Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

If you're going to have your characters talking

to one another, it should be for some reason,

not just to have them chattering away.

When people talk, there's usually

quite a lot of padding and verbiage, pauses

and ums and uhs and you know and like,

and ums and uhs and you know and like,

a lot of stuffing in the conversation like that.

And if you put all of that into a book,

it can get either unintentionally comical or very

boring.

So dialogues in books are much, much more selective.

And they're usually trying to find out something

from the other person or they're making some social move.

from the other person or they're making some social move.

They're making some power play of a social nature

or trying to ingratiate themselves,

or they may even be attempting to be seductive.

So how people talk and what they say

in a book is indicative of who they are, of course.

It has to be consistent with who they are.

But it's also telling the reader things

that the reader needs to know, but most particularly,

that the reader needs to know, but most particularly,

what their intention is in talking

to this other character.

What are they trying to achieve?

What is their goal?

And what are they trying to avoid?

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What people say to one another and what

they're thinking while they're saying those things

may be quite different.

What the person listening hears, what they understand

What the person listening hears, what they understand

by what the first person has said,

which can be something like, that person

is trying to be quite rude to me although, they've

put it in a polite way.

I get it that they're being dismissive and condescending

to me.

You can do it like that.

You can hear a veiled threat.

For instance, you can hear some information

For instance, you can hear some information

that the first person wasn't intending to give you.

Maybe they're attempting to be seductive

and the other person just thinks they're an idiot.

All of these can happen.

Pickup lines-- what the person says, what the recipient hears,

those can be two quite different things.

It might be fun sometimes to have

to have your character overhearing two other people.

to have your character overhearing two other people.

So that's another kind of use of dialogue,

an overheard dialogue.

And if you do that, usually the person doing the overhearing

is either learning a secret or hearing something quite

unpleasant about themselves, so that experience people

may have had in wash rooms, say, wash rooms in high school

about overhearing other people discussing you

behind your back.

behind your back.

Because it is true in society in general

that people will say things about you behind your back

that they would not say to your face.

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It's hard to speak about someone's tone of voice

or their voice apart from what's happening to them

and who they are.

So you need to know who they are.

You need to know where they're living,

You need to know where they're living,

what their social level is, what sort of vocabulary

would be available to them, how they talk.

What's their level of speech?

What is their local dialect?

I just watched a film called "Bad Grannies."

I see these on planes.

So they're all talking southern--

southern dialect, and they're putting

in a lot of vernacular expressions

because that's who they are.

because that's who they are.

They're not New York sophisticates, OK?

Shakespeare was criticized by French literary people

of the time because in his plays there

are people who speak in an elevated manner,

namely the aristocrats, usually speak

in blank verse in a rather convoluted way,

and then there's always some comic characters.

And they speak in vulgar vernacular,

And they speak in vulgar vernacular,

so the grave digger in Hamlet, the gatekeeper in Macbeth.

There was obviously an actor or a couple

of actors who specialized in this kind of part.

But the other reason that Shakespeare

mixes these kinds of speech is that he

was playing to an audience that consisted

of everybody, whereas French drama of that era

was court drama.

So they were doing plays based on Greek mythological figures,

So they were doing plays based on Greek mythological figures,

all of whom spoken beautiful Alexandrians.

There weren't any clowns, vulgar people, bad sex jokes, puns

that were really pretty rude.

But Shakespeare put all of that in because his audience

consisted of people who'd only paid a penny

to stand in the pit and other people who were having

a fine time in the better seats and were

from the upper classes.

So he put in something for everyone

So he put in something for everyone

and he always did that in his plays.

And he knew perfectly well what he was doing.

And if you go onto YouTube and find

a thing called "Shakespeare Original Pronunciation,"

you will realize just exactly how many

vulgar puns you have missed.

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Words and phrases come in and out of fashion.

Words and phrases come in and out of fashion.

So again, if you're setting your dialogue in the past,

you should--

you should be accurate to something people would actually

have said then.

This is "Alias Grace."

And the passage that I'm going to read

is the moment when Grace Marks, who

is a convict in the penitentiary,

first meets Dr. Simon Jordan, who

is trying to recover her lost memory in order

is trying to recover her lost memory in order

to prove whether she is a murderer

or whether she is not a murderer.

"He has brought with him an apple.

He smiles his lopsided smile.

What does Apple make you think of, he says.

I beg your pardon, sir, I say.

I do not understand you.

It must be a riddle.

I think of Mary Whitney and the apple

peelings we threw over our shoulders

that night to see who we would marry.

that night to see who we would marry.

But I will not tell him that.

I think you understand well enough, he says."

So how people spoke at that time--

so she says, I beg your pardon, sir,

which you wouldn't say today.

You wouldn't say, I beg your pardon,

unless you were being very formal.

Some people today say, pardon?

But even that seems to be going away a bit.

They're more likely to say, what did you say?

They're more likely to say, what did you say?

Or something like that.

Or, I don't get it.

The conversations and books need to be specific to the time

that you're writing in without being overly researched.

That is, you can't go too much in that direction

or it's going to sound quite artificial and wooden.