On Eavesdropping

So I had the pleasure a couple of years ago to attend a craft talk by Mark Spragg, author of An Unfinished Life among other works, and he described his approach to revision. Once he feels pretty good about a manuscript, he goes back over it several more times, each time focusing specifically on some aspect of writing in particular. One of those aspects is dialogue. His goal, in this procedure, is to make sure that his dialogue is consistent for each character throughout the entire manuscript.

I've been working through that myself. How easy it is to not recognize when you let your character start sounding like yourself rather than like her own person. Or how easy it is to overlook the need to change the character's voice and speech once you really discover who he is. In my novel, my characters are diverse in terms of geography, ethnic or racial heritage, and age, so they certainly should have distinct voices.

If I were to write a conversation between my mother and my son, the characters would obviously speak differently; I know that by listening to them.  And the same should be true if I were to document a dialogue between my west coast friends, my southern friends, and my midwestern friends, or between my various friends of different heritages. But in real life we tend to let many of the sounds and colloquialisms blend together. We stop hearing them and we overlook the different ways that people speak to one another just as we might overlook a few pebbles of cat litter that simply become part of the landscape.

Time and again writers are encouraged to pay more attention to people in the store, at the restaurant, or on the bus. To really listen to what they say and how they say it. To eavesdrop. But I would suggest that isn't simply something that writers should do. I think we should all be alert to how those around us are communicating, because those spoken words, and the unique manner in which they are uttered, are gifts from each individual to the world.