#writing thoughts

~ a writer's discussion ~

I had this thought a couple of days ago, based on a tiktok video I saw. The video asked viewers to drop quotes they enjoyed from their own pieces of writing. It had one comment that shared a pretty long quote that seemed almost...forced into it's quotable-ness.

I specifically wanted to talk about this sort of forcing of quotable sentences/passages in terms of dialogue.

There's often talk of needing a character's dialogue to sound like it comes from them, to make each of their lines unique enough that we know who's talking. While this *can* be good, I find it sometimes feeds into the quote farming behavior.

Not every sentence a character speaks has to be something that they alone would say. Not every sentence needs to have their tag line, a nickname, etc that only they say. It doesn't need to be profound and thought provoking. It doesn't need to pull at our heart strings. It only needs to drive the plot forward.

Real people don't have time to perfect all of their sentences so they sound a certain way--at least, not all the time and not without reason. Neither do your characters.

I thought of this like a cup of coffee. Your character is just the coffee and the cup, a blank slate. Everytime you add something to them/their dialogue, you add a dash of sugar or a pump of cream.

Maybe your character has a habit of using "y'all" instead of "you all" or some other word. That's a spoonful of sugar. But if they use it for every sentence, everytime they speak, your cup of coffee becomes less coffee with sugar and more sugar with coffee.

Same goes for more quotable or profound passages. When they are scattered throughout your text and come naturally, you end up with a balanced cup of coffee with cream and sugar. If you force them into every paragraph, you end up with a cup overflowing with mostly sugar milk.

As always, balance is best. Enough of something to show readers who your character is, without making them a walking cartoon or stereotype.