The Care and Feeding of Supporting Characters

A while back a member of SF Canada wrote a request for advice about writing dialogue, with specific reference to how to make dialogue for specific characters seem individual to them. I never got around to replying (and I doubt my opinion was missed) but it did make me think about the way I write dialogue.

And it gave me a focus for this year's Heyer Project: how did Georgette Heyer's supporting characters help the stories she told?

My reason for thinking this way is my conclusion that in fact I don't go out of my way to give my protagonists a distinctive mode of speech. Seems to me this is only going to get in the way of what these characters are in business for. Or to put it another way, how they say things doesn't matter nearly as much as what these characters say.

Where I do spend some time exploring ways of making dialogue distinctive is in the supporting characters. These individuals don't have to worry about carrying theme and plot and all those fictive parts of a balanced breakfast, so how they say things can be allowed to occasionally take prominence over what they say. So I gave Hachette, in A Tangled Weave, certain vocal mannerisms I would not have considered for Victoire. Likewise Congressman Reynolds, in The Bonny Blue Flag, has a consistent mannerism I might even call a vocal tic and Cleburne has some (possibly stereotypical) Irish sentence constructions and cadences, whereas Stuart and Patton speak in roughly similar voices.

Heyer does this as well. While I'd be hard-pressed to tell her protagonists' dialogue from one novel to the next, the supporting characters are often instantly identifiable: there is no way I'd confuse Camille d'Evron (Cotillion) from Lady Bellingham (Faro's Daughter) from Eugenia Wraxton from Lord Bromford (both in The Grand Sophy). And that's just what supporting characters ought to be like. While they might not carry as much of the plotting weight, in a comedy of manners they have to carry an exceptional amount of comedic baggage.

So it's a good thing for a supporting character to have an exaggeratedly sweet way of talk, for example, or to be prone to babbling incoherently. The writer can afford to experiment more with the dialogue and voices of supporting characters, because the dangers posed by failure are so much smaller.

One thing I will not do, however, is write in dialect. And that's a subject for another time.