I am a very aural person. My head is a noisy place. I re-hear conversations I've had in real life, and I hear the voices of three-quarters of the original SG1 very clearly when I'm writing. I feel like I have them down pretty well, though I've definitely made mistakes. (I don't hear all the characters I write in fanfic. The Matrix, for example; I never got Neo's voice right and I was miles from the ballpark with Trinity's.) When I'm stuck on a plot point in a story, I will sit down and just write stream of concsiousness in 1st person from one of the characters, and 90% of the time it gets me out of the jam.
I think Teal'c's voice is kind of a trick question. I hear him, and I know what he's going to say most of the time. But I think that's partially due to his having a very small vocabulary on the show. He says things over and over, so his intonation (like his eybrows) is drilled into our brains. Actually getting Teal'c is harder than getting his voice, much more so than with the others. I tried to write a fic from Teal'c's POV once and it wasn't even like pulling teeth, it was like a black hole. Nothing. And it was for a ficathon, so I never got a chance to go back and do it right.
Daniel is the one out of the four who gives me fits. I don't hear him most of the time. I have to put a lot of effort into writing dialogue for him, and dialogue is usually easiest for me. It's odd, because I share most of his interests and some of his education, and my personality is closer to his than to any of the others. I think perhaps our worldviews are very different.
I have no clue with Cam and Vala.
In fact, I find when I do infuse Sam with little personality quirks that are outside canon (not contradictory to, but extemporaneous), she is defaulted with what I like or may do.
I think, not that I'm trying to get all Obi-Wan on you, I think this is one of the easiest things to do as a writer, and something we have to work against. I once had teenage Sam thinking that her favorite TV shows were Nova and Magnum, P.I., and Magnum was entirely me, not Sam. No doubt there are many other examples in my stories.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2009-03-11 09:48 pm (UTC)I think Teal'c's voice is kind of a trick question. I hear him, and I know what he's going to say most of the time. But I think that's partially due to his having a very small vocabulary on the show. He says things over and over, so his intonation (like his eybrows) is drilled into our brains. Actually getting Teal'c is harder than getting his voice, much more so than with the others. I tried to write a fic from Teal'c's POV once and it wasn't even like pulling teeth, it was like a black hole. Nothing. And it was for a ficathon, so I never got a chance to go back and do it right.
Daniel is the one out of the four who gives me fits. I don't hear him most of the time. I have to put a lot of effort into writing dialogue for him, and dialogue is usually easiest for me. It's odd, because I share most of his interests and some of his education, and my personality is closer to his than to any of the others. I think perhaps our worldviews are very different.
I have no clue with Cam and Vala.
In fact, I find when I do infuse Sam with little personality quirks that are outside canon (not contradictory to, but extemporaneous), she is defaulted with what I like or may do.
I think, not that I'm trying to get all Obi-Wan on you, I think this is one of the easiest things to do as a writer, and something we have to work against. I once had teenage Sam thinking that her favorite TV shows were Nova and Magnum, P.I., and Magnum was entirely me, not Sam. No doubt there are many other examples in my stories.