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
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