer, and editor with more than 10 novels on the market. During the day he leads the writing team for a company that simulates difficult conversations for professionals to practice. He also helps authors improve their dialogue in order to engage readers more fully through his podcast, The Dialogue Doctor -- which I've listened to and it's fantastic, I can highly recommend -- and through one-on-one consulting.
[00:00:41] And so what we're going to be talking about today is building great protagonist and antagonist voices. And I love this topic because this is not a spin on the whole question of dialogue and voices that I had experienced before. But before we dive into the details of that, Jeff, just describe a little bit how you got into this gig of being The Dialogue Doctor.
[00:01:02] Jeff: Oh, that's a great question. And a little complicated. Well, not too complicated, I guess. I have been writing for about six years. When I grew up, I'm dyslexic, so English was my least favorite class of all time, and I love to read but, you know, if you ask me to write something, when I wrote by hand, it all came out backwards as a kid. So that was just really frustrating. So writing and I didn't get along.
[00:01:25] It wasn't until I actually was in adulthood in my mid-thirties that I started writing. Started with short stories, then moved into novels. I've got two series out on the market and some standalone books. And I got to a place where I really wanted to slow my fiction down and think about how I was going to do that.
[00:01:40] So I was talking to a friend who you know, because you've had him on the podcast, and he was on a recent episode, J. Thorn. I was talking to J. about what do I want to give back to the author community. I want to be able to invest like so many people have given to me, like this podcast is a great example of just ways that authors are constantly giving back. So I was talking to J., who does The Career Author Podcast, and he was quizzing me about life and what I do for a living and what I do during my day job when I'm not writing novels. ...
[00:00:06] Jeff: Hey, I'm good, Matty. Thanks for having me on. I'm really excited about being a part of this today.
[00:00:12] Matty: I'm pleased to have you here. So just to give our listeners a little bit of background on you ... Jeff Elkins is a novelist, ghost writer, and editor with more than 10 novels on the market. During the day he leads the writing team for a company that simulates difficult conversations for professionals to practice. He also helps authors improve their dialogue in order to engage readers more fully through his podcast, The Dialogue Doctor -- which I've listened to and it's fantastic, I can highly recommend -- and through one-on-one consulting.
[00:00:41] And so what we're going to be talking about today is building great protagonist and antagonist voices. And I love this topic because this is not a spin on the whole question of dialogue and voices that I had experienced before. But before we dive into the details of that, Jeff, just describe a little bit how you got into this gig of being The Dialogue Doctor.
[00:01:02] Jeff: Oh, that's a great question. And a little complicated. Well, not too complicated, I guess. I have been writing for about six years. When I grew up, I'm dyslexic, so English was my least favorite class of all time, and I love to read but, you know, if you ask me to write something, when I wrote by hand, it all came out backwards as a kid. So that was just really frustrating. So writing and I didn't get along.
[00:01:25] It wasn't until I actually was in adulthood in my mid-thirties that I started writing. Started with short stories, then moved into novels. I've got two series out on the market and some standalone books. And I got to a place where I really wanted to slow my fiction down and think about how I was going to do that.
[00:01:40] So I was talking to a friend who you know, because you've had him on the podcast, and he was on a recent episode, J. Thorn. I was talking to J. about what do I want to give back to the author community. I want to be able to invest like so many people have given to me, like this podcast is a great example of just ways that authors are constantly giving back. So I was talking to J., who does The Career Author Podcast, and he was quizzing me about life and what I do for a living and what I do during my day job when I'm not writing novels. ...
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[00:02:09] I work for a company that simulates difficult conversations, which means it feels like a Skype conversation. And the product that we make, there's a real person, a live actor on the screen, but that live actor is actually a computer program that's being run by the simulation we write. So it requires me and our writing team to get real intense about dialogue and what's happening with dialogue and how it's working and just the ins and out of phrases and words, and how does this word impact the rapport of the conversation versus that word impact the rapport of the conversation? So just studying dialogue on a level that is a little unusual for writers, a level that writers typically don't get into, and studying characterization on a level that writers usually don't get into.
[00:02:54] And so J. was like, why don't you just bring that to the writing world? And so I did, I started just kind of experimenting with it back in March of 2020. And so I just called some writer friends that I knew, and I was like, Hey, send me something, let me see if I can help. And they loved it.
[00:03:11] So I did about 20 people just for free, trying to figure out exactly how I can most help writers. I launched officially in August and what I do now is, writers will send me anywhere from 500 to 3000 words. If there's dialogue in them, that's helpful. And, we break them down a little piece at a time and talk about what they're hoping to get out of the piece and what they want these characters to sound like and who they want these characters to be and how they're communicating that well and how they can communicate that better. That session is really about giving a writer skills that they can use through their whole book, and giving a writer a great launch of a character.
[00:03:49] So they have a strong character voice. So they know as they finish their book, they know what that character voice sounds like. Or if they're editing their book, they know what they're looking for when they edit, all that kind of stuff. So that's what I do. And then, because I recognize not everybody can pay for a session -- I've been the poor struggling author who can't afford the service but really needs it -- so I just started putting some of the sessions up on a podcast. So if you can't get a session or you don't have a piece you're working on but you still want to learn about dialogue, you can go over to The Dialogue Doctor Podcast and we're breaking down people's work there, which is fun.
[00:04:23] Matty: I also just listened to an episode where you were talking about one of the X FILES episodes, “Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose.” It was great fun. Not only did I think you had some really insightful comments about the dialogue in one of the scenes from that, but I was so intrigued that I went back and watched it again.
[00:04:43] Jeff: That's great. Yeah. I'm an obsessive student. I'm always learning. And I think one of the best ways to learn dialogue is to look at masterworks. Let me define master works. When I say master works, I don't mean things that have won awards necessarily -- they might have -- or things that are considered classics of all times of literature, although those are good too. I mean, what do people love? What characters do they fall in love with, what voices are they quoting all the time? And we did X FILES because it's one of those series that people just obsessed over and loved. Scully and Mulder are iconic characters with iconic voices that people now try to represent in their own work.
[00:05:29] And so if we can go back to those master works, these things that people just fell in love with, and look at them and ask what was it about these characters and their voices that enchanted viewers so deeply, and how can we take those lessons and put them into our own work. That's why we go back and look at masterworks every once in a while.
[00:05:49] I think we have an episode coming up soon where we talk about WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, which is another one of those just like fantastic movies that people quote all the time. They fall in love with the characters and it's comes to be emblematic of the romantic comedy genre. So what can we learn by watching that movie about how we write dialogue in our pieces is the point of grabbing those masterworks and digging through them?
[00:06:14] Matty: The whole master works concept is interesting because for things like plot structure, you can go back to Greek mythology, but dialogue is quite different. And you wouldn't want to look at Dickens for tips about dialogue. And even when you were talking about the X FILES, I guess that was from the eighties, maybe ...?
[00:06:37] Jeff: It's actually mid-nineties. The X FILES is a nineties show.
[00:06:40] Matty: Okay. So even there, you were talking about some dialogue considerations that were a little dated. And so dialogue is very interesting because you have to choose masterworks that were good at the skill of dialogue, but also then assess whether they're appropriate for today's work.
[00:07:00] Jeff: Yeah. I think the heart of dialogue, the heart of writing dialogue, that really engages readers is creating characters that the reader can empathize with. So writing dialogue is an exercise in empathy. You're trying to create a character the reader can empathize with, and you are as you write need to be empathizing with the character as well. So even masterworks like Dickens, the language may not help us and the pacing and how Dickens is constructing sentences may not help us, but what Dickens is doing to lead his readers to empathize with his characters.
[00:07:39] You know, Dickens often writes children, and there's no more vulnerable character than a child, right? And putting a child, like he does with OLIVER TWIST, putting a child in a dangerous circumstance brings immediate empathy from the reader. And so learning those kinds of tricks from those masterworks, if I'm creating this character and I want the reader to be 100% bought into my character's journey, how am I connecting that character to that reader with that character's voice? So writing children, putting children in dangerous places, making the thieves in Oliver Twist children, those kinds of considerations, giving the children that are thieves more adult voices because they're living a more adult life, those are all the kinds of things that we can learn from even past works.
[00:08:29] So all that to say, what you're saying is 100% true that we have to keep in consideration the time period we're writing in and how that dialogue is going to last over time. At the same time, I don't ever want anybody to throw away old dialogue because it sounds old, because there's still so much we can learn from that, from that writer and what's happening with the choices that writer is making with their characters in order to engage the reader deeply.
[00:08:55] Matty: Let's use that as a segue into one of the topics we wanted to talk about today, which was creating a vulnerable hero voice. Can you talk about that a little?
[00:09:03] Jeff: Yeah, I would love to. You and I were discussing what we'd talk about on the podcast, and this is something that I haven't had an opportunity to talk anywhere about yet, so I'm pumped about doing that.
[00:09:12] So let's first kind of define hero and where we mean. We've got to get some terms out of the way before we just jump in, because I don't want people just to naturally assume that when we say vulnerable hero voice, they're like, Oh, I don't write superheroes, and they turn it off. So what we're talking about here, we're just talking about your protagonist, whatever character is going on a journey. And there is the plot structure of the hero's journey, but just the idea that your protagonist is going to start your piece, your short story or your novel, one way, go through a transformation, and end your story or novel another way. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about the protagonist that's changing in the story, when we talk about the hero.
[00:09:53] When we talk about the antagonist, we're talking about the character that is rubbing against that hero, causing barriers that the hero has to overcome. So sometimes the antagonist is like a pure villain, intentionally causing these barriers. Sometimes the antagonist is going to be more like society or culture causing these barriers that the hero has to fight through. So writing a vulnerable hero, creating a hero voice that really resonates with people.
[00:10:20] So there's lots of different types of heroes. I kind of go with the six archetype model that I like, which is there's the everyday man. I think of Frodo in LORD OF THE RINGS as the everyday man, he's just a normal Hobbit that's wandering around the Shire and then he's sent on this big journey.
[00:10:39] There's the more classical hero, someone special that maybe has to discover something special about themselves. So we're talking about Harry Potter, that kid that doesn't know he's prophesied to take over magic but is going to discover that along this hero's journey. There's the epic hero, that is the Superman-type character, that's more classic literature, but that's more like the superhero-type genre now, where the hero is special and knows he's special and royal and powerful and has all this stuff. There's the tragic hero that has some kind of fatal flaw, where everything around him is going bad. I've talked about this on my podcast, but I just read A MAN CALLED OVE, an amazing classic hero. In that book of an old man who has suicidal ideations, who's struggling with those suicidal ideations, has this deep, fatal flaw that he just doesn't want to live anymore. So, you know, fantastic tragic hero. And then we've got the Byronesque hero that is deeply internal and doesn't say much externally. He has a problem relating to the world and has a deep inner life. And that's, I think of Mr. Darcy in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE when I say that.
[00:11:48] So I line up all those archetypes to say the first step of building a character voice for your protagonist is deciding who your protagonist is. And figuring it because who your protagonist is, is going to shape their voice. For example, if you're going with an everyman protagonist where the protagonist is just a normal person that's thrust into extraordinary circumstances, you have to decide what does a normal person sound like and how is this normal person going to talk? What's the normal level of education for this person? Like in "normal," are they in a world of PhDs? So this is a normal PhD, right? Or are they a mechanic? Because those two voices have been encultured differently. They're going to sound different, right? What is normal in your world?
[00:12:36] If you're going with a more tragic hero, what's tragic about them? So that tragic aspect of them needs to play out in their voice. Are they like Romeo, who's a tragic romantic. Then their voice needs to be constantly pursuing that romance. Are they more like the man called Ove, who is fatalistic? Then everything needs to be down and sour.
[00:13:02] So considering what your hero is, and then lining your hero's voice up to communicate to the reader, this is what I'm going for. So Frodo in LORD OF THE RINGS for everyman has a very simple voice. He's not given complex sentences. He rarely sings on his own. Even though Tolkien has everybody's singing, Frodo is rarely singing on his own. There's not a lot of poetry coming out of Frodo, right? He's just a simple guy that's walking along and his voice and his tone shows that simplicity.
[00:13:31] Whereas like Harry, his voice always has a little bit of an edge to it. From the moment that we meet Harry Potter in this story, he's got this kind of a defiant tone in his voice, right? Like he lives under the stairs, but he's not tragic and sad about it. Even before he knows who he is, he's pushing back with his voice. He's looking for moments of escape to get away from the people he's living with. And so we start to feel who the character is and what the journey is we're going to come on, right from the start of their voice.
[00:14:04] So the key is to figure out the archetype that you're writing toward, or who your hero is and how your hero fits into society around them. And then start building the voice around that decision you're making to communicate to the reader what's going on. And I always like to talk about how you build from the beginning and also how you edit.
[00:14:27] Because a lot of time, we just start writing. And I'm actually a huge proponent of that. I don't actually plan out my hero before I write them. I try to write like 5,000 words. And then after I've written 5,000 words, I back it up and I go okay, what am I doing? What's coming? What's coming out of me?
[00:14:44] So if you've already written and now you're editing, take a second and read your hero's first big conversation. And take a look at your hero's journey and where you're taking your hero and how they're changing. And just go ahead and ask, Who is this? Is this Superman? Is this the invincible hero who's super strong voice needs to reflect that? They need to be commanding. They need to understand their own strength and be measuring it in the conversation, if you want them to be relatable, which we can get into quirks in a minute, but you need to be representing that to the people.
[00:15:17] If it's Mr. Darcy, he needs to not talk much, but be frustrated with the fact that he has things to communicate and doesn't know how. To represent that there is an inner life going on, but he just can't get it out. So maybe there's a lot of storming off. Maybe there's a lot of mean quips that he's saying that puts everyone off around him. And then an internal frustration -- frustrated that the conversation has shut down.
[00:15:43] All that to say, figure out who your hero is and what archetype they are or how they're defined in the story and how they're transforming, and then start editing or building your voice around that concept of the hero.
[00:15:56] Matty: When you were talking about having 5,000 words, are you suggesting that would only be dialogue or just 5,000 words of the story in some format?
[00:16:03] Jeff: I just start writing the story. Now I will say I cheat in that if I go three paragraphs without writing dialogue, I stop writing and figure out how to put dialogue in. I don't go more than three or four paragraphs without dialogue. I've actually gone through some best sellers, like HARRY POTTER, and tested that theory. How many paragraphs do they go? It's rarely over five, that they go over five paragraphs without someone starting to talk.
[00:16:33] And I think the reason that is, I think good authors naturally feel that because they feel that the reader connects with their character, not through the actions their characters do, but through the words their characters say. It's how we connect with people, right? Especially in today's day and age where right now we're all listening to this podcast, right? So we're literally connecting to each other through our voices and I think it's just part of human nature. We talk to each other. And so if you go too long in your story without your characters talking, you start to lose engagement. And so my rule of thumb is like two to three paragraphs are great, five paragraphs sometimes, but if nobody's spoken in five paragraphs, then it's time to stop and go back and edit.
[00:17:19] So all that to say, I write 5,000 words, but it always has a lot of dialogue in it because I force dialogue into this story.
[00:17:25] Matty: Did you ever read or do an assessment of Andy Weir's THE MARTIAN?
[00:17:30] Jeff: I haven't, I've never read Andy Weir's THE MARTIAN.
[00:17:33] Matty: You'll have to read it and then come back and talk about how they get around ... how he does or doesn't get around the fact that for a lot of the time, there's just a guy there who has no one to talk to.
[00:17:43] Jeff: And that's so hard, right? Writing a story where the whole story is the character's inner thoughts is difficult. Again, I haven't read THE MARTIAN and so I have no idea what he does. I find that a lot of those, though, work well if you write in first person, where the person is explaining their journey because it comes off as if the person's talking to the reader. So if you're going to have a book where the character's by themselves a lot, or the character's a serious loner, writing in first person allows you to have that conversation with the reader that feels like dialogue, and it can be achieved.
[00:18:19] Matty: The other piece of work that popped into my mind was ALIEN, at the point at which everybody's dead except Ripley. And I'd be curious to go back and see how far into the movie that happens and what they do for dialogue after that point.
[00:18:39] Jeff: Yeah. So again, I haven't analyzed ALIEN, but I can tell you that you'll be surprised when you watch action movies, horror, thrillers, we think in our head that the dialogue shuts down. But you're going to find that there's actually a lot of sound happening from those characters. So there's a lot of talking in that empty space, a lot of yelling, a lot of guttural cries. I always recommend to writers, put that in. Put it into your book because those yells and calling people's names, running around scared, yelling at the darkness, that kind of stuff really connects your reader to the fear your character's experiencing.
[00:19:20] So again, I haven't watched ALIEN, but my bet is if you watch it, you're going to be surprised at how much sound she's actually making, even though she's the only person in the movie, because it is that verbal connection.
[00:19:30] Matty: Yeah. And there's also a certain amount of, I don't think she's actually having conversations with the computer, but the computer is talking, you know, "10 minutes to go," or whatever. And then there's a cat, so occasionally she says something to the cat.
[00:19:43] Jeff: Yup. And so going back to our conversation about heroes and archetypes, the cat's a great illustration, even though I haven't seen ALIEN, we could play off of that. As you build your hero, you want to put characters around them that allow them to express who they are in an appropriate way. So if you have a character that is by themselves, give them something to talk to. If it's a cat, if it's a computer, if they talk to their gun, if they talk to their sword, give them something to talk to. Give them an imaginary friend, give them a ghost, something to relate to.
[00:20:22] Matty: Soccer ball.
[00:20:24] Jeff: A soccer ball, right? Yeah, like in CASTAWAY. Give them something to have a conversation with. Because it's through that conversation that your readers are going to connect to your character. So you've got to plug them into something. And that goes to the conversation of, when we're looking at our character's voice, once we have the archetype down, we have to start building the world around our character because we want to give our character moments to express who they are.
[00:20:48] And so these things that you put around your character allow you to put your character in a situation where they can express themselves. So if you're taking your character on a hero's journey, starting at one place, going through a transformation, and coming out different, we want to put things around your character that allow them to express who they are at the beginning, how they're changing throughout, and where they're coming out different. And usually the way that works is, you want to work on contrast and then complementing So a lot of heroes have a cast of companions on their journey.
[00:21:25] So going back to Frodo, he's got Sam, right? They are connected in that they're both everyday men. But what Frodo is trying to overcome in his journey is this hopelessness and pessimism that he's actually going to be able to accomplish this giant task that's been put on the everyday man. Especially as we go through the transformation of Frodo and we get to the end of THE LORD OF THE RINGS series, he starts to experience this deep, deep hopelessness.
[00:21:57] So what Tolkien did was brilliant was he gave him a character that is unexplainably optimistic. Sam will not quit and he won't let Frodo quit. But the beauty of that is they complement each other in that they're both the everyday man. They both have the everyday man voice, but they contrast each other. And then Sam is going to challenge Frodo to encounter the hopelessness that he's struggling with in his voice. So we get to have these moments where they're talking to each other and Sam's declaring things like, I'm not giving up on you and you're not giving up either. Expressing the hero's journey out loud by having this cast of characters around them.
[00:22:38] Or Harry Potter has Hermione and Ron. Now they're all similar in that they are all in some ways inexplicably driven to solve the mystery of what's happening in their world. The other kids around them are appropriately scared of participating. But Harry has these two companions who are willing to dive into this adventure with him. So they share that thing, but then they complement Harry in that Ron is entertaining and fun-loving and has some humor in his voice. Whereas Harry has very little humor in his voice. He's very serious all the time, as he explores who he is. And he's very inner, all the time he explores who he is. And Hermione is very much intellectual.
[00:23:25] So you bring these companions around Harry that allow Harry to contrast with them and express his opinion and his thoughts on what's going on and his desire to be a lone wolf. And as Harry goes through this transformation of who he is, understanding what it means to be good or evil and understanding his history and coming to terms with his own personhood, you get these two companions that force him into conversation to do that.
[00:23:52] Or another example, if you're writing a Superman-type character or if we're going for the epic archetype where the hero is royal and invincible and super strong, and is a true hero, then you need to put companions around him that are going to get into trouble and that are going to force him to consider what it means to be wounded and hurt. So in the Superman illustration, we've got Jimmy and Lois who are always around him. The joke when I was a kid was that Jimmy's always tied up in the corner, newer versions of that character aren't that way.
[00:24:25] But in the old comic books, Jimmy was always like in a corner with a gag on. So you want to put characters around your epic hero that are going to push your epic hero to consider humanity and consider what it means to be vulnerable and weak and have to deal with that kind of conversation.
[00:24:40] So all that to say, as you're thinking about your hero and let's say you've written 20,000 words and you've got three characters and your plot's stalled. Nothing's transforming. We're having a good time. We're running around, but nothing's happening here. Look at your character and decide, is this an antihero I'm writing, is this a hero that feels like a villain that's really not, like a Tyler Durden from FIGHT CLUB, or is this an everyday man in here? Who is this guy or woman?
[00:25:13] And then as you start to transform your character, ask yourself what you're doing with your side characters. How are your side characters forcing your hero to have conversations about the journey your hero's on, by contrasting their voices from each other, by making them different enough to push your hero to have to explain what's happening or to be challenged by them.
[00:25:34] And it can even happen in small ways. For example, if your hero's optimistic and super happy and sees the world through rosy colored glasses and you have a scene where you're putting your hero in a coffee shop, give them an interaction with a cynical and mean barista to contrast that. Oh, they're rosy colored glasses and open and optimistic, I want to show that, I want to demonstrate that to the reader right now. So I'm going to give them a barista who's cynical, angry, and doesn't want to be bothered. And now we've got a great setup for a fun interaction between your character who can say things like, Isn't it a great day? and your barista can say, No. And all of a sudden, we have a conversation that you can flow from, that can illustrate to the reader this is who my character is, and this is what's happening.
[00:26:25] So it can feel like we've been taught for so long that dialogue has to move the plot along, that that's the goal of dialogue. And if your dialogue isn't moving the plot along, cut, cut, cut. I hate that advice, right? Like on some ends, that advice is really great because you do want your dialogue to serve a purpose, but the plot isn't the only thing moving, right? Your character is transforming as well. So sometimes your dialogue needs to be used to move your character forward and move your character's voice forward.
[00:26:54] It's not just a plot device, right? It's telling the reader who your character is and how they're interacting with the world. So if you can arrange the characters around them to build that in and going back to quirks, if you have no characters, give them a cat. If you want to write a tragic hero, like A MAN CALLED OVE, where the hero is dark and brooding and experiencing suicidal ideations, and you can't figure out how to translate that, give your character something they're doing routinely just to openly express it. Like in A MAN CALLED OVE, there's multiple suicide attempts -- warning for anybody that wants to read that book, it's a little dark in the beginning -- but that communicates in a very strong way, right up front. Or throughout the book, he talks to his wife who is dead. He'll be alone in his apartment and he starts having a conversation with his wife who's dead. Often it's just a sentence or two expressing the fact that he doesn't want to make his sandwich today.
[00:27:52] So giving him that quirk of talking to a dead wife communicates right up front that this is a tragic and sad character. He's talking to someone who isn't there. We immediately start to empathize and to feel for that person what's going on.
[00:28:08] Or let's go to the Mr. Darcy character. If you have this character who's internal and who has this deep inner life but very little vocal, pair them with an Elizabeth Bennett, because Elizabeth is vocal and aggressive with her opinions and not going to hold back and is a strong woman in a time that wants to push and hold her down. And it's fighting against that culture. So the pairing of those two characters allows us to see the contrast between the two of them and forces the reader to start to ask, What's going on, what's happening here? Why does he never talk and she talks all the time. Why does he never actually say the right thing? Why is he always saying the wrong thing? Why is she always frustrated by it? What's happening with this tension? That's building this world that we can now engage in.
[00:28:56] So if we can think about our characters and their quirks and how that's coming out of their voice, and then start to build them to complement and contrast each other, then we can start to create this really rich world that our reader can engage in and start to see that hero's journey play through our character's voice as they transform.
[00:29:15] Matty: How about the villain? We've talked a little bit about the cast of characters that's surrounding the hero. How do you form the villain's voice so that it works and it's complementary with the hero's voice?
[00:29:26] Jeff: That's perfect. So I feel the best villains are very close to who the character is, because the villain and the character needed to stand on the same plane.
[00:29:38] So let's go to the easiest villain, the epic villain. Beowulf needs a Grendel. The hero that can destroy any monster needs the unkillable monster. Superman needs a Lex Luthor, right? Elizabeth Bennett needs a society that is completely designed to put her into a specific box. She needs that villain to come around her and force her down.
[00:30:06] So when we think about our villain, we always want to make sure they match our hero or are greater than our hero in power in some way. It's important that they're equally footed because otherwise your hero's going to feel like they're just beating up on somebody and nobody wants to read that.
[00:30:22] They need to match in power, which means when you're thinking about their characterization and their voice, you want them to line up. You want Luthor and Superman to have matching arrogance in some ways. You want them both to think they're undefeatable in different ways, but you want them both to think that they are super strong.
[00:30:45] If we go back to the Harry Potter illustration, one of the things Rowling did with her villain in Voldemort and Harry is she united them in a lot of ways and combined them in a lot ways so that Harry has this kind of sinister side and it's always taking over. He has a little bit of Voldemort's voice in him, or with him and Malfoy, who's his more immediate villain, they both have a disdain for authority, so they both think they're right. Even when all the headmasters are telling them to go back to their room, Harry's not going to obey, neither is Malfoy. The villain needs to complement and match the character.
[00:31:33] But then the villain needs to push barriers at the character's transformation and call the character to make a choice to go another way. So going back to Malfoy and Harry, Malfoy is constantly calling Harry to be the villain of the story and constantly telling Harry he's not who he thinks is, and that's what we want. We want our villain actively expressing that the hero's journey is going to fail, that whoever it is you think it is, whatever is you think you're doing, that's not going to work.
[00:32:06] Or in A MAN CALLED OVE, the villain is personified by the bureaucratic director of the community. And he's constantly telling Ove that Ove is going to lose. Every time Ove talks to him, Ove is going to lose. Ove is a nuisance. Ove is a pain in the butt. This is the way society works and Ove just needs to get in line.
[00:32:31] So we have this villain expressing the hero's journey actively and where it's going, but in a nuanced and beautiful way. And if the villain's something like culture, you may think culture can't express anything, but that's not true because the side characters all around your hero should be saying to the hero what culture expects, what society expects, so the hero can push against that.
[00:32:58] Matty: Yeah. That sounds like PRIDE AND PREJUDICE in the sense that there are all sorts of characters who are just representing the societal expectations.
[00:33:05] Jeff: One hundred percent -- like the minister in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE just lives out the societal expectations. This is constantly not even directly, but constantly just expressing, This is what society expects. This is what a lady is. This is how you're supposed to behave with people above your social class and social standing. Just pushing down on the character all the time.
[00:33:25] And so when you look at the full cast, let's put it all together. You've got your hero. Do you know who you want your hero to be and the transformation they want to undergo. If you're going the everyday man route, your hero has some monstrous tasks that's impossible for an everyday man to accomplish. If you're going the more classic hero, your hero has to come to terms with this power that's within them, that they don't understand. If you're going the antihero route, your hero has something that actually feels a little villainous that they want to accomplish, but that in the end is going to turn out okay. That's the more like antihero matter. So we know who our hero is and we're starting to build our hero's voice to match that hero's journey.
[00:34:05] Then we're going to put this cast of characters around our hero to allow our hero to talk about the journey they're going on. The characters are going to complement our hero in mission, complement our hero in desire, so that they are willing to go on the journey with our hero. But at the same time, they're going to contrast our hero, to rub against our hero just a little bit, so our hero has to express what's going on so that they challenge our hero in a positive way. That's the companions and the quirks that you're putting around your hero. And then we want a villain that is pushing back on the hero's journey and their voice, and saying, you can't, you won't, you don't, you're not allowed. And that villain pushes back on the hero.
[00:34:48] So now we've created this environment where the hero can actually take a journey and find transformation, that the hero's moving to something. Moving from depression to freedom, moving from rags to riches, or moving from riches to rags and coming to terms with that. We have a hero that's going in a direction. We have companions going with them and then we have a villain that's pushing back on them saying, You can't make the transformation you need to make. You're incapable of it. And once we put all of that around our hero, writing the hero's journey becomes a lot of fun because now we have all these fun ways we can play with the reader to do it.
[00:35:30] So the way that all of this is expressed is through the voice and the actions. If your plot is the skeleton of your story, your dialogue are the muscles. Your dialogue is what's moving that plot forward.
[00:35:46] I had a weird revelation about this six years ago when I first started writing. I was writing my first fiction book, it's called MENKEN AND THE MONSTERS, and I wanted an antihero. So my lead character is a jerk. He's a lone wolf. He doesn't want to be around anybody. He's a reporter and he believes everybody around him is wrong. And I wrote the book and I put characters around him that kind of push him along. And he's discovering that the world isn't what he thinks it is. And I finished it and I passed it out to readers, and I was like, Check it out! I wrote my first urban fantasy! I love it -- it's great! They read it and so many of them came back to me and said, I hate your main character. He's the worst. He's awful. I don't like him.
[00:36:35] And it took me a couple years to figure out that what I had failed to do was put a companion next to him who makes him likable and who agrees with him in the journey, and goes on the journey with him, but pushes back on him and his need to be lonely and his need to be isolationist and his idea that he has everything right. I failed to give him an appropriate companion. And so when people read the book, they get frustrated with him and they don't want to read him anymore because he's such a jerk and there's no companion there telling them No, this is okay. This guy's going to be all right.
[00:37:15] Matty: Is there an example that would be well known in popular culture of that scenario, where the protagonist is a jerk, but it's softened by the voice of another character?
[00:37:23] Jeff: Well, we've already talked about Tyler Durden in FIGHT CLUB. Tyler Durden is the angry, mean, reckless, doing terrible things to people's personality in the book. But there's another side to Tyler who is hesitant and struggling and searching for meaning in life. And it's through his eyes that we come to like Tyler as somebody we want to go on a journey with, and the alternate personality tells us Tyler has value. Tyler's worth seeing.
[00:38:01] And then all of these side characters start to come around him and form this kind of cult around him. And so we see in the side characters like, Oh no, even though he seems to be terrible, he's really doing good for people. And so that is a way to take an antihero and communicate to your reader, no, no, no. It's not what you think. It's okay. It's okay to be around him.
[00:38:25] In some ways, Han Solo's this way, in the STAR WARS movies. You have an antihero who's kind of a jerk and selfish and outside of his giant dog, Chewy, wants to be left alone. But he's embraced by Luke, and Luke we like, because Luke is the hero on the journey. And so Luke grabs this antihero and brings him along, and in partnership with Luke, Han is okay.
[00:38:51] Matty: It sounds also like Humphrey Bogart. Humphrey Bogart movies sometimes have that kind of flavor to it.
[00:38:57] Jeff: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. When we're thinking about our companion casts, we need to make sure we have characters that are telling our reader how we want them to feel about the character, not blatantly being like, Hey, you should like this person, but more like, We like this guy or We like this woman. You should like them too. Like in a more relatable way. So when I wrote my second series, I had an internal Byronesque character who has deep inner life but very little exterior life. And I wrote my first 5,000 words, which was a short story about her in a more trying to solve a mystery. And I realized quickly if I don't put somebody with her, this is going to be a problem, because we're going to spend the whole book with her thinking about things and looking at things and her inner life isn't going to come out. And so the next 5,000 words, I introduced her to a friend. That friend is extroverted and excited to be around her and appreciates what she brings to the table.
[00:40:06] So now I have somebody who can communicate to the reader, like, No, this is fun. We're having a good time. We're enjoying this. And we should like Mo. Mo is great and we should be on a journey with Mo.
[00:40:18] So adding those complementary characters around to get your more difficult protagonists to be loved can communicate to the reader, this is somebody you should embrace.
[00:40:30] Matty: It sounds like THE ODD COUPLE too. That Oscar and Felix on their own each would be pretty unsympathetic, but together they're great.
[00:40:38] Jeff: Together they're great. And part of it is because they are together, and so it becomes the relationship between them that you really like.
[00:40:46] This can sound like a lot. It can be overwhelming to an author because I know I've been there. It's like, Okay, I've got my plot and SAVE THE CAT beats. Oh my gosh. THREE STORY thing, and now you're telling me I have to design these intense characters too?
[00:40:59] And the thing is, you can feel it. Like it doesn't need to be this complicated. It gets this complicated when you're trying to solve a problem, but when you're first writing, feel it out, write your character, make sure they're talking. And if they're not talking, give them someone to talk to. And when you give them someone to talk to, make that person different than they are.
[00:41:23] And that's a great place to start, right? A great novel is going to have all that stuff in it, but you don't have to start there. So don't be overwhelmed. Just start writing, get your character's voice down and then put some people around them that are different.
[00:41:38] And if you can get that complement / contrast, then you can start being intentional with that. After you've written your first couple chapters, start to ask, Okay, where's this voice going? What's it going to be at the end of the book? Who is Harry at the end of this series? How is he different than the beginning? Who is Elizabeth Bennett at the end of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE? How is she different than the beginning? Who is Mr. Darcy and how is he changing?
[00:42:02] So once you start to get the voice down and understand who they are, what kind of hero they are, then you can start thinking about how you're going to transform them and change them and what the flaw is or what the barrier is that they need to overcome to actually go on this journey.
[00:42:15] So don't be overwhelmed. You just need to get into it and do it, but do be thinking, How am I using this dialogue to communicate what I want to communicate about my hero?
[00:42:25] Matty: I think that's, that's great advice and I love that you're giving people a little entree so that they don't just say, Oh, it's too much. And I'd love to have you back for part two at some point down the road to talk about, okay, now you've applied those roles and now we're in the refining stage and to find out what kind of tips you might have for that stage as well.
[00:42:45] Jeff: The refining is fun. How does character sounds? Do they use a lot of words or little words? Did they use complicated words or small words?
[00:42:52] Are they funny? Are they asking questions all the time? And you start to hone that individual character voice to actually represent the hero you want? So if you want the epic hero, you need to have confidence in their voice. Declaratory statements, no questions, saying how things are, speaking the world into existence. Creating that epic feel.
[00:43:13] If you want the everyman, there should be a lot of expressing uncertainty. A lot of like expressions of nervousness about where to go, a lot of someone else making a declaration of what needs to be done and then letting your character say, I don't know, I don't know. A lot of expression of, I don't know how I feel about that. I don't know what that means. So once you have the archetype down, then start to build the voice empathetically around what's going to express that archetype, and look at the details of, if I want my character to be shy, maybe not have a sentence with 50 words in it. Maybe cut that to two words. If I want my character to be the life of the party and super exciting, then when my character enters a room, there needs to be an entrance. The character needs to pronounce something. The character needs to declare their arrival.
Like my wife and I joke all the time, there's this old Disney cartoon TARZAN, and there's a gorilla character that's played by Rosie O'Donnell and my favorite scene of an extrovert arriving into a scene that I think of whenever I write an extroverted character coming into a scene, there's a scene where Rosie O'Donnell's gorilla jumps out of the bushes and says: " The fun has arrived!" Whenever I want to write an extroverted character coming into the scene, I think about that moment. How is the fun arriving into the room?
[00:44:37] But that's where it starts to get more detailed with your character. The problem is until you get the general down, until you know who you're writing and can empathize with who you're writing, those kinds of details can become muddy and you can get lost in them. So you've got to know who the character is and what the voice is you're going for, and then you can get into that kind of detailed work. But until you know what you're doing with your character, until you know the journey they're going on, that detailed work will just feel like a fog.
[00:45:06] Matty: Well, Jeff, this has been so helpful and so insightful. I appreciate you spending the time to talk with us about it. Please let people know where they can go online to find out more about you and your work.
[00:45:17] Jeff: Oh, absolutely. So you can go to dialoguedoctor.com and you can see everything we do there. And the podcast is there. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, the front page, you'll find a link to the podcast. All the podcasts are there. If you just want to see what I do with individual authors, or if you want to get an appointment, you can book an appointment right on the site. I have a good time talking to people about this. It's a lot of fun. I think what's most important to me when we're doing this work is I love writers and I love storytellers. We all have these amazing stories to tell, and I see my role as just helping a writer get what's in their head onto the page. My goal isn't to write the story or give you a certain prescription to write dialogue in this way. I don't really have a dog in any fight. My only goal is to help you find the story you want to tell, the story that's in your heart and in your gut and get that story out onto the page so that it can be shared with readers. Because I like to see people succeed and I want to see writers, have that joy of readers connecting with their work because it is an amazing thing when it happens.
[00:46:22] If you go to my website, I have a place where you can sign up for a newsletter and you get a free book, and what I'm doing with that newsletter is once or twice a month, I'm sending out resources that I'm thinking about that are challenging me in dialogue.
[00:46:36] So last week, for example, there was a really great article by a Harvard professor named Alison Wood Brooks, who was talking about the role of follow-on questions and conversation and how to ask good follow-on questions and bad follow-on questions. And I was reading it and I was like, man, this is great because if I want my readers to feel a character is charming, one of the ways this Harvard professor, whose research is fantastic, was saying, one of the things that makes someone charming is they ask appropriate follow-on questions.
[00:47:06] Matty: Sounds like a good resource for podcasters.
[00:47:09] Jeff: Yeah, that's correct. Oh, but it makes us feel like when somebody asks a good follow-on question, it makes us feel like they care. So if we want to communicate to our reader, that our character cares, we need to give our character the ability to ask people some follow-on questions. So all that to say, that's the kind of thing I send out in the newsletter, just finding that kind of stuff and kicking it out to people. And I'll send you nuggets every once in a while about how to think about your dialogue, how to work your dialogue a little bit more stuff like that.
[00:47:35] Matty: That's great. Well, thank you so much, Jeff. This has been wonderful.
[00:47:38] Jeff: Matty. Thanks for having me. This has been so much fun.
[00:02:54] And so J. was like, why don't you just bring that to the writing world? And so I did, I started just kind of experimenting with it back in March of 2020. And so I just called some writer friends that I knew, and I was like, Hey, send me something, let me see if I can help. And they loved it.
[00:03:11] So I did about 20 people just for free, trying to figure out exactly how I can most help writers. I launched officially in August and what I do now is, writers will send me anywhere from 500 to 3000 words. If there's dialogue in them, that's helpful. And, we break them down a little piece at a time and talk about what they're hoping to get out of the piece and what they want these characters to sound like and who they want these characters to be and how they're communicating that well and how they can communicate that better. That session is really about giving a writer skills that they can use through their whole book, and giving a writer a great launch of a character.
[00:03:49] So they have a strong character voice. So they know as they finish their book, they know what that character voice sounds like. Or if they're editing their book, they know what they're looking for when they edit, all that kind of stuff. So that's what I do. And then, because I recognize not everybody can pay for a session -- I've been the poor struggling author who can't afford the service but really needs it -- so I just started putting some of the sessions up on a podcast. So if you can't get a session or you don't have a piece you're working on but you still want to learn about dialogue, you can go over to The Dialogue Doctor Podcast and we're breaking down people's work there, which is fun.
[00:04:23] Matty: I also just listened to an episode where you were talking about one of the X FILES episodes, “Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose.” It was great fun. Not only did I think you had some really insightful comments about the dialogue in one of the scenes from that, but I was so intrigued that I went back and watched it again.
[00:04:43] Jeff: That's great. Yeah. I'm an obsessive student. I'm always learning. And I think one of the best ways to learn dialogue is to look at masterworks. Let me define master works. When I say master works, I don't mean things that have won awards necessarily -- they might have -- or things that are considered classics of all times of literature, although those are good too. I mean, what do people love? What characters do they fall in love with, what voices are they quoting all the time? And we did X FILES because it's one of those series that people just obsessed over and loved. Scully and Mulder are iconic characters with iconic voices that people now try to represent in their own work.
[00:05:29] And so if we can go back to those master works, these things that people just fell in love with, and look at them and ask what was it about these characters and their voices that enchanted viewers so deeply, and how can we take those lessons and put them into our own work. That's why we go back and look at masterworks every once in a while.
[00:05:49] I think we have an episode coming up soon where we talk about WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, which is another one of those just like fantastic movies that people quote all the time. They fall in love with the characters and it's comes to be emblematic of the romantic comedy genre. So what can we learn by watching that movie about how we write dialogue in our pieces is the point of grabbing those masterworks and digging through them?
[00:06:14] Matty: The whole master works concept is interesting because for things like plot structure, you can go back to Greek mythology, but dialogue is quite different. And you wouldn't want to look at Dickens for tips about dialogue. And even when you were talking about the X FILES, I guess that was from the eighties, maybe ...?
[00:06:37] Jeff: It's actually mid-nineties. The X FILES is a nineties show.
[00:06:40] Matty: Okay. So even there, you were talking about some dialogue considerations that were a little dated. And so dialogue is very interesting because you have to choose masterworks that were good at the skill of dialogue, but also then assess whether they're appropriate for today's work.
[00:07:00] Jeff: Yeah. I think the heart of dialogue, the heart of writing dialogue, that really engages readers is creating characters that the reader can empathize with. So writing dialogue is an exercise in empathy. You're trying to create a character the reader can empathize with, and you are as you write need to be empathizing with the character as well. So even masterworks like Dickens, the language may not help us and the pacing and how Dickens is constructing sentences may not help us, but what Dickens is doing to lead his readers to empathize with his characters.
[00:07:39] You know, Dickens often writes children, and there's no more vulnerable character than a child, right? And putting a child, like he does with OLIVER TWIST, putting a child in a dangerous circumstance brings immediate empathy from the reader. And so learning those kinds of tricks from those masterworks, if I'm creating this character and I want the reader to be 100% bought into my character's journey, how am I connecting that character to that reader with that character's voice? So writing children, putting children in dangerous places, making the thieves in Oliver Twist children, those kinds of considerations, giving the children that are thieves more adult voices because they're living a more adult life, those are all the kinds of things that we can learn from even past works.
[00:08:29] So all that to say, what you're saying is 100% true that we have to keep in consideration the time period we're writing in and how that dialogue is going to last over time. At the same time, I don't ever want anybody to throw away old dialogue because it sounds old, because there's still so much we can learn from that, from that writer and what's happening with the choices that writer is making with their characters in order to engage the reader deeply.
[00:08:55] Matty: Let's use that as a segue into one of the topics we wanted to talk about today, which was creating a vulnerable hero voice. Can you talk about that a little?
[00:09:03] Jeff: Yeah, I would love to. You and I were discussing what we'd talk about on the podcast, and this is something that I haven't had an opportunity to talk anywhere about yet, so I'm pumped about doing that.
[00:09:12] So let's first kind of define hero and where we mean. We've got to get some terms out of the way before we just jump in, because I don't want people just to naturally assume that when we say vulnerable hero voice, they're like, Oh, I don't write superheroes, and they turn it off. So what we're talking about here, we're just talking about your protagonist, whatever character is going on a journey. And there is the plot structure of the hero's journey, but just the idea that your protagonist is going to start your piece, your short story or your novel, one way, go through a transformation, and end your story or novel another way. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about the protagonist that's changing in the story, when we talk about the hero.
[00:09:53] When we talk about the antagonist, we're talking about the character that is rubbing against that hero, causing barriers that the hero has to overcome. So sometimes the antagonist is like a pure villain, intentionally causing these barriers. Sometimes the antagonist is going to be more like society or culture causing these barriers that the hero has to fight through. So writing a vulnerable hero, creating a hero voice that really resonates with people.
[00:10:20] So there's lots of different types of heroes. I kind of go with the six archetype model that I like, which is there's the everyday man. I think of Frodo in LORD OF THE RINGS as the everyday man, he's just a normal Hobbit that's wandering around the Shire and then he's sent on this big journey.
[00:10:39] There's the more classical hero, someone special that maybe has to discover something special about themselves. So we're talking about Harry Potter, that kid that doesn't know he's prophesied to take over magic but is going to discover that along this hero's journey. There's the epic hero, that is the Superman-type character, that's more classic literature, but that's more like the superhero-type genre now, where the hero is special and knows he's special and royal and powerful and has all this stuff. There's the tragic hero that has some kind of fatal flaw, where everything around him is going bad. I've talked about this on my podcast, but I just read A MAN CALLED OVE, an amazing classic hero. In that book of an old man who has suicidal ideations, who's struggling with those suicidal ideations, has this deep, fatal flaw that he just doesn't want to live anymore. So, you know, fantastic tragic hero. And then we've got the Byronesque hero that is deeply internal and doesn't say much externally. He has a problem relating to the world and has a deep inner life. And that's, I think of Mr. Darcy in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE when I say that.
[00:11:48] So I line up all those archetypes to say the first step of building a character voice for your protagonist is deciding who your protagonist is. And figuring it because who your protagonist is, is going to shape their voice. For example, if you're going with an everyman protagonist where the protagonist is just a normal person that's thrust into extraordinary circumstances, you have to decide what does a normal person sound like and how is this normal person going to talk? What's the normal level of education for this person? Like in "normal," are they in a world of PhDs? So this is a normal PhD, right? Or are they a mechanic? Because those two voices have been encultured differently. They're going to sound different, right? What is normal in your world?
[00:12:36] If you're going with a more tragic hero, what's tragic about them? So that tragic aspect of them needs to play out in their voice. Are they like Romeo, who's a tragic romantic. Then their voice needs to be constantly pursuing that romance. Are they more like the man called Ove, who is fatalistic? Then everything needs to be down and sour.
[00:13:02] So considering what your hero is, and then lining your hero's voice up to communicate to the reader, this is what I'm going for. So Frodo in LORD OF THE RINGS for everyman has a very simple voice. He's not given complex sentences. He rarely sings on his own. Even though Tolkien has everybody's singing, Frodo is rarely singing on his own. There's not a lot of poetry coming out of Frodo, right? He's just a simple guy that's walking along and his voice and his tone shows that simplicity.
[00:13:31] Whereas like Harry, his voice always has a little bit of an edge to it. From the moment that we meet Harry Potter in this story, he's got this kind of a defiant tone in his voice, right? Like he lives under the stairs, but he's not tragic and sad about it. Even before he knows who he is, he's pushing back with his voice. He's looking for moments of escape to get away from the people he's living with. And so we start to feel who the character is and what the journey is we're going to come on, right from the start of their voice.
[00:14:04] So the key is to figure out the archetype that you're writing toward, or who your hero is and how your hero fits into society around them. And then start building the voice around that decision you're making to communicate to the reader what's going on. And I always like to talk about how you build from the beginning and also how you edit.
[00:14:27] Because a lot of time, we just start writing. And I'm actually a huge proponent of that. I don't actually plan out my hero before I write them. I try to write like 5,000 words. And then after I've written 5,000 words, I back it up and I go okay, what am I doing? What's coming? What's coming out of me?
[00:14:44] So if you've already written and now you're editing, take a second and read your hero's first big conversation. And take a look at your hero's journey and where you're taking your hero and how they're changing. And just go ahead and ask, Who is this? Is this Superman? Is this the invincible hero who's super strong voice needs to reflect that? They need to be commanding. They need to understand their own strength and be measuring it in the conversation, if you want them to be relatable, which we can get into quirks in a minute, but you need to be representing that to the people.
[00:15:17] If it's Mr. Darcy, he needs to not talk much, but be frustrated with the fact that he has things to communicate and doesn't know how. To represent that there is an inner life going on, but he just can't get it out. So maybe there's a lot of storming off. Maybe there's a lot of mean quips that he's saying that puts everyone off around him. And then an internal frustration -- frustrated that the conversation has shut down.
[00:15:43] All that to say, figure out who your hero is and what archetype they are or how they're defined in the story and how they're transforming, and then start editing or building your voice around that concept of the hero.
[00:15:56] Matty: When you were talking about having 5,000 words, are you suggesting that would only be dialogue or just 5,000 words of the story in some format?
[00:16:03] Jeff: I just start writing the story. Now I will say I cheat in that if I go three paragraphs without writing dialogue, I stop writing and figure out how to put dialogue in. I don't go more than three or four paragraphs without dialogue. I've actually gone through some best sellers, like HARRY POTTER, and tested that theory. How many paragraphs do they go? It's rarely over five, that they go over five paragraphs without someone starting to talk.
[00:16:33] And I think the reason that is, I think good authors naturally feel that because they feel that the reader connects with their character, not through the actions their characters do, but through the words their characters say. It's how we connect with people, right? Especially in today's day and age where right now we're all listening to this podcast, right? So we're literally connecting to each other through our voices and I think it's just part of human nature. We talk to each other. And so if you go too long in your story without your characters talking, you start to lose engagement. And so my rule of thumb is like two to three paragraphs are great, five paragraphs sometimes, but if nobody's spoken in five paragraphs, then it's time to stop and go back and edit.
[00:17:19] So all that to say, I write 5,000 words, but it always has a lot of dialogue in it because I force dialogue into this story.
[00:17:25] Matty: Did you ever read or do an assessment of Andy Weir's THE MARTIAN?
[00:17:30] Jeff: I haven't, I've never read Andy Weir's THE MARTIAN.
[00:17:33] Matty: You'll have to read it and then come back and talk about how they get around ... how he does or doesn't get around the fact that for a lot of the time, there's just a guy there who has no one to talk to.
[00:17:43] Jeff: And that's so hard, right? Writing a story where the whole story is the character's inner thoughts is difficult. Again, I haven't read THE MARTIAN and so I have no idea what he does. I find that a lot of those, though, work well if you write in first person, where the person is explaining their journey because it comes off as if the person's talking to the reader. So if you're going to have a book where the character's by themselves a lot, or the character's a serious loner, writing in first person allows you to have that conversation with the reader that feels like dialogue, and it can be achieved.
[00:18:19] Matty: The other piece of work that popped into my mind was ALIEN, at the point at which everybody's dead except Ripley. And I'd be curious to go back and see how far into the movie that happens and what they do for dialogue after that point.
[00:18:39] Jeff: Yeah. So again, I haven't analyzed ALIEN, but I can tell you that you'll be surprised when you watch action movies, horror, thrillers, we think in our head that the dialogue shuts down. But you're going to find that there's actually a lot of sound happening from those characters. So there's a lot of talking in that empty space, a lot of yelling, a lot of guttural cries. I always recommend to writers, put that in. Put it into your book because those yells and calling people's names, running around scared, yelling at the darkness, that kind of stuff really connects your reader to the fear your character's experiencing.
[00:19:20] So again, I haven't watched ALIEN, but my bet is if you watch it, you're going to be surprised at how much sound she's actually making, even though she's the only person in the movie, because it is that verbal connection.
[00:19:30] Matty: Yeah. And there's also a certain amount of, I don't think she's actually having conversations with the computer, but the computer is talking, you know, "10 minutes to go," or whatever. And then there's a cat, so occasionally she says something to the cat.
[00:19:43] Jeff: Yup. And so going back to our conversation about heroes and archetypes, the cat's a great illustration, even though I haven't seen ALIEN, we could play off of that. As you build your hero, you want to put characters around them that allow them to express who they are in an appropriate way. So if you have a character that is by themselves, give them something to talk to. If it's a cat, if it's a computer, if they talk to their gun, if they talk to their sword, give them something to talk to. Give them an imaginary friend, give them a ghost, something to relate to.
[00:20:22] Matty: Soccer ball.
[00:20:24] Jeff: A soccer ball, right? Yeah, like in CASTAWAY. Give them something to have a conversation with. Because it's through that conversation that your readers are going to connect to your character. So you've got to plug them into something. And that goes to the conversation of, when we're looking at our character's voice, once we have the archetype down, we have to start building the world around our character because we want to give our character moments to express who they are.
[00:20:48] And so these things that you put around your character allow you to put your character in a situation where they can express themselves. So if you're taking your character on a hero's journey, starting at one place, going through a transformation, and coming out different, we want to put things around your character that allow them to express who they are at the beginning, how they're changing throughout, and where they're coming out different. And usually the way that works is, you want to work on contrast and then complementing So a lot of heroes have a cast of companions on their journey.
[00:21:25] So going back to Frodo, he's got Sam, right? They are connected in that they're both everyday men. But what Frodo is trying to overcome in his journey is this hopelessness and pessimism that he's actually going to be able to accomplish this giant task that's been put on the everyday man. Especially as we go through the transformation of Frodo and we get to the end of THE LORD OF THE RINGS series, he starts to experience this deep, deep hopelessness.
[00:21:57] So what Tolkien did was brilliant was he gave him a character that is unexplainably optimistic. Sam will not quit and he won't let Frodo quit. But the beauty of that is they complement each other in that they're both the everyday man. They both have the everyday man voice, but they contrast each other. And then Sam is going to challenge Frodo to encounter the hopelessness that he's struggling with in his voice. So we get to have these moments where they're talking to each other and Sam's declaring things like, I'm not giving up on you and you're not giving up either. Expressing the hero's journey out loud by having this cast of characters around them.
[00:22:38] Or Harry Potter has Hermione and Ron. Now they're all similar in that they are all in some ways inexplicably driven to solve the mystery of what's happening in their world. The other kids around them are appropriately scared of participating. But Harry has these two companions who are willing to dive into this adventure with him. So they share that thing, but then they complement Harry in that Ron is entertaining and fun-loving and has some humor in his voice. Whereas Harry has very little humor in his voice. He's very serious all the time, as he explores who he is. And he's very inner, all the time he explores who he is. And Hermione is very much intellectual.
[00:23:25] So you bring these companions around Harry that allow Harry to contrast with them and express his opinion and his thoughts on what's going on and his desire to be a lone wolf. And as Harry goes through this transformation of who he is, understanding what it means to be good or evil and understanding his history and coming to terms with his own personhood, you get these two companions that force him into conversation to do that.
[00:23:52] Or another example, if you're writing a Superman-type character or if we're going for the epic archetype where the hero is royal and invincible and super strong, and is a true hero, then you need to put companions around him that are going to get into trouble and that are going to force him to consider what it means to be wounded and hurt. So in the Superman illustration, we've got Jimmy and Lois who are always around him. The joke when I was a kid was that Jimmy's always tied up in the corner, newer versions of that character aren't that way.
[00:24:25] But in the old comic books, Jimmy was always like in a corner with a gag on. So you want to put characters around your epic hero that are going to push your epic hero to consider humanity and consider what it means to be vulnerable and weak and have to deal with that kind of conversation.
[00:24:40] So all that to say, as you're thinking about your hero and let's say you've written 20,000 words and you've got three characters and your plot's stalled. Nothing's transforming. We're having a good time. We're running around, but nothing's happening here. Look at your character and decide, is this an antihero I'm writing, is this a hero that feels like a villain that's really not, like a Tyler Durden from FIGHT CLUB, or is this an everyday man in here? Who is this guy or woman?
[00:25:13] And then as you start to transform your character, ask yourself what you're doing with your side characters. How are your side characters forcing your hero to have conversations about the journey your hero's on, by contrasting their voices from each other, by making them different enough to push your hero to have to explain what's happening or to be challenged by them.
[00:25:34] And it can even happen in small ways. For example, if your hero's optimistic and super happy and sees the world through rosy colored glasses and you have a scene where you're putting your hero in a coffee shop, give them an interaction with a cynical and mean barista to contrast that. Oh, they're rosy colored glasses and open and optimistic, I want to show that, I want to demonstrate that to the reader right now. So I'm going to give them a barista who's cynical, angry, and doesn't want to be bothered. And now we've got a great setup for a fun interaction between your character who can say things like, Isn't it a great day? and your barista can say, No. And all of a sudden, we have a conversation that you can flow from, that can illustrate to the reader this is who my character is, and this is what's happening.
[00:26:25] So it can feel like we've been taught for so long that dialogue has to move the plot along, that that's the goal of dialogue. And if your dialogue isn't moving the plot along, cut, cut, cut. I hate that advice, right? Like on some ends, that advice is really great because you do want your dialogue to serve a purpose, but the plot isn't the only thing moving, right? Your character is transforming as well. So sometimes your dialogue needs to be used to move your character forward and move your character's voice forward.
[00:26:54] It's not just a plot device, right? It's telling the reader who your character is and how they're interacting with the world. So if you can arrange the characters around them to build that in and going back to quirks, if you have no characters, give them a cat. If you want to write a tragic hero, like A MAN CALLED OVE, where the hero is dark and brooding and experiencing suicidal ideations, and you can't figure out how to translate that, give your character something they're doing routinely just to openly express it. Like in A MAN CALLED OVE, there's multiple suicide attempts -- warning for anybody that wants to read that book, it's a little dark in the beginning -- but that communicates in a very strong way, right up front. Or throughout the book, he talks to his wife who is dead. He'll be alone in his apartment and he starts having a conversation with his wife who's dead. Often it's just a sentence or two expressing the fact that he doesn't want to make his sandwich today.
[00:27:52] So giving him that quirk of talking to a dead wife communicates right up front that this is a tragic and sad character. He's talking to someone who isn't there. We immediately start to empathize and to feel for that person what's going on.
[00:28:08] Or let's go to the Mr. Darcy character. If you have this character who's internal and who has this deep inner life but very little vocal, pair them with an Elizabeth Bennett, because Elizabeth is vocal and aggressive with her opinions and not going to hold back and is a strong woman in a time that wants to push and hold her down. And it's fighting against that culture. So the pairing of those two characters allows us to see the contrast between the two of them and forces the reader to start to ask, What's going on, what's happening here? Why does he never talk and she talks all the time. Why does he never actually say the right thing? Why is he always saying the wrong thing? Why is she always frustrated by it? What's happening with this tension? That's building this world that we can now engage in.
[00:28:56] So if we can think about our characters and their quirks and how that's coming out of their voice, and then start to build them to complement and contrast each other, then we can start to create this really rich world that our reader can engage in and start to see that hero's journey play through our character's voice as they transform.
[00:29:15] Matty: How about the villain? We've talked a little bit about the cast of characters that's surrounding the hero. How do you form the villain's voice so that it works and it's complementary with the hero's voice?
[00:29:26] Jeff: That's perfect. So I feel the best villains are very close to who the character is, because the villain and the character needed to stand on the same plane.
[00:29:38] So let's go to the easiest villain, the epic villain. Beowulf needs a Grendel. The hero that can destroy any monster needs the unkillable monster. Superman needs a Lex Luthor, right? Elizabeth Bennett needs a society that is completely designed to put her into a specific box. She needs that villain to come around her and force her down.
[00:30:06] So when we think about our villain, we always want to make sure they match our hero or are greater than our hero in power in some way. It's important that they're equally footed because otherwise your hero's going to feel like they're just beating up on somebody and nobody wants to read that.
[00:30:22] They need to match in power, which means when you're thinking about their characterization and their voice, you want them to line up. You want Luthor and Superman to have matching arrogance in some ways. You want them both to think they're undefeatable in different ways, but you want them both to think that they are super strong.
[00:30:45] If we go back to the Harry Potter illustration, one of the things Rowling did with her villain in Voldemort and Harry is she united them in a lot of ways and combined them in a lot ways so that Harry has this kind of sinister side and it's always taking over. He has a little bit of Voldemort's voice in him, or with him and Malfoy, who's his more immediate villain, they both have a disdain for authority, so they both think they're right. Even when all the headmasters are telling them to go back to their room, Harry's not going to obey, neither is Malfoy. The villain needs to complement and match the character.
[00:31:33] But then the villain needs to push barriers at the character's transformation and call the character to make a choice to go another way. So going back to Malfoy and Harry, Malfoy is constantly calling Harry to be the villain of the story and constantly telling Harry he's not who he thinks is, and that's what we want. We want our villain actively expressing that the hero's journey is going to fail, that whoever it is you think it is, whatever is you think you're doing, that's not going to work.
[00:32:06] Or in A MAN CALLED OVE, the villain is personified by the bureaucratic director of the community. And he's constantly telling Ove that Ove is going to lose. Every time Ove talks to him, Ove is going to lose. Ove is a nuisance. Ove is a pain in the butt. This is the way society works and Ove just needs to get in line.
[00:32:31] So we have this villain expressing the hero's journey actively and where it's going, but in a nuanced and beautiful way. And if the villain's something like culture, you may think culture can't express anything, but that's not true because the side characters all around your hero should be saying to the hero what culture expects, what society expects, so the hero can push against that.
[00:32:58] Matty: Yeah. That sounds like PRIDE AND PREJUDICE in the sense that there are all sorts of characters who are just representing the societal expectations.
[00:33:05] Jeff: One hundred percent -- like the minister in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE just lives out the societal expectations. This is constantly not even directly, but constantly just expressing, This is what society expects. This is what a lady is. This is how you're supposed to behave with people above your social class and social standing. Just pushing down on the character all the time.
[00:33:25] And so when you look at the full cast, let's put it all together. You've got your hero. Do you know who you want your hero to be and the transformation they want to undergo. If you're going the everyday man route, your hero has some monstrous tasks that's impossible for an everyday man to accomplish. If you're going the more classic hero, your hero has to come to terms with this power that's within them, that they don't understand. If you're going the antihero route, your hero has something that actually feels a little villainous that they want to accomplish, but that in the end is going to turn out okay. That's the more like antihero matter. So we know who our hero is and we're starting to build our hero's voice to match that hero's journey.
[00:34:05] Then we're going to put this cast of characters around our hero to allow our hero to talk about the journey they're going on. The characters are going to complement our hero in mission, complement our hero in desire, so that they are willing to go on the journey with our hero. But at the same time, they're going to contrast our hero, to rub against our hero just a little bit, so our hero has to express what's going on so that they challenge our hero in a positive way. That's the companions and the quirks that you're putting around your hero. And then we want a villain that is pushing back on the hero's journey and their voice, and saying, you can't, you won't, you don't, you're not allowed. And that villain pushes back on the hero.
[00:34:48] So now we've created this environment where the hero can actually take a journey and find transformation, that the hero's moving to something. Moving from depression to freedom, moving from rags to riches, or moving from riches to rags and coming to terms with that. We have a hero that's going in a direction. We have companions going with them and then we have a villain that's pushing back on them saying, You can't make the transformation you need to make. You're incapable of it. And once we put all of that around our hero, writing the hero's journey becomes a lot of fun because now we have all these fun ways we can play with the reader to do it.
[00:35:30] So the way that all of this is expressed is through the voice and the actions. If your plot is the skeleton of your story, your dialogue are the muscles. Your dialogue is what's moving that plot forward.
[00:35:46] I had a weird revelation about this six years ago when I first started writing. I was writing my first fiction book, it's called MENKEN AND THE MONSTERS, and I wanted an antihero. So my lead character is a jerk. He's a lone wolf. He doesn't want to be around anybody. He's a reporter and he believes everybody around him is wrong. And I wrote the book and I put characters around him that kind of push him along. And he's discovering that the world isn't what he thinks it is. And I finished it and I passed it out to readers, and I was like, Check it out! I wrote my first urban fantasy! I love it -- it's great! They read it and so many of them came back to me and said, I hate your main character. He's the worst. He's awful. I don't like him.
[00:36:35] And it took me a couple years to figure out that what I had failed to do was put a companion next to him who makes him likable and who agrees with him in the journey, and goes on the journey with him, but pushes back on him and his need to be lonely and his need to be isolationist and his idea that he has everything right. I failed to give him an appropriate companion. And so when people read the book, they get frustrated with him and they don't want to read him anymore because he's such a jerk and there's no companion there telling them No, this is okay. This guy's going to be all right.
[00:37:15] Matty: Is there an example that would be well known in popular culture of that scenario, where the protagonist is a jerk, but it's softened by the voice of another character?
[00:37:23] Jeff: Well, we've already talked about Tyler Durden in FIGHT CLUB. Tyler Durden is the angry, mean, reckless, doing terrible things to people's personality in the book. But there's another side to Tyler who is hesitant and struggling and searching for meaning in life. And it's through his eyes that we come to like Tyler as somebody we want to go on a journey with, and the alternate personality tells us Tyler has value. Tyler's worth seeing.
[00:38:01] And then all of these side characters start to come around him and form this kind of cult around him. And so we see in the side characters like, Oh no, even though he seems to be terrible, he's really doing good for people. And so that is a way to take an antihero and communicate to your reader, no, no, no. It's not what you think. It's okay. It's okay to be around him.
[00:38:25] In some ways, Han Solo's this way, in the STAR WARS movies. You have an antihero who's kind of a jerk and selfish and outside of his giant dog, Chewy, wants to be left alone. But he's embraced by Luke, and Luke we like, because Luke is the hero on the journey. And so Luke grabs this antihero and brings him along, and in partnership with Luke, Han is okay.
[00:38:51] Matty: It sounds also like Humphrey Bogart. Humphrey Bogart movies sometimes have that kind of flavor to it.
[00:38:57] Jeff: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. When we're thinking about our companion casts, we need to make sure we have characters that are telling our reader how we want them to feel about the character, not blatantly being like, Hey, you should like this person, but more like, We like this guy or We like this woman. You should like them too. Like in a more relatable way. So when I wrote my second series, I had an internal Byronesque character who has deep inner life but very little exterior life. And I wrote my first 5,000 words, which was a short story about her in a more trying to solve a mystery. And I realized quickly if I don't put somebody with her, this is going to be a problem, because we're going to spend the whole book with her thinking about things and looking at things and her inner life isn't going to come out. And so the next 5,000 words, I introduced her to a friend. That friend is extroverted and excited to be around her and appreciates what she brings to the table.
[00:40:06] So now I have somebody who can communicate to the reader, like, No, this is fun. We're having a good time. We're enjoying this. And we should like Mo. Mo is great and we should be on a journey with Mo.
[00:40:18] So adding those complementary characters around to get your more difficult protagonists to be loved can communicate to the reader, this is somebody you should embrace.
[00:40:30] Matty: It sounds like THE ODD COUPLE too. That Oscar and Felix on their own each would be pretty unsympathetic, but together they're great.
[00:40:38] Jeff: Together they're great. And part of it is because they are together, and so it becomes the relationship between them that you really like.
[00:40:46] This can sound like a lot. It can be overwhelming to an author because I know I've been there. It's like, Okay, I've got my plot and SAVE THE CAT beats. Oh my gosh. THREE STORY thing, and now you're telling me I have to design these intense characters too?
[00:40:59] And the thing is, you can feel it. Like it doesn't need to be this complicated. It gets this complicated when you're trying to solve a problem, but when you're first writing, feel it out, write your character, make sure they're talking. And if they're not talking, give them someone to talk to. And when you give them someone to talk to, make that person different than they are.
[00:41:23] And that's a great place to start, right? A great novel is going to have all that stuff in it, but you don't have to start there. So don't be overwhelmed. Just start writing, get your character's voice down and then put some people around them that are different.
[00:41:38] And if you can get that complement / contrast, then you can start being intentional with that. After you've written your first couple chapters, start to ask, Okay, where's this voice going? What's it going to be at the end of the book? Who is Harry at the end of this series? How is he different than the beginning? Who is Elizabeth Bennett at the end of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE? How is she different than the beginning? Who is Mr. Darcy and how is he changing?
[00:42:02] So once you start to get the voice down and understand who they are, what kind of hero they are, then you can start thinking about how you're going to transform them and change them and what the flaw is or what the barrier is that they need to overcome to actually go on this journey.
[00:42:15] So don't be overwhelmed. You just need to get into it and do it, but do be thinking, How am I using this dialogue to communicate what I want to communicate about my hero?
[00:42:25] Matty: I think that's, that's great advice and I love that you're giving people a little entree so that they don't just say, Oh, it's too much. And I'd love to have you back for part two at some point down the road to talk about, okay, now you've applied those roles and now we're in the refining stage and to find out what kind of tips you might have for that stage as well.
[00:42:45] Jeff: The refining is fun. How does character sounds? Do they use a lot of words or little words? Did they use complicated words or small words?
[00:42:52] Are they funny? Are they asking questions all the time? And you start to hone that individual character voice to actually represent the hero you want? So if you want the epic hero, you need to have confidence in their voice. Declaratory statements, no questions, saying how things are, speaking the world into existence. Creating that epic feel.
[00:43:13] If you want the everyman, there should be a lot of expressing uncertainty. A lot of like expressions of nervousness about where to go, a lot of someone else making a declaration of what needs to be done and then letting your character say, I don't know, I don't know. A lot of expression of, I don't know how I feel about that. I don't know what that means. So once you have the archetype down, then start to build the voice empathetically around what's going to express that archetype, and look at the details of, if I want my character to be shy, maybe not have a sentence with 50 words in it. Maybe cut that to two words. If I want my character to be the life of the party and super exciting, then when my character enters a room, there needs to be an entrance. The character needs to pronounce something. The character needs to declare their arrival.
Like my wife and I joke all the time, there's this old Disney cartoon TARZAN, and there's a gorilla character that's played by Rosie O'Donnell and my favorite scene of an extrovert arriving into a scene that I think of whenever I write an extroverted character coming into a scene, there's a scene where Rosie O'Donnell's gorilla jumps out of the bushes and says: " The fun has arrived!" Whenever I want to write an extroverted character coming into the scene, I think about that moment. How is the fun arriving into the room?
[00:44:37] But that's where it starts to get more detailed with your character. The problem is until you get the general down, until you know who you're writing and can empathize with who you're writing, those kinds of details can become muddy and you can get lost in them. So you've got to know who the character is and what the voice is you're going for, and then you can get into that kind of detailed work. But until you know what you're doing with your character, until you know the journey they're going on, that detailed work will just feel like a fog.
[00:45:06] Matty: Well, Jeff, this has been so helpful and so insightful. I appreciate you spending the time to talk with us about it. Please let people know where they can go online to find out more about you and your work.
[00:45:17] Jeff: Oh, absolutely. So you can go to dialoguedoctor.com and you can see everything we do there. And the podcast is there. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, the front page, you'll find a link to the podcast. All the podcasts are there. If you just want to see what I do with individual authors, or if you want to get an appointment, you can book an appointment right on the site. I have a good time talking to people about this. It's a lot of fun. I think what's most important to me when we're doing this work is I love writers and I love storytellers. We all have these amazing stories to tell, and I see my role as just helping a writer get what's in their head onto the page. My goal isn't to write the story or give you a certain prescription to write dialogue in this way. I don't really have a dog in any fight. My only goal is to help you find the story you want to tell, the story that's in your heart and in your gut and get that story out onto the page so that it can be shared with readers. Because I like to see people succeed and I want to see writers, have that joy of readers connecting with their work because it is an amazing thing when it happens.
[00:46:22] If you go to my website, I have a place where you can sign up for a newsletter and you get a free book, and what I'm doing with that newsletter is once or twice a month, I'm sending out resources that I'm thinking about that are challenging me in dialogue.
[00:46:36] So last week, for example, there was a really great article by a Harvard professor named Alison Wood Brooks, who was talking about the role of follow-on questions and conversation and how to ask good follow-on questions and bad follow-on questions. And I was reading it and I was like, man, this is great because if I want my readers to feel a character is charming, one of the ways this Harvard professor, whose research is fantastic, was saying, one of the things that makes someone charming is they ask appropriate follow-on questions.
[00:47:06] Matty: Sounds like a good resource for podcasters.
[00:47:09] Jeff: Yeah, that's correct. Oh, but it makes us feel like when somebody asks a good follow-on question, it makes us feel like they care. So if we want to communicate to our reader, that our character cares, we need to give our character the ability to ask people some follow-on questions. So all that to say, that's the kind of thing I send out in the newsletter, just finding that kind of stuff and kicking it out to people. And I'll send you nuggets every once in a while about how to think about your dialogue, how to work your dialogue a little bit more stuff like that.
[00:47:35] Matty: That's great. Well, thank you so much, Jeff. This has been wonderful.
[00:47:38] Jeff: Matty. Thanks for having me. This has been so much fun.
Links
"Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," X Files
"The Surprising Power of Questions" by Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John, Harvard Business Review
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