rpanons | Uhh

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Why wouldn't he?

That said, what do you want him to sound like and what is he sounding like?

i'm aiming for a normal guy kind of feel - he's smart, he's educated, but he's not the kind of guy who'd want to sound wealthy or want to use big words to sound smart when smaller ones would work better. i'm thinking more tony stark and less importance of being earnest, if that makes sense? somebody who you can tell is intelligent from the content of what he's saying, not the individual word choice.

also, the way i imagine him sounds really british for some reason, and that doesn't make any sense since he's never been there.

If this is the case, then have you thought about finding an article or a paragraph about a intellectual or specialized subject (depending on what he's more educated in), and just...rewriting it? Try to reword it how you think he should talk and then read it back to yourself. One of your problems may be that you're too used to characters that are wealthy and educated being the British/pseudo-Victorian types. You need to break away from it and one of the ways to do that is recreating how they talk and paraphrasing/rewriting the dialogue with the dialect you are wanting to convey.

this is actually a really good idea, anon! i'll go looking for technical articles later and give it a go.

Yeah, but what's his society like? What cultural influences are there? How far in the future is it? I mean, what I'd rec for a normal sounding guy from the 60s would be different from the 20s or 2001. Give me some idea of where he's from, not just who he is as a person, because while his personality is important so's what happened around him.

it's about fifty years in the future! i might do a little research into how english and greek have evolved over the past few decades just to get a vague idea of how people might talk then, on top of common greek phrases and wording he might've grown up around, but i really don't want to get into any heavy tolkienesque language evolution crackdowns if i can get around it.

other than that, he's greek, fluent in greek and english and shaky in french, spent ages twelve through eighteen or so in boarding schools, is in a heavily technical scientific field (so he talks to a lot of SCIENCE SHIT to other scientists), and has spent some (but not a lot of) time abroad - bouncing around the world for business meetings, maybe a half year spent fucking around in miami, stuff like that. he later ends up spending about five years in close quarters with a bunch of americans (of all kinds, although heavily new yorkers, from baristas to military to astrophysicists) due to circumstance. i'm basing him from after this five years.

thing is, he was a little shit as a kid and probably picked up a load of slang to spite his parents, who were grooming him to take over the family business and to be able to speak fluently and businesslike at company meetings - he doesn't use slang in every sentence as an adult, but it's still a holdover from his youth and he hasn't really shaken it. since society's more or less taken a heavy scifi bent - nothing ghost in the shell quite yet, but cybernetics and sophisticated virtual reality programs are kicking around - so the slang itself probably has some roots in scientific or technological terminology.

man, that's all pretty tl;dr. does that help clear things up any?

Actually, yeah, it does. I'd advise differently based off of if you said a somewhat distant dystopic future in which some specific nationality had taken over the world versus fifty years in the future with things being kind of the same.

Alright, so, first I'd hit up some TED talks. Those are, if you don't know, a bunch of experts in their respective fields being asked to give a talk to an audience. This is important because while giving these talks they have to balance sounding intelligent and professional with being understandable: if they drop the field-specific terminology like crazy they'll lose their audience, but if they just relentlessly abuse slang then they'd come across as being unqualified and unprofessional. I suggest TED talks because I feel like they're the best balance in terms of getting an easy supply of people who sound intelligent but don't wax too deeply into sesquipedalian loquaciousness whilst doing unspeakable things to that thesaurus over there. Documentaries aren't candid enough, and academic papers...no one talks like an academic paper. No one.

You have some idea of what voice you're aiming for since you cited a few sources, so I'd also look for a script. You might learn differently than I do, I don't know, but I find with text it's really easy to grasp the nuances of sentence structure and word choice. Why does Tony Stark word things in this way? What phrases does he go for? Why does this seem effective to me?

That said, you don't want to RP Tony Stark or whomever, you want to RP your character. So. Relentlessly write out drabbles and scripts and have people look them over. Edit, edit, edit, basically. If he's starting to sound British, stop yourself, ask yourself why he sounds British...also ask someone else if he sounds British because it could also be you reading a dialect into your word choice that wouldn't be apparent to other people. Read it out loud to yourself.

I guess this is the hardest part. I've got one character of mine...it's hard to explain but I always imagine writing her voice as balancing a very delicate glass ball and I have no idea why, but it's something I have to keep in mind otherwise she sounds too normal. It might help to fixate on a specific voice to stand in for your OC's own and just imagine that voice speaking out the lines.

Remember that some parts of slang can be surprisingly enduring. Hell, "ain't" is like 250 years old. Try reading stuff from around 50 years ago, see what's different and what's familiar.

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