How do you write verbose characters?

[Peyton Stafford]

In A Trembling Wind, several characters speak at length.

One is an innkeeper who loves attention. He dresses so people will notice him. He speaks at length because he craves the attention he gets as people listen to him. The more he talks, the longer they listen.

Another is a sorcerer, who is secretive by nature, but when he has an audience he tries to prolong it because he, too, craves attention. Any advice on how to write such characters without boring the readers? Any examples of how to do this?

@Izuku Midoriya @Serra K Asking you especially.

 

[Brayati]

If these characters aren't the POV character, it works better if the first few sentences of the story/oration are written as direct dialogue, and then summarised. For example:
"My friend -as we shall call him - went this way and that, and when he took it upon himself to enter the aforesaid establishment ..."
The innkeep kept up the chatter as he fed and watered his patrons. Although the storytelling was better than most of the [musicians] [POV had heard], it distracted his thoughts.

The little summarisation of the ongoing chit-chat is enough to know that he (the innkeep) now becomes background noise rather than taking over the narrative. It becomes another form of setting, and unless something important is said (in which case, make it part of the opening salvo of words, or the last few words), most of the dialogue can go without taking up space, or losing the narrative pace.

Also, the actions as they speak can show how much they crave that attention.

 

[Jason L.]

If it's not the POV character, then you can show the person who is kind of tuning in and out. So, something like this:

"Well, she was living around here at the time. Back then of course, there were only farms, not the fancy places that they threw up later on. When I was coming up, there was a barn out there where they put the Walgreens..."

Oh God, Martin thought. We're in for this story. The truth was that Evan Green was a fount of indiscriminate information. He chattered happily in your general direction until you lost the thread completely. Was he talking about the barn? A Cow? Eventually Martin's mind just gave up. Flooded by information, most of it dull, he smiled and tried not to fidget. He found himself focusing on other things: the collar of Evan's shirt, which was was fraying at the tips. The dirt that had been ignored by Evan's rag as he swiped cheerfully but absently at the bar. The feel of the bench underneath him. He wondered if his own father, or grandfather, had sat on this bench, listening to Evan, or one of his predecessors, chatter away. Was it a requirement for innkeepers to be like this? Cheerful, fun, garrulous? He tuned in for a second to hear about a car crash involving a cow, a fence, and a Plymouth, missed the joke completely, and pretended he was laughing along, because Evan was amusing himself so much that it seemed mean-spirited not to be chuckling along for his benefit.

"...And of course, the body was covered in nettles. Strangest thing."

Martin leaned forward. What? He had almost missed it in the reminiscences.

I just made all of that up off the top of my head.

If it's something like your sorcerer, don't give the words. Something like this?

John started his story with the words, "There were dragons in the mountains in those days." He stopped, leaned back in his chair, and surveyed Martin with the look of someone eminently pleased with himself. He knew he had caught his audience, like a fish wriggling on the line.

"Of course, it was the old days, before the white men came, when my grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's grandfather was still in the villages, when the Cherokee were still a free people."

Martin felt an enormous stillness descend over him as old John narrated the lineage. The image of the family tree, preserved through meticulous retelling, mapped out in front of him. His brain buzzed as images flashed before him. The yearly hunt, the warrior named Runs-at-Bear, the arrival of the first iron cookpot for which they had traded forty deer hides. The terror in the village as the first dragon came to burn them. The fires sweeping the longhouse so that the elders and the women were cooked alive. He wondered, dimly, what it could represent. A dramatic retelling of cannons, firing upon the village? But John talked on, his voice sure and steady, speaking of the horrors transmitted from the eyes of generations long past, recorded in song and transmitted without hesitation to the next generation, and the one after that.

He felt a peculiar chill as the image of a dragon, a real dragon, no bigger than a ferret, flew through the air behind John's chair, settled on the windowsill, and stared at him with a basilisk eye. A blink, and it was gone. Martin felt dizzy. He felt weak. The words were carrying on. The room had grown silent and still, every face turned blankly to watch and listen to a mastery storyteller at his best. His coffee had grown cold. The light had shifted in the room. How long had they been listening here? Could the rest of them see the dragon he had imagined? He reached out and brushed the coffee cup off the table. It hit the floor with a loud, dissonant crash. John stopped, mid-sentence, and abruptly Martin's mind cleared. The spell, if you wanted to call it that, had been broken. People looked at him, and looked around. Nervous titters filled the room as they turned back to tablemates. The first strained words were coming out of throats that felt hoarse from disuse.

Okay, I made up that too. If it's a point of view character, then we can also take into account his internal reaction, because he's picking up on feedback cues as well. Or people can interrupt him periodically to ask a question. Something like this?

"I'm still trying to work it out. I think it all started with the disappearance of Baby Eve. It was a small story, but it's a small town. You don't forget those kind of stories, even if they're old. I kept wondering what Eve would be like if she were alive today. How old would she be? When her mother's body was found, why did she have a jar of raspberry preserves on her? Who takes that sort of thing for a midnight rendezvous?"

"This is going back a bit," Lilith interrupted. "What relevance can it possibly have to robbery?

Martin hesitated. The truth was that he hadn't worked that out yet. But there was something that had to be said about this. What was it? He knew this part of the story. Did he really know the next part? Had his fevered imagination contrived it? Abruptly, a line from Evan Green came to him.

"Nettles," he said. "It has to do with nettles."

"What?"

"They don't grow here. So they had to have come from somewhere. That's what stuck out. He's an avid gardener, he would have noticed it straightaway, and that's why it stuck with him. Where did the nettles come from?"

"Where does anything come from?" Lilith rolled her eyes. "Look, if we're going to waste all our time on a twenty-five-year-old murder and missings persons case, I'm going to need something a lot stronger than coffee." She raised her hand for a waiter. "What have you got in the way of whisky?"

Martin leaned forward, pouring out what he had worked out about Rebecca and George, about John's story told in this room three weeks ago, about the dead animal he'd found in Anya's basement, rushing through his words in an effort to get the story delivered before the whiskey arrived. If he could do it before she stared drinking, he rationed with himself, he might have kept her attention long enough for her to take him seriously.

I admit that I had a long monologue at the end of my latest that read like Poirot in the library in 1922. It absolutely has to go, so for this one you might have to take someone else's advice on how to make that. I've tried to include some self-reflection, but there is no need to have a word-for-word recapitulation unless he's bringing something genuinely

Also, I'm not sure where this story with Martin goes, but holy Hell it sounds interesting already. I have no plot, no mystery, a vague setting of somewhere in the modern Southeast and that's about it. But I'm kind of digging the freewriting exercise. Thanks for giving me the writing prompt. Anytime you have more, I will happily let my mind wander and give Martin more mysteries to solve, because this village is seriously whack.

 

[izi 出久]

In A Trembling Wind, several characters speak at length.

One is an innkeeper who loves attention. He dresses so people will notice him. He speaks at length because he craves the attention he gets as people listen to him. The more he talks, the longer they listen.

Another is a sorcerer, who is secretive by nature, but when he has an audience he tries to prolong it because he, too, craves attention. Any advice on how to write such characters without boring the readers? Any examples of how to do this?

@Izuku Midoriya @Serra K Asking you especially.

I think @Brayati makes a good point about switching out of speech after a paragraph. But just keep in mind that, unless done artfully or as a scene, large chunks of backstory told are, by nature, a form of telling. If it is indeed backstory and your chosen POV allows, you might consider switching out of oration and into a scene to show the previous action instead. Or characters might interject, telling the story together and interacting with each other. Quite a bit of characterization can come from that.

Going back to the original point (verbose characters): You didn't specify the innkeeper or the sorcerer are telling stories. So is this more just a scene to show that they're verbose? Understandably, you don't just want to write "so-sand-so was verbose". That's flat and we all know it. Showing a character as verbose, though, can be a good way to insert humor. Often, we laugh a bit at them. Or we want to. Sorry to all the talkative people out there. But help us to do that. Give them some character. Show us their quirks. How they say things. We'll understand a bit about them and we'll know they're verbose.

Hope something here helps. But I'll pass the baton to the wonderful @Serra K

 

[Jason L.]

Popcorning off of that. I have a character with severe and unmedicated ADHD. I have to convey his speech patterns because he is acutely aware of the fact that he can't control how much he's talking, how much stuff will come out of his mouth, and that anything he thinks will just come nervously out of his mouth. Here is an example, occurring at the tail end of a scene in which he's been chattering rather extensively. Note the run-on and contradictory sentences, the way everything seems stream-of-consciousness:

I lifted the pan. “It means bacon. Why are you so early?” I asked, tending to the breakfast things.

“I was afraid of being late. And then I thought about the size of people in the car, because I’m driving my dad’s old Buick. And it’s not bad, but then I thought that if I came early, I could check with you about optimal seatage, because if we needed to, I could change it out for my mom’s minivan. Optimal leg room is probably important. Especially since Logan is so tall. But then I almost called you but I thought that you would be sleeping in because it’s Saturday, and you wouldn’t know the dimensions of the car until you sat in it, so I thought it would be better to…” he trailed off.

I plated the bacon. “To drive over here, sit in the parking lot, and wait until you saw signs of life.”

“In the least stalkery way possible. But then I realized I didn’t know which apartment you lived in, and I didn’t want to call you and say I was right outside, because that really does sound stalkery.” Zach cleared his throat. “Well, going back to the original crisis. The size of my car. Logan’s got fairly long legs, so I thought that he should be in the front seat, but then I thought maybe he should be in the back seat with you,” he indicated me with a fork, “but then I thought that maybe one of you might get carsick in the back seat, but I could also borrow the church bus, but I would have to drive it back for Sunday evening because Dad needs it. And I’m talking too much, aren’t I? I should stop talking. My dad says that I need to work on my situational awareness, and I can see you’re getting that overwhelmed look.”

 

[Peyton Stafford]

I think @Brayati makes a good point about switching out of speech after a paragraph. But just keep in mind that, unless done artfully or as a scene, large chunks of backstory told are, by nature, a form of telling. If it is indeed backstory and your chosen POV allows, you might consider switching out of oration and into a scene to show the previous action instead. Or characters might interject, telling the story together and interacting with each other. Quite a bit of characterization can come from that.

Going back to the original point (verbose characters): You didn't specify the innkeeper or the sorcerer are telling stories. So is this more just a scene to show that they're verbose? Understandably, you don't just want to write "so-sand-so was verbose". That's flat and we all know it. Showing a character as verbose, though, can be a good way to insert humor. Often, we laugh a bit at them. Or we want to. Sorry to all the talkative people out there. But help us to do that. Give them some character. Show us their quirks. How they say things. We'll understand a bit about them and we'll know they're verbose.

Hope something here helps. But I'll pass the baton to the wonderful @Serra K

Both characters tell stories and fill in backstory, but they also use a lot of filler words when conversing, lots of "of course, in my opinion..."

 

[izi 出久]

but they also use a lot of filler words when conversing, lots of "of course, in my opinion..."

Ah, ok. These are natural for dialogue. But they won't make the story interesting. It will still feel like tell. Because it is. Having someone tell a backstory is the same for the reader as the writer simply doing it. Or it might be. Again, interspersing details, descriptions, thoughts, maybe quirky action from the speakers, etc., could help just enough to keep the reader engaged. Another thought: what kind of humor does Peter have? He might be turning some sarcastic thoughts about. Those might be entertaining for the reader.

Just throwing ideas against the wall to see if any stick. I think Eva is our only Italian on here, so hopefully it's safe to say that.

 

[Hannah F]

If it's not the POV character, then you can show the person who is kind of tuning in and out. So, something like this:



I just made all of that up off the top of my head.

If it's something like your sorcerer, don't give the words. Something like this?



Okay, I made up that too. If it's a point of view character, then we can also take into account his internal reaction, because he's picking up on feedback cues as well. Or people can interrupt him periodically to ask a question. Something like this?



I admit that I had a long monologue at the end of my latest that read like Poirot in the library in 1922. It absolutely has to go, so for this one you might have to take someone else's advice on how to make that. I've tried to include some self-reflection, but there is no need to have a word-for-word recapitulation unless he's bringing something genuinely

Also, I'm not sure where this story with Martin goes, but holy Hell it sounds interesting already. I have no plot, no mystery, a vague setting of somewhere in the modern Southeast and that's about it. But I'm kind of digging the freewriting exercise. Thanks for giving me the writing prompt. Anytime you have more, I will happily let my mind wander and give Martin more mysteries to solve, because this village is seriously whack.

I'm loving this story. You should write it!

 

[Hannah F]

Both characters tell stories and fill in backstory, but they also use a lot of filler words when conversing, lots of "of course, in my opinion..."

An important thing about fictional speech, long or short winded, is that it must seem to mimic real life speech but actually doesn't. Lots of "um"s or "in my opinion"s is really tiring for the reader. You can pick up on it though with maybe only having a couple in the speech by having another character comment e.g. I've counted twent-four "um"s already, and he's still at it. or If he says "in my opinion" one more time, I think I might actually scream.

 

[izi 出久]

Ha. Yes. If the reader is going to critique the writing and you know it, make the character do so. I like it.

 

[Peyton Stafford]

I should probably cut any padding from the dialogue and focus on how they twist things while simultaneously trying to understand why the other person is not telling the truth, and what the truth is. It is a dance they do throughout the book. Most of the main characters are all deluded about who and what they are, so when they give each other backstory, they are unreliable narrators.

 

[Peyton Stafford]

I'm loving this story. You should write it!

Seconding that!

 

[Jason L.]

I'm loving this story. You should write it!

I KNOW, RIGHT? FOR JUST BEING IN THE ZONE FOR ABOUT TEN MINUTES, I WAS LIKE, PULLING OUT SOME FRIGGING GOLD THERE!!!!!! It's now in the Future ideas folder in Scrivener. And if I do write it, it's 100% @Peyton Stafford's fault.

 

[Peyton Stafford]

I KNOW, RIGHT? FOR JUST BEING IN THE ZONE FOR ABOUT TEN MINUTES, I WAS LIKE, PULLING OUT SOME FRIGGING GOLD THERE!!!!!! It's now in the Future ideas folder in Scrivener. And if I do write it, it's 100% @Peyton Stafford's fault.

OMG! What have I signed up for? I hate being late, even if everyone expects me to be late, but then sometimes I'm early, and then no one knows what to think, except maybe I'm stalking them, but that can be okay, too, 'cause some people want a guy following them around. Romantic, they think. Not me. And this is going to make me late for something. I forget what? Oh, that story, or the other one, the one about something. But I need to get dressed now. It's almost five on a Monday afternoon, and I can't remember where I left my clean socks. Just one pair. Maybe I'll run the laundry but the noise drives me nuts.

Thanks or whatever. I mean that's really nice of you, and I'll try to live up to it. I guess. You set a great example, or does that even make sense? I just want to get to the point about this, and what about Hannah? And she's a professor like you. And it was her idea, but I was thinking it before she said anything. So maybe it's my fault after all. I think the socks are in the dresser, but I should check all the drawers before committing to that. I take commitments seriously.

 

[Hannah F]

OMG! What have I signed up for? I hate being late, even if everyone expects me to be late, but then sometimes I'm early, and then no one knows what to think, except maybe I'm stalking them, but that can be okay, too, 'cause some people want a guy following them around. Romantic, they think. Not me. And this is going to make me late for something. I forget what? Oh, that story, or the other one, the one about something. But I need to get dressed now. It's almost five on a Monday afternoon, and I can't remember where I left my clean socks. Just one pair. Maybe I'll run the laundry but the noise drives me nuts.

Thanks or whatever. I mean that's really nice of you, and I'll try to live up to it. I guess. You set a great example, or does that even make sense? I just want to get to the point about this, and what about Hannah? And she's a professor like you. And it was her idea, but I was thinking it before she said anything. So maybe it's my fault after all. I think the socks are in the dresser, but I should check all the drawers before committing to that. I take commitments seriously.

Eek! I'm not a professor. Nowhere near. I was a specialist subject guest lecturer on mainly post-grad courses (though I did do a stint as module director for 12 years). The course I mainly taught on (Animal Behaviour and Welfare MSc) kept mutating over the years (as courses do) and was moving more and more on-line (as is everything in the educational world). But on-line lecturing seemed to mean to students "available 24 hours a day" for no extra pay. I'd been lecturing for 20 years so seemed a good time to stop. There's no "Doctor" prefix before my name. I don't even have a PhD (just an MA and an MSc). Come to think of it, I was amazingly successful, all things considered.

 

[Serra K]

Hi Peyton, you've received some good feedback for this question and I don't have too much to add to it. I would be reluctant to overindulge in verbose dialogue from side characters if the single purpose is to show that they crave attention. As others have said, this can be done in scene setting and character interaction.

How relevant is the innkeeper's and sorcerer's need for attention to the goals of the MC? Is it getting in the way of the MC's urgent need for information? Do these characters have information which is sorely needed and quickly? Because you could show the MC's impatience at their blathering.

A concept I learned a little while ago which has helped me immensely:
When you consider the theme of your book, take a mirror, and smash it on the ground. (Not really, just as a thought exercise). The glass will shatter into pieces, some pieces larger, some smaller. The larger piece will be your MC, and every thought, word, action, will reflect a unique aspect of your theme. The next largest piece is your antagonist. It will also reflect your theme, but from yet another unique angle. There will be smaller pieces of glass, which you can attribute to your side characters. Each piece falls where it falls and is able to reflect your theme from yet another angle.

If you keep this in your mind when deciding how your side characters will behave, you will be able to imagine how many possible variations there are in representing the different aspects of your theme. Making sure that, all the time, the words, thoughts, and actions contribute to the overarching message that you want your story to deliver.