RIDIN’ THE BUS

The bus plays a big part in my life because I never learned how to drive. Some days it's a complete drag; getting stuck in traffic (okay, so every one gets stuck in traffic but, c'mon, I'm on a bus!), babies screaming, people talking loudly on their phones so you know exactly every minutiae of their lives. I have to catch two buses and the second one has to go over the railway lines, so invariably we're stuck at the gates for a while. Yeah, it can be a drag.

Then again, I'm a writer so going on the bus is like a field trip. Seriously. People like to know where you get ideas from, or inspiration, or language and I say: take a trip on the bus. Get a day ticket, ride as many as possible - if you're not a regular bus user - and just...listen.

Dialogue can be really hard. We all have our own unique voice and sometimes that is the voice we use in our writing but that's not how all people talk. Some repeat themselves, some use 'like' and 'you know' too much, and some listen and nod and say 'yeah, yeah, yeah'. Actually, if you listen to people talking, you can see that we don't all stop and wait for the other person(s) to finish; we inject, interrupt, zone out. That's really hard to convey in a narrative sense but pretty easy if you're writing a script - there's a button to show that everyone is talking at once - but, honestly, would your reader want all the extraneous words we spout in everyday conversation? Probably not. Take this conversation I overheard on the bus a few weeks back:

Woman 1: I saw Ruth yesterday. I never had her down as a snob Woman 2: Oh? Woman 1: She was with her boy and he's off up to secondary school in September so I asked where he was going and she jumped in and said, the high school and I thought, you know, she meant one of them out at Lexdon, so I said to him, oh, I thought you'd go to Stanway and she said, yes, Stanway High School. Well, I've never heard it called that before, you know, because it's not a high school....secondary modern probably...but I thought, you know, she meant the high school. Woman 2: Well, yes, you would. Woman 1: We've got several of those haven't we...the girls high and the boys grammar and that private one. Woman 2. Well, I thought that's what you meant when she said high school...the girls high or St Mary's, you know, the private one. Woman 1. That's what I thought she meant when she said it, that's why I said, I thought you'd go to Stanway and she said, he is Stanway High School.

There was a short pause before Woman 2 started the conversation up again with a repeat of: Woman 2. Well, I thought that's what you meant when she said high school...the girls high or St Mary's, you know, the private one.

So, everyday conversation can be boring, repetitive and not for you but....but, it's not what they are saying per se that you should be interested in but the cadence, the variances in pauses, the words like 'yes' or 'yeah' that are used as a shorthand for not saying a lot; the tone of delivery of a 'yes' can be quite loaded., is it conveying anger, agreement, sarcasm, sadness?

lso, there's the variety. Slang is very transient and probably best avoided if it's really of the now as it will date quite rapidly however, it is interesting to listen to young people using slang.

I sat in front of two teenagers who were discussing gang culture on the two large estates in Colchester. Two phrases stood out in the conversation: getting switched up and on your onesies. The former, a quick check in the urban dictionary informs me is when your mood changes from calm to mad in an instant and the latter is when your on your own. In this case, the boy told his friend that it 'wasn't on for seven to do that when you're on your onesies.'

Of course, you can differentiate between characters by using regional accents. I did this in Since You've Been Gone by having Michael, Hal's best friend come from up north but even then, regional accents are not homogeneous. I based Michael's rhythm on Guy Martin - it was a tough gig watching hours of Mr Martin but he's interesting because he has a very unique and identifiable way of talking. However, a note of caution, be sparing in your use of dialect, readers don't necessarily want to have to fight through obscure words and saying just because you've found them during research (I loathed reading North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell for this very reason - her repeated use of the word 'hoo' which means 'she' bugged the life out of me). So, less is more, I think. Use it to convey but don't let it swamp the reader with idioms.

Ride the bus and happy writing