It's often said the Inuit have 52 words for snow. That's 52 distinctions they have for a specific type of snow, I imagine referring to its state, density and what-not.Genuinely, finding a character's "voice" is really fucking hard. This isn't something that only comes from practice, it comes from a lot of experience: Talking to a lot of people, really listening to a lot of people, reading a lot, watching a lot of content, etc.
When done well, you can pick up on details about a person entirely based on what their dialogue is. Their maturity, the relationship between the two characters, the emotions their feeling... People mistake the idea that "show don't tell" means there's no dialogue. NO! What "show don't tell" means is that we learn things about the character's BEYOND the explicit thing stated in the dialogue.
If we look at this bit of internal dialogue:
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We're not learning anything beyond what the character is explicitly telling us is happening. And rather than us being told that Nick's mind has internalized this part of his transformation, it would have been wonderful if this was just something that was naturally happening and as readers we picked up on the consistent feminization. After 150 pages, if you've written your characters well, having their speech patterns change should stick out just as much as seeing them starting to grow breasts
That's kind of what I mean where I think an editor could help. You don't need the full story to point out where some of the "fat" in the story can be cut. That's why I think an editor would provide the most "bang for the buck" when it comes to taking her works to the next level. Before worrying about having "perfect" dialogue, we've already got some nuance that can be introduced just by slimming down the amount of dialogue. Because I genuinely think Melissa is better than most. But I also know that once you're at this level, getting even better is especially hard.
One of my favourite random bits of research can be found
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(and
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if you don't have an account). In short, in Namibia there's a tribe called the Himba and researchers led by a professor of the University of Essex found the Himba like everyone use words to describe colours. They're a tribe long isolated from outside influences so their language developed without those influences. In English eleven broad colour categories are used to describe colours, e.g. green, blue, yellow. The Himba use five. So means they group colours together for which we use different colours. That's interesting because those researchers found that because those categories used by the Himba allows them to see a distinction in different types of green Westerners would have a difficult time to see. But because their categories mean they don't have different names for types of blue and green we in the west have a very easy time seeing the difference with the blue standing out and they have trouble seeing it in the following image:
So in short, the words we have for specific colours determines the way we see them. So knowing and studying more names for different shades of colour does allow us to see more differences between colours.
Now, the reason I bring this up is when extrapolating, I believe this also works for describing actions in works of fiction. When an author wants to write a character's voice they're limited by language. If your vocabulary is richer, that means adding an extra unique layer on top of your characters is easier. It allows an author to make it easier to make every character more unique. When drawing an image of a person it's a hell of a lot easier to use 50 colours than it is when using 9.
An other thing I wonder about what it's like as a 3d CGI artist is what I'd like to call the Lion King problem. I'm sure you've seen the 90s classic cartoon, I'm not sure if you've seen the 2019 remake. The 1994 film is hand drawn and the characters have almost caricature-like expressive faces, making it very clear for the viewer what their thoughts are without them really needing a voice to express those thoughts. The 2019 remake decided to make all animals photorealistic, sacrificing those expressive faces. That results in a hollowed out version without the charm of the original.
When doing 3d animation having true non-verbal expressions I wonder if maybe they have to lean more into the caricature, exaggerated types of emotion to truly sell the emotions the characters feel. But at the same time that would be too comical to take serious as well. So I think it's a conundrum on how to really do that sort of stuff well. There's also the limitations the 3d software offer to take into account as well. And if the Academy Award winning artists who had trouble selling those emotions when they did The Lion King, is it really fair to ask it of Melissa? I don't know. I really don't know.
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But these two limitations both are why I feel Melissa works so well in text stories. Her art is superb and in text stories she's proven she does very well.
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