Throwback Monday! Taken in the early 2010's, when I had a sense of humor at work. I may or may not still have that Sun doll, and the whale was put back in storage somewhere in this state after making a few appearances at the Big E.
While I was working on a few of my short stories, I noticed that I was trying to write my dialogue to fit the tenor of the story. I noticed that I was doing this on a similar scale in my fantasy series, only I was applying it during a given scene with certain characters.
For example, if I was dealing with a particular scene at the palace, I would tweak the dialogue to more accurately reflect what the courtiers and others would speak and how they would answer.
I found myself doing this with my sort stories, almost automatically. For example, a short story that I was rewriting, the setting was a passenger train in the late 19th century. Now in the Victorian age, there was a certain fluidity to the language, even though certain slang and curse words that would be the norm today.
So I made sure that the dialogue stayed within those Victorian standards. For example, I had my character curse, or rather, use a curse word that was stronger 'damn'. But I simply couldn't drop an F bomb when the man was showing disgust with himself and/or his current situation. Instead, I use the version that preachers would use during fiery sermons about sin: fornicate.
While it doesn't have the shock or staying power of today's F bombs, it can still pack a punch where a proper young lady would be scandalized by the word.
Another example where I tried to tailor the dialogue to the tone of the story, was another rewritten short story that I had set in today's world, but the people were part of a large wolf pack (you know the type: human carnivore, answers to the man down under, etc.) that was a tiny bit gothic in nature.
So the dialogue had to be more in the view of gothic, with shades of being quite erudite. Like in the style of a few well known period shows back when television used to be really good.
One more example, again dealing with a rewrite (I have a plethora of badly written short stories that were explicitly created for my now closed short story blog that are desperately looking to be rewritten), with the setting being in the backwoods of a nameless southern state, and two of the characters being of the "Deliverance" mentality, and the other two being of the jaded city type with their own brand of justice.
Let me tell you, it were not easy writing dialogue for two characters with the IQ of their shoe sizes combined, but it was disturbingly easy to write dialogue for the proverbial dumb blonde/valley girl who actually wasn't plus her assistant.
So with those examples shown, I guess my question for every oner would be: do you tweak the way you go about writing dialogue based on what the given setting for your story, or do you keep it the same regardless of the type of story that you're writing?
