The Box That Never Was

I've striven to keep a fairly pragmatic perspective when it comes to writing, as has probably been evidenced on more than one occasion.

When it comes to amateur novelists, a group of which I still consider myself a member, I've found little shortage of hope, dreams and imagination.  It's seldom I have to tell someone who has already been bitten by The Bug to reach for the stars; the difficulty is usually in how to bring the stars down to Earth to share with everyone else.

I'll give the science fans in the room a moment to stop cringing at the astronomical disaster that implies.

So I've focused on pragmatism and realistic, honest assessment.  I have attempted (with limited success) to cut directly through the mystique and leave new writers with very tangible tools at their disposal to move forward.

I say this because, today, I intend to depart from that trend.

A good friend of mine asked for help reading and reviewing his novel before he sends it off with the hope of being published.  I'm somewhere shy of a quarter of the way through, and outside a few stylistic nit-picks, I have to say it's as good as any of the books I read for enjoyment (and a grand sight better than titles that have topped the bestseller list, but that's not exactly a reliable measure...)

That said, his subject matter (or in this case, the setting it's all wrapped in) has me concerned.  It's a niche market inside of a niche market, limiting the scope beyond what I would consider safe even for a seasoned author, let alone someone pinning their hopes to a first publication.

I sit here pouring over almost 600 pages of brilliantly-envisioned characters, and somewhere beneath the joy and humor is a constant worry that I will be a statistically significant portion of the audience who ever get a chance to read it.

I'm ashamed to admit that I've often made judgments on genres, even ones I subscribe to myself (watch me chuckle at the idea of a post-apocalyptic western trilogy, but I'm already two books in).

I write off the various sub-sub-sub-genres that cater to a populace roughly half the size of a Rhode Island suburb purely because the size of that diminutive audience makes them difficult to reach and rules out much chance of them sustaining a writer on sales alone.

It's the pragmatic approach:  go where the people are.  Reach a wide market.  Open yourself up to fringe fanbases you might not have considered, and never hedge anyone out.

And it's the wrong approach.

Setting aside the nature of purpose, the little limiting factors that tie us to one genre or the next, one audience or the next, are the very things which make what we write unique.  If your dream is of cowboys and space aliens, then dammit, write about cowboys and space aliens.

The danger in starting to bend what you love to fit the common mode, to fit the market we pretend we understand, is that you've started to censor yourself.  You find yourself believing lies like "No one wants to read about a French Muslim super hero."

Naturally, if your aim is to read a wide audience, it may be better to start with something you consider widely palpable; that is, something equally uniquely yours, but which happens to fall along lines you consider more digestible by a mainstream audience.

But if you find yourself thinking "I shouldn't write this, no one out there is going to want to read it" because you're tackling a subject or a genre that you worry is either too surreal or too obscure to find an audience, let me assure you what I've been forced to remind myself today:

There are almost seven billion people on the planet.  Over two billion of them have access to the Internet.  Over 300 million of them live in the United States.

Inside a given person there exist a limitless number of wants, desires, hobbies and guilty pleasures.  A given person reads many different books, watches many different TV shows, has seen many different movies, or even just told and been told a variety of stories from all corners of their world, no matter how large or small.

The chance that a well-written work will not find another mind outside your own willing to love it either in spite of or because of the trappings it comes with is therefore mathematically and sociologically ridiculous.

Setting aside my misgivings with the wisdom of Henry David Thoreau, there is one statement of his I can't help but agree with:  "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams."  That means setting aside the pragmatic "safe route" when it comes to what you're writing and never assuming that your audience won't love it.

No one knows what the next best thing will be.  No one.  The number of times the mainstream has been shattered by a sudden strong player from the fringe goes beyond counting.  There is actually a musical genre called "Pop alternative" now.  If that doesn't convince you that freaks can win the day, I don't know what will.

Save the pragmatism for the business end of things.  You're going to need it, mainstream or not, to get your dreams into the hands of someone who's out there waiting for that comforting echo of their own thoughts in someone else's words.  Don't silence yourself just to hedge your bets.  Scream it out, the louder the better.

Someone out there is bound to hear.

Outlines - The Plan Before the Plunge

It saddens me that I've taken this long to cover such a basic, core principle as storyboarding, but I first needed to be reminded that it isn't second-nature for everyone.

The natural instinct for most (myself included) is to throw the ideas into paper (virtually or otherwise) before they have a chance to dart past the cochlea and escape into the ether.  While I support this practice, it's not always easy to build a story off of a jumble of words and half-baked phrases including things like "motorcycle guy leaves gang, building explodes, army of evil puppies."

...although not everyone finds it hard to build a story off of something like that.

Idea dumping is best when you're first putting thought to paper and trying in earnest to produce something out of the open cage of your imagination.  It's not so great when you're actually sitting at the crest of Chapter One and trying to figure out where to go from here.

That may be an overstatement.  It's more accurate to say that you'll notice it about a half-page before the climax, when you're trying to remember what exactly is exploding, why, and how the guy with the motorcycle fits into all this in the first place.

That is not the point where you want to look back and realize that you have nothing.

Thus, storyboarding.  Some writers honestly have trouble writing anything at all without it, the rest of us just have trouble writing anything printable without it, and of course there are those who don't need any planning at all to pen something stellar from the word "go."

...Jerks.

For the rest of us here on the mortal plane, storyboarding (or outlining) is the necessary scaffold that allows us to build up to the awesomeness that is "explosion, motorcycle guy," etc.  You can see in an instant where the gaps are, how things flow together, and even opportunities on what other pieces to add in, tie in, or rearrange to get a great story without having written a single clause.

The process may seem automatic or even childish, but I recommend giving it a shot any time you get stuck on a new work (or before you start a work you really care about) to save yourself hours and days of post-production madness.

Here's the basic gist:  buy a set of index cards, or find a virtual equivalent of the same.  On each, jot down one and only one scene or scene part, a plot point, or a "junction" in the story.  Stick to simple sentences as much as possible, and make them singular events.  Examples include:

• Hero meets Motorcycle guy
• Villain kidnaps Hero's puppy
• Love Interest escapes trap
• Hero finds clue to Villain's secret plan

Note the lack of specifics.  If you have names, I recommend leaving them out for now:  put them on a separate card with the character's role (i.e. "hero," "friend," "motorcycle guy") on one side and the name you tentatively picked on the other.  Then, if you change your mind on names, you don't have to redo your notes.

First, build cards based on your idea dump in any order.  For my example above:

• "motorcycle guy leaves gang, building explodes, army of evil puppies."  

My cards would be:

• Motorcycle Guy Leaves Gang
• Building Explodes
• Army of Evil Puppies

The order doesn't have to match the order they'll appear in the book, just get them each down on a separate card.  

Next, you'll need a nice, flat, clear surface, like a coffee table (which you'll probably need to clear), a white board (especially if you have magnets), a desk (after copious cleaning, no doubt), or even a floor (assuming you're not in a high-traffic area).  Any place will do, but give yourself about ten square feet if you can manage it, plus another couple of feet for you to be able to stand back and review what you've done.

Lastly, get a camera (or a cell phone with high resolution), and write in pen or sharpie.  You'll have more index cards in a pack than you're likely to need, so if you mess up, start with a new card.  You'll want to record your work when you're done, and gluing things to the hardwood is probably not the best way to please your roommates/spouse/parents.

Next we need to fill in some basic gaps.  You'll want to make sure you have the skeleton of a story, and it may look a little different depending on the type of story.  Grab a card each and just write the basic structure you're aiming for:

1. Exposition - Introducing the world, the characters, the "setup" for the whole thing
2. New Direction - The first driving force that takes the main character(s) out of his or her routine and throws him or her into the throes of the plot
3. Major Conflict - The point of contention, the quest, the drive, the point:  what the heck are our heroes going after / caught up in?
4. Turning Point - Where things either go from bad to good, or good to bad for our hero.  Sometimes both, in rapid succession
5. Climax - The peak, and the lead up to it.  The final battle, the chase to stop a madman, the confession that keeps them together, you get the idea.  (This is very likely part of the idea dump you've already done.  Our minds love scenes like this, and they stick with us for years, even when we're the ones writing them)
6. Resolution - How it all works out in the end.  The epilogue.

And then some "components" that we're going to use to fill in the holes:

• New Character (make about 5 of these to start, though you'll likely need more)
• Big Change (write at least 2 or 3 of these)
• Clue (2 for your average story, 5 or more for mysteries and crime dramas)
• Tension Point (or "Awkward Moment," for romantic comedies - 2 to 3 at least)
• Character Fact (something not immediately obvious about a character, but important to the story)
• World Fact (mostly for fantasy/sci-fi, or obscure locales/sub-cultures - 5 to 7 of these)

Now we've taken a serious dent out of that stack of index cards and we have a handful of pieces to play with.    First, set down the core pieces (the second set of cards we made) to line up the general structure of the work, as least as you know it thusfar.  Don't worry if it's a little sketchy right now:  that's the whole reason for storyboarding in the first place.

Next, add the set of plot points you already devised (the first set of cards we made), and line them up with the major pieces of the story.  You can either keep the structure off to one side and list the plot points beside each structural element, or actually stack the specific plot points on top of them as appropriate.  Dealer's choice.

Then, fill in the gaps.  Look at the uncovered or empty pieces of your structure, and add new cards to fill the voids.  If you don't have all the pieces yet, that's perfectly fine:  you know what you need to work on next.  Fill as many as you can before proceeding to the next step, you can always repeat this process later.

The last piece is organizing your components.  First, find the plot cards you made yourself (the first set) and tuck a component card under each wherever you can.  If a plot point doesn't fit either a component or a major structural element, set it aside for now.  If you wind up with a large "slush" pile, see if there's an emerging trend:  your component list may be missing a key piece.

Make sure everything has a place, and then make note of the gaps you've got left:  those will be your focus to work on.  Start small, like "Hero discovers Villain's secret plan" under your Turning Point area, and then grab a couple of Clue cards to help the hero piece it together.  Once you have the Clues, put them anywhere in the story you like so that the discovery flows naturally out of what you've already created.

Once your first few structural cards are covered and you feel you have enough components to get started, it's time to deal with the slush pile:  all the pieces that don't fit.  These, sadly, are a natural part of the process.  Our imagination has an affinity for "cool things" that don't necessarily work at all in our story.  That said, the pieces of a "cool thing" can often be applied to other useful or appropriate scenes.

For each element in your slush pile, search for a component card that matches.  If you find a match, look for the other components of that time in your storyboard.  If you already have a half-dozen clues, for instance, you may be close to overdoing it.  If you only have one or two clues, you may have just solved your own problem.

More often, though, you won't find an exact match.  Look for the closest fit, and understand that you may have to shave a little off the "cool thing" to line up the edges, so to speak.  If you have a scene that you're dying to bring in but can't find room for, consider pairing it with a Character Fact or World Fact.  Now a humorous or exciting scene has a good place in the story, and you're not just wasting ink.

Some of these cards just won't fit, and it's best not to force them.  Keep them anyway.  As you go back to your storyboard later (even after the work is finished), you're going to move things around, remove things, add things in, etc.  By then, these spare pieces may suddenly open the door for the new gaps that get created later on.

If possible, take a picture of your cards as they're laid out so that you at least have an idea for the structure.  If you can't make out the details on every card, that's okay, so long as the major structural cards can be read.

Lastly:  mark your cards.  In one corner (or on the back), name the component type it ties to.  In another corner, mark which structural element it's bundled with.  Any other trends (or "tags") you want to include that might help you rebuild this storyboard later, do so.  

Ask anyone who every coded on punchcards and you'll understand why.

Once all this is done, you'll have a dynamic, visual realization of your story in neat, movable chunks.  Like Whitney's famous industrial redesign, the interchangeable parts of your story will make it easier to see what you lack and to rearrange items later when you need to make edits on the fly.

Now the really cool part:

As you're writing, keep your story cards nearby.  When you get done with a chapter or a large section of your work, take a break and jot down the page numbers of a given plot piece on a corner (in pencil, I recommend).  In other words, if chapter three deals with the main characters all meeting, grab the cards for "motorcycle guy meets hero" and "love interest intervenes, forces a truce" and note the corresponding page numbers on each.

Now, months later when it's time to edit, you'll know how to zero in on a given piece.  If you decide to move, remove or change a given element, you can zip right to it in your manuscript.  

[Naturally, programs like Microsoft Word and Google Docs allow for comments, labels and bookmarking that probably make this unnecessary, but if you either aren't familiar with those tools or simply prefer the low-tech method, I personally find it easier than pausing to set the anchors as I go.]

The last great thing about a story is seeing what it looks like laid out:  is it one single line straight through to the end?  Is it an endless sprawling web of frayed edges that never find their way home to the main plot?  Does it match what you wanted in your mind for it to be?  

If not, grab some more cards:  it's time to get to work.

Accentuate the Positive: Dialog with a Twist

One disadvantage of a written medium is that your readers don't have a physical form to tie your characters to.  Descriptions are helpful for visual characteristics, but tone and voice can get lost unless you get very creative with dialog.

Worse still, all dialog innately bends towards your own mode of speech (or at least, written speech), meaning that there's a risk from the start of all your characters sounding the same.  One way many authors have tried to stir the waters and keep things from becoming too uniform is by giving one or more characters a unique accent.

Which is a very dangerous endeavor.

Accents have the potential to add a real spice to your dialog.  A light Scottish brogue is not only appealing to many ears, it can add notes to a brash or comedic character that the words themselves may not.  A harsh Russian edge lends itself to everything from comedy (see Nosh in Drive) to animosity (thank you, Ian Fleming).  A rich Spanish accent?  That should go without saying.

Of course, all of the above enter into the area of overused, but before we even get that far, there's a larger concern:  how do you write sound?

The idea may sound ludicrous:  we write sound all the time.  Every letter has a sound.  But with an accent, you have to translate from written, "proper" English into the modified, slanted version your speaker is using.  That comes in three forms:

• tonal variations (shifting the way the words, especially vowels, sound), 
• structure (dropping articles, dropping contractions, etc), and 
• idioms (word choice, slang and other things that simply don't translate)

Representing those in text is another matter entirely.  The first is the hardest, so we'll start there.

Native speakers of almost any other language tend to struggle a bit with English.  Depending on which language they're coming from, the structure or the sounds may be what trips them up, but we tend to hear it either way.  

Even within English, there are several dialects all their own, including regional (Oxford, cockney, Irish, Scottish, Australian, but also Brooklyn New York, the Deep South, Texas, the mid-west, New Orleans) and cultural (geeks, jocks, military, scholars, blue collar, white collar, etc.) selections.  

Again, most of these represent in a combination of tonal variations, structure and idioms, but we'll start with tone and work our way out.

The best way to translate aural diction to written diction is purely to listen to it for a while.  Find a sample somewhere (public places can be hit-and-miss, YouTube offers a decent sampling, larger media like movies and shows will often showcase common or even misused accents, so do your research) and shut your eyes.  Write down what you're hearing, sound by sound.

"Ahvent bean to the races iss week, won't ahve a chahnce till next Fursday eve."

"Haven't been to the races this week, won't have a chance till next Thursday eve."

Legible, if a bit unwieldy.  Cockney is like that.  Notice the lack of apostrophe on "Ahvent."  As I said, write the sounds, not the words.  Don't try to translate what they're saying.  Just write down exactly what you hear.

Once you have your raw transcript, the second step is the clean-up.  100% accuracy is likely to lead to low accessibility:  we're not programmed as readers to translate sounds, we try to guess at the words as we go, so you may need to help your reader along (unless the point is for them to be befuddled).

The best ways to help your readers out are to let them know what they're missing, touch up the key points and lampshade the accent entirely.  We'll get back to what that means in a moment.

"Letting them know what they're missing" typically involves the dreaded apostrophe.  I say "dreaded" because apostrophe's are like commas on helium:  easily overused.  Don't go overboard.  

If an accent involves dropping every G on an -ing ending, the natural tendency is to highlight it each time with an apostrophe:

"I figger we kin be gettin' on with arr day, closin' up shop 'n' movin' ma into town like we oughtta."

and much as I hate to admit it, you typically have to.  We've come to expect it, culturally, and it helps us tell the difference between character accent and author typo.  Just remember when you reach the end of the sentence that punctuation comes before the double-quotes:

"We best be goin'."

That will help visually rein in your word-endings even in an accented phrase.

The biggest troublemaker in the first snippet is the "and," here simply "'n'," given the accent.  To and The are also big victims of this:  t' and th' show up regularly.  Each of these individually isn't so bad until you start mashing them all together, at which point it can get out of hand.  That said, it can be done well:

"If th' landlady says we oughtta git movin', t' only thing I kin figger is we best be gettin' movin'."

but it can be done poorly:

"I need t' move t' couch to t' other side of t' room."

so be careful.  Like the YouTube rule, read it aloud when you're done, exactly as its written.  If you get tired of hearing it, don't be afraid to stretch some of the words back out to help stir up the mix:

"I need to move t' couch to th'other side of the room."

Dropping the end of To and The especially is best done with words that we naturally slur together.  "Th'other" for instance becomes it's own contraction.  Now you're putting your apostrophes to work (and they should be, the lazy buggers).  By contrast, "the room" and "th' room" sound pretty much the same.  Taking a break from the apostrophe race just means looking for the right spots to do so.

By contrast, when displaying Japanese to English, you typically have to add, not subtract.  

One of the more familiar traits is that the Japanese don't tend to end names on a consonant, so trying to say many American names can lead to an added "uh" at the end (much like pronouncing a silent "e" on a name like "Mike").  Likewise, the Japanese alphabet doesn't have any combination consonants, so they have a tendency to insert vowels were we might not.

Take, for example, the name "Karl."  To a native Japanese speaker, it might come out more like "Karalu," with a quick "a" and a very muted "u" on the end.  The same is true for many words, but it tends to be most noticeable with names.

Touching up the key points is another good way to ensure accessibility to your audience.  If every other word in a sentence is utter gibberish by the time you're finished, make sure that a few key words stand out unfiltered so that the audience can roughly put together what they're reading.  Creole or any of the Caribbean island dialects are great examples of exactly how far you can go with a mash-up language:

"Ku ovah yonder, matey! Dat scurvy bobo be all up inne quashie's face. Dat hard-eared swab gonna get salt, mon... gonna get keelhauled and gonna be made into a duppy, mon."

-- [Courtesy of Blizzard, and its awesome public use policies]

To be frank, half the words in that sentence made no sense to me, but the gist remains:  scurvy is easily identifiable even if "bobo" isn't.  "Gonna get salt" has any manner of implications, but "keelhauled" isolates it as strong, negative punishment.  You can understand a whole sentence without getting the idiomatic nouns so long as the structure is familiar and the in-between words still add up.  

Oddly, adjectives and verbs are more important here than nouns.  I have no clue what a bobo is exactly, but if it's scurvy, it can't be pleasant.  That sets the tone for words like "hard-eared swab," referring to the same individual, and finally "duppy" (roughly meaning zombie or spirit) as a generic thing-that-is-bad.  

Lastly, we can "lampshade" the accent to help ensure understanding.  Lampshading (here, arguably misused) is a way of calling out the ridiculousness of a given character's mode of speech.  

If a new character marches in spouting what you're confident your audience will consider incomprehensible gibberish, having one of the characters raise an eyebrow at the newcomer and say simply "...What?" can be a great way to maintain the full integrity of the accent (or even turn it up to 11) without having to worry about losing your audience. 

Alternatively, if another character has learned over time to translate said newcomer's lingo, they may be able to act as interpreter.  They don't have to simply restate everything the first character says:  often it's best if they simply react to them in a way that implies what was said.  [See, for example, Han and Chewie in Star Wars, or the way Rusty responds to The Amazing Yen in Ocean's Eleven.]

A last caution about tonal variance and representing it in speech:  a number of accents that sound different to our ears look the same on paper.  American Southern and British cockney look remarkably similar if all you're relying on is the visual sound of which letters get dropped and what words get slurred.

Which brings us to the remaining topics of structure and idioms.  

For accents that either have so much tonal variance they become indecipherable or for dialects that sound roughly the same (at least as far as text is concerned), the best way to illustrate uniqueness is in how you say what you say.

For certain languages, the transition to English involves much worse than simple changes in letters and words.  The shift in grammar and habits of other languages can trip up a non-native speaker in ways you might not expect.  For instance, a Russian-born speaker may have a tendency to drop articles (a & the) throughout a sentence.  This small change creates a surprisingly noticeable fork of traditional English.  

Going from any Asian dialect (perhaps most notably Chinese) to English can lead to entire pieces of a sentence disappearing.  So much of the language is different that speakers often struggle to express a familiar notion in an unfamiliar tongue.  

There is no one-to-one relationship, so they're having to restate what they know, which leads to large gaps, or at times, a sentence comprised almost entirely of "bullet points," the focal concepts they want to get across, thrown together in a rough assembly without the intervening words and clauses we might expect.   

"You, go to store, get fish for dinner.  Martin's grocer, very good price!"

What we might instinctively consider as comical or even silly dialog makes a good deal more sense when you understand why, linguistically, such accents exist.  Each language has its quirks when making the transition.  

For dialects that are natively English and sound roughly alike, structure and idioms are often the only way to distinguish them.  As an added benefit, they make comprehension almost a guarantee, with the possible exception of the idioms themselves.

British to American is famous for this particular usage.  Idioms are often the only thing that separate us linguistically.  Toilets become "loos," TVs become "teles," and that's just the simple noun-conversions.  "Having a laugh," "Fanny's your aunt" and other such phrases pepper the lingo and help seal the speaker in their given cultural corner for your audience.

For British specifically, there is no shortage of idiomatic expressions.  They can lend flavor and humor to your work, but like any other device, I advise against overusing them.  Pepper them in only where they best fit.  If you feel like you're tacking them on or cramming them in, chances are you're doing it wrong.

The American Mid-west has loads of its own tweaks to the common language, and it doesn't stop at "don'tcha know."  There's a habit in Midwestern speech for the audible run-on sentence, where a speaker seamlessly segues from their original statement to two or three additional, tangential remarks, effectively commenting on their own commentary like some sort of lingual Mobius strip.

Of particular interest to me, given that I live in the Southeast, is the distinction between the various forms of Southern, and their too-often confused distant cousin:  Texan.  

South Carolina, Georgia and parts of Virginia boast a kind of "high brow" southern, the sort of linguistic elitism you'll find in old movies of plantation owners or so-called Southern Gentlemen.  The distinction mostly shows up in the word choice:  a smattering of remarkably scholarly words in an otherwise casual, informal diction.  It leads to such combinations as "Why, I do declare" and "I reckon them boys is about to come to fisticuffs."

Also, point of note, it's spelled "y'all;" a contraction of You and All.  "ya'll" would be the contraction of You and Will, so be careful where you put those apostrophes.  Those damn things get everybody in trouble.

Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee tend to have a more gruff, twangy form of Southern, slurring much more frequently and generally speaking frankly without "puttin' on airs."

Texan is the heart of the twang.  If you ever hear "H'yuck!" or "Aw, shucks," you're probably somewhere south of  Dallas.  Idiomatic expression dominate common diction almost as richly as British cockney here.  While it's an awful example, the ridiculously charicatured speech of Yosemite Sam is, as far as structure goes, sadly close to the mark.  

"Wound up tighter than a pig on a spit" is the sort of euphemism much of Texas is known for.  But like with any other accent, it's easy to go overboard.  Texas is, to put it mildly, a big state, so to say that everyone there speaks like a cartoon character is statistically ridiculous.  However, if what you're looking for is a character with an accent that can easily and irrevokably identify them as Texan, you may have to dial it up a few notches...

That said, these are largely stereotypes and should be viewed as such, even when they're accurate.  These are your templates, your general cookie-cutter phrasings.  With any accent, any mode of speech, any tweak you wish to add to your characters' literary "face," the best method for unique discourse is always direct research.  

Find someone whose voice or accent fits and just listen to them talk.  Write what you hear, not what you think they're saying, but what you hear, and you will soon enough have a structure to work with that no one can ever say isn't genuine.

The Power of the Casual Narrative Style

It's a popular illusion that narrators must speak with all the pomp and style of an Ivy-League professor.  There is often as much if not more power in speaking frankly, as a peer, to your reader.

Storytelling is called "story telling" because at some point, stories were told, here meaning vocalized as part of the oral tradition from whence all modern writing began.  What's been lost on too many budding authors is that departure from casual, frank diction is somehow required.

In short, that is a load of crap.

There is nothing wrong with using casual diction to tell a story, even an ornate, rich and complicated story.  The old standbys of epic fantasy or even film noir could benefit from the icy splash of effective but simple prose.  (Simple may not be the right word, but we'll get to that in a moment)

In fantasy or certain historical fiction, the concept of antiquated language is both overdone and, more often, done wrong.  The notion that "people don't talk like that anymore" is rooted in an idealized past.  Take the common misconception that "thou" is a formal mode of address.  Thou is the former informal.  "You" is actually the formal variety.  "Hey, thou!" would actually be more appropriate for casual friends in the era.

Being a slave to formal speech purely because it "sounds more good" is both stylistically limiting, linguistically elitist and deceptively lazy.  Treating formal diction like it's a challenge is a complete and utter myth.  With a thesaurus and a couple of chapters from Strunk & White, you can write anything you want using enough words, clauses and three-dollar words that the average reader should legitimately cross his or her eyes at.

There's a cleverness inherent in formal prose, and a certain artistry.  If you're using it for either, you are capable enough to understand the notion of picking the right tool for the job.  Informal voice is just as powerful a tool, and often more difficult to use.

Hence why I say "simple" is a misleading modifier.  When you have less to work with, you still need to drudge the same amount of "oomph" out of simpler and often fewer words.  Sentences get short fast.  You want the same brain-busting impact with less mileage.  Short is harder, and that's how your words have to be:  like bricks through the store windows of their minds.

Here, the colloquial is your lifeblood.  You want impact and you want it fast and that means using the bank in the back of someone's brain to cash the thin paper check your words are writing.

If you're writing about anything even remotely present, accurate, historical or culturally-relevant, anything happening in or around the lifetime of your reader, their parents or their kids is prime for this sort of diction.  It speaks to people like a friend, like a teacher, like a present and living force in their minds, not an ancient literary ghost of a bygone era hoping to coat a little beauty onto an ugly and real affair.

Draw on the great orators for notions of pacing and speech.  Look to Dr. King's repetitions.  Look to Malcolm X's hammering, overreaching bravado.  Look to Churchill's quiet, paternal assurance.  Listen to your own narration aloud, and write it so you don't want to get up and walk away from the recorder.

Write it so you carry it into the bathroom with you, write it so you play it in the car on your way to work, write it so you keep it by your bedside and listen to it right up till the point where you're falling asleep.  Write it so you charge into an all-night convenience store at 3:00am scrambling for double-A's so that you don't go mad from waiting to hear the end.

It's a monologue, but it's an active monologue:  you engage your reader, you prompt them, you wait for them to get their head on straight and then hit them with the truth so quick it makes them dizzy.  Lit becomes a song, a battlecry, a movie without pictures.  Keep the hits coming and keep 'em on their feet.

Opinion:  yours, your characters, the world's; it's now valid.  Bring it into print like an unwritten truth.  Make your reader feel like an outsider, and then slowly, quietly, become "one of you."  Make them belong to this world.  This shaded, imperfect, unseen world.  Bring them in close and tell them what you believe.  Speak it like the truth, and make them believe it.

That is how you must write.

But impact isn't everything.  Casual diction in a work about an unspoken history is prime for forceful assertion and quick, dirty feedback straight to the chin of your reader.  Casual diction in a comedy takes the opposite approach:  underspoken subtlety and unforgiving snark are the twin-fisted weapons of your linguistic arsenal.

Unrefined, quaint and unfinished speech, especially with a first-hand narrator, blends seamlessly with the dialog to create an ongoing image of the characters and scene at hand to keep the reader in a constant state of comfortable, realistic appraisal of the awkward, unfinished reality that tends to come up in a comedy.

The most important rule with all this is that casual speech works in any genre with the right spin.  Science fiction has learned this (although there are still many writers fearful of making the switch), fantasy will hopefully soon catch on.  Historical fiction, when not too full of itself, may have the most to gain from a conversion to simpler, possibly period-appropriate speech.

If you're aces with dialog, if your characters are better at talking to each other than you are at talking about them, you may want to consider switching to a natural mode of speech.  Understand that it won't feel as natural to write:  you'll probably have to start by speaking the words aloud as you write.  It'll be slow, but don't rush it.  You don't want to risk sinking back to old habits halfway through.

Because if you change voice halfway, it damn well better be for a reason.

The greatest worry with casual diction is that it can trick you into being lazy.  When speaking, we tend to ramble, we tend to wander and we tend to insert needless junk in between the lines.

You know, like parsley.

When you're writing, you have to rein in the tendency to sprawl, waste time or otherwise mince words.  This is where it gets hard:  you have to craft natural, unsculpted speech.

Craft.  Unsculpted.  You see the problem here.

The good news is, especially in a shorter work, you can get a lot of the finer work done in the editing.  If you get to where you can write more quickly in a comfortable mode of speech, just keep going.  It'll be easier to determine later which phrases and pages fall flat or feel quiet while others grab your attention and hold it by the proverbial balls.

Which brings me to another point.  Yes, it's an unfortunate segue.  That doesn't make it any less appropriate.

A rapid transition from one voice to another (the mixing of formal and informal speech) is often freaking hilarious.  Occasionally, that humor is dark enough it leads instead to impact, like a new driver in a manual transition shifting rapidly from gear to gear.

Except you're doing it on purpose.

Crashing the two modes into one another is a common practice in comedy.  Describing simplistic things with ornate words, and then immediately restating the same with simpler, effective words, helps lampshade just how ridiculous unnecessarily complicated speech can be.

Alternatively, swapping out single words can help punctuate or gloss over words that might otherwise be too obtuse or too brusque for your current environment.  Hence, proverbial balls.

I said it was an unfortunate segue.

The last thing to add about the use of casual speech is that most stories, even comedies, often come to a serious point somewhere in the middle.  On the road to climax, even a flippant hero has to grit through difficult times and play the shining knight, if only for a second.

At those times, you have a choice:  you can remain in casual speech, using the rush and pacing of the short, impactive form to crescendo to your final movement.  Alternatively, you can switch into more formal speech, even in the midst of a sentence, using the natural artistry to build a sudden majestic beauty out of otherwise unremarkable moments and people.

But whichever you do, when you end the work, after the dust settles and the last moments of your climax burn out in the night's sky, make sure to return to the casual voice to neatly cap off the work with the same you that you started with so that your audience isn't parting ways with a stranger.

For some of the best examples of casual speech done well, see:

• Instructions by Neil Gaiman
• Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz