Hello everyone, Bridget here and welcome back to my channel. Today I have a cat. I normally have cat. I don't... well not normally in my videos. I do have a cat. Normally in my life. This is Abadon. Today we are talking about how to make your dialogue individual. How to make your dialogue not sound generic and all your characters talk the same way. I have a few things that I would like to talk about and I feel like I'm getting very distracted by the cat because she's purring very loudly. But I'm going to try my best. So a few things I want to talk about in relation to dialogue and how to make it individual and how to make it very specific to each individual character. So the first thing is the character's background. Now this has to do with slang or dialects or even just bring out a clause. Sorry. Yeah I'm kicking the cat. Oh, the room. You want to be coming to drop the room. Okay. Okay. As I'm slang. So this has to do with how the characters grew up. It has to do with where they grew up and what kind of class, what time period. And this involves both its slang, dialects, also accents. So there is always, there is always something depending on where the characters from that can influence their speech. For example, if someone grew up in the upper class in say England, they wouldn't speak like someone who grew up in the south of the United States. Those are two very different places and you would need to write accordingly. They would not talk the same. They wouldn't use the same vocabulary and they would not have the same, yeah, the same mannerisms or anything like that. That actually leads to my next point which is mannerisms. The first thing about mannerisms that I really want to touch on is pop culture references. Now I watched some shows that do pop culture references well. I have a watch on that do not do it well. The two that I would like to reference is scream the TV show which is a basically a teen drama in a horror movie. I don't know how to describe it. It's a really good show. I highly recommend watching it. It's on Netflix. It's an Netflix original so you can find it anywhere. And on the other side we have Riverdale. Now when you're writing pop culture references, you want them to make sense for the characters you're writing about. Especially in these examples, the characters are mainly teenagers and so they're not going to most likely know a lot of old references. They're going to know very modern references and that makes sense with what teenagers are consuming in the media. With scream, most of the pop culture references come from one character and that is Noah Foster. He is a movie and serial killer nerd and kind of is the he does dump exposition but in a very fun way. And I am going to be doing a video about exposition later on so stay tuned for that. And I am going to talk about how to really involve exposition in a good way. And so just dumping it like a dumpster truck. Anyway, getting back to the topic. The way that scream the TV show deals with pop culture references is really well handled and giving it to one character and having it make sense really works. And just having that one person to give a look at like a digestible amount of exposition and references for the audience. On the other hand, we have Riverdale where basically all of the characters make pop culture references that don't really mean anything. They're just really there for comedic purpose. And one of the biggest ones that I remember was even in like the first episode. We had Reggie calling Jughead, Donny Darko and Suicide Squad in the same sentence. And those things I guess are related but not really. And we didn't really get a sense of why Reggie would know of Donny Darko. I mean, Suicide Squad is more recent which kind of makes sense. At the same time, it doesn't really have any meaning and it doesn't really make sense to give Reggie those lines. So basically use pop culture references sparingly and in the right place. If you want me to make another video about pop culture references, leave a comment and I will. I'll do it. It's fun. A game that I highly suggest playing is who said it. Now you can play this game with your characters or you can play it with your favorite TV show just as an exercise to show how different dialogue is for different characters. And this is a really fun game just to really get your mind wrapped around the fact that every character does have different dialogue and different mannerisms and different vocabulary. There is definitely lines that you cannot imagine any other character saying in your favorite TV show because it just wouldn't make sense. It wouldn't make sense with their personality and how they conduct themselves. And your dialogue should be that way with your characters. It shouldn't be interchangeable. It should really be personal to each individual character. Now in my last video I talked about how to create complex characters. If you want to check out that video, I'll leave a card to it up here or up here actually and we up here right here right up up here. And I talked about how your characters see other people and again that comes into play a lot when you're writing dialogue. This is very important to think about when you are developing the relationships between your characters because what one character would say to another, they might not say to one another person. Like if you have a link up to another character, they would not say the same thing to these other characters is totally different relationship. And I want you just to think about the relationships you have with different friends. And something that you would say to one friend, you don't have the same relationship with another person. So you would communicate it differently or you might not even talk about that subject with those friends. It's really dependent on what kind of relationship you have and what has been built over time. And that is something you need to think about when it comes to your characters because that will build a history between your characters and really give them a lot more dimension. And that's what we're really looking for when we're looking for really great characters. When writing characters overall, you really want to create this sense that they are real people, that they are walking around in the world and experiencing things like we do because people want to connect to your characters. They want to feel something when your characters are feeling something. They want to feel in pain when your characters hurt or overjoyed when they are happy. And really that's our job as the writers to create characters that are audience become really attached to. It's a definitely not an easy job, but we can definitely work to make it happen. I hope you all enjoyed this video. I really enjoy talking about this stuff. Leave a comment down below if there's any questions you have that you'd like me to address in future videos, anything you're struggling with, do with writing. My next video is going to be about keeping your characters consistent and as well being able to develop character growth and keeping your characters consistent and having character development is very important. I hope you guys stay tuned for that video. Be sure to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss anything. Well, hit the bell so you really don't miss anything and give this video a like and I will catch you guys on Tuesday with another video. Bye! When doing? Okay. Wonder what my mind is? Well, nope.