This man grew up in the digital age, was a part of various online cultures, and marked the brass of his ammunition with memes and references. Yet when investigators released a transcript of what he supposedly said to his roommate, it reads like a combination between a Civil War-era love letter from the front, and a second-draft attempt by a middle-aged man who has no friends under the age of 40, and who doesn't have kids, so he has no goddamn clue how the young people talk these days.
In other words, it's about as convincing as the Steve Buscemi, "How do you do fellow kids?" meme.
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| You know the one. |
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Make Sure Your Story SOUNDS Right To The Ear
How your characters talk is a complicated combination of tone, slang, time period, ethnicity, cultural background, and a thousand other things. And it's a lot like eating a carefully-crafted lasagna; when it comes together, all the disparate pieces form a singular whole. And sometimes when you have just one or two little elements off, it might be written off as a quirk, or a chef's decision. But when something is really off, it ruins the entire ensemble.
One of the easiest ones to screw up is when you have someone who is part of a certain demographic, but they sound like they're part of another one. For instance, a rebellious 20-something with contempt for his father might sneeringly refer to him as "my old man" in the 1970s, or even the 1980s... but not in 2025. If a character is supposed to be British, then it's likely they're going to give measurements in the metric system, or use Celsius for temperature, unless they're acclimated to doing things differently for some reason. Someone who was raised on Chicago's South Side will have a different local dialect than someone from Boston's south side... as well as completely different understandings of cuisine, culture, and everything in between.
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| You can always tell when something sounds off. |
Speech is the manner we use to communicate, but beyond that, it's a road map of who we are, where we're from, and what experiences and interests we have. If you've ever heard veterans talk, then you know they have their own lingo and jargon, and it can offer some real insight as to who they were during their time in the service. If someone is terminally online, they'll have particular ways of speaking that might not making sense to people who aren't... and even if it doesn't crowd into their speech, they'll understand it when they see or hear it somewhere else. You can often tell if someone has been to therapy by the way they talk about issues, or if they read a lot of books without talking to too many people by how they mispronounce words they've only read before.
Writers often develop characters who have similar experiences to themselves, not just for ease of slipping into their skin, but for making sure their voice sounds authentic. But the further you're going to stretch outside of what you know personally, or places you've been and people you've heard, the more research you're going to have to do if you want to avoid the literary equivalent of your characters sounding like parents trying to be hip by drastically misusing their kids' slang in front of their friends.
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