Exchange of Realities

It’s pretty much a narrative imperative; at some point you’re going to have multiple characters in one room, all having a conversation. The difficulty at this point is, of course, making it as clear as possible when different people are talking. How do you make sure they don’t all blend together?

The first trick, and the most basic, is one that people running games can use, but writers can’t: Taking advantage of further layers of presentation. For instance, in live games, the easiest way to differentiate NPCs is to use different voices for them, changing up pitch and accent between characters. In text-based games, we can’t do that, but we can color-code our characters’ speech and actions. (I even have a completely reliable universal font-coding system for Exalted.)

As noted before, both of these tricks are impossible in novel format, and even using them doesn’t do much for helping your players remember who’s who. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to differentiate between characters within the narrative.

To cement the images of different people in the minds of your audience, start with physical descriptions. This isn’t just hair and eye color; that gets boring very, very quickly, and isn’t very specific to begin with. It’s also height, hairstyle, skin tone, and all sorts of clothing description.

Then they begin to converse, and the challenge begins. Start with body language. Remember our discussion of beats a few days ago? This is where they come into play. One character might tend to fidget, or clasp his hands. Another may hold perfectly still. One might be trying to project a reassuring feeling, while another gives off more aggressive signals, and still another insists on being flirtatious.

But that’s not always easy to maintain, particularly if you have to stay within text limits. Fortunately, you still have one important medium to fall back on: Speech patterns. This can take a number of forms, including preferred sensory imagery, level of vocabulary, formality, favored subject matter, use of slang, or individual speech quirks.

Sensory imagery is perhaps one of the easiest. Our language is full of metaphors that appeal to one or another of the senses. Consider the difference between “Something about this really reeks”, “This doesn’t feel right,” “This looks funny”, and “This sounds a little off.” Same meaning, different sense. Most people tend to favor one or another of these senses, whether they realize it or not. As a result, you can use it as a subtle way to differentiate between characters. Don’t overdo it, though; if you can’t find an image in the appropriate sense, feel free to default to something you know that’s either in another sense or sense-neutral.

Level of vocabulary is also reasonably straightforward. Some people sound like they were raised reading the dictionary for fun. Others tend to prefer short words, and will try to talk around something when they don’t know a word that the more linguistically adept can handle. Still others fall into the above categories, but less smoothly—they might use longer words without quite realizing they don’t mean what they think they do, or blend long and short. These, too, are valid and potentially distinctive speech patterns.

Another possibility is level of formality. It isn’t as pronounced in English as it is in more hierarchical languages such as Japanese, but it can still come across properly. More formal speech will often, but not always, overlap with a larger and more complicated vocabulary. It will tend to avoid slang whenever possible, and sometimes even try to avoid contractions, like can’t or won’t, replacing them with cannot or will not. Ending a sentence with a preposition may be something up with which a particularly formal speaker will not put.

Favored subject matter is a fun one. Different people just react to different topics in different ways. Someone who yawns through a discussion of academics might brighten up when discussing sports; similarly, a fellow who sounds lost when his friends are talking about geomancy might start leading the conversation when the subject matter moves more towards summoning.

Using a more archaic tongue can also work, but don’t do this unless you can do it right. If you can’t spot the problems with a sentence like “Dost thee not realizeth that thou lacketh my respect?”, don’t do it. (For those who are confused: One, if it’s the subject of the sentence, it’s thou, not thee. Thee is for the object of the sentence. Two, realize should not be conjugated there: It’s like saying “He did realized” rather than “He did realize”. Three: Conjugation matters. I lack. Thou lackest. He lacketh. We clear? I’ll rant more on this later, if people want me to.)

Besides, if you want nearly incomprehensible speech that sets a member of a community apart from members of other communities, you’ll have just as much luck using jargon or slang. That is, after all, what those sorts of words are made for. If you can’t make up your own (I’ll go into a riff on that on a later date as well, once I’m done actually reading up on it), then feel free to borrow someone else’s; there are a lot of writers who have a fully developed collection of personal slang vocabulary, and the real world is full of the stuff. Similarly, jargon allows you to set apart an expert in a certain field; a writer can go on for hours about synecdoche and metaphor and allusion, then be left blinking when a molecular biologist starts riffing about PCR and introns and quaternary structures and various things that Microsoft Office’s default spellcheck setting doesn’t necessarily recognize as words. In a more fantasy world, you might have a difference between the gnome’s constant riffs on runic thermodynamics, or the researcher going on about sympathetic principles and cythenic structure, or the diviner descending into a long run of astrological jargon.

Then there are the speech tricks that don’t fit under any of the above. One of these is the catch phrase—that little exclamation or word pattern that such and such a character uses regularly. Be careful of this one, though; if the phrase-user uses that phrase every time he opens his mouth, it just gets old very, very fast. (Believe it!) Another is what happens as the character speaks. If someone has a limited short-term memory, or just talks faster than they think, she might start a long and complicated sentence and then forget what she was trying to say halfway through; after all, she can’t read backwards. Some may sprinkle their dialogue with quotes, whether attributed or not. The big thing to remember is that these are minor quirks, and should not define the character.

Stick with these, and you’ll soon find that it’s a lot easier to tell your characters apart in a crowd.