One of the most common remarks a Beatle fan fiction author might receive regarding his or her work is “How do you get the Beatles to talk the way they do in your writing? It’s impossible for me to make them sound like themselves when I try to write a fan fic!”

The bad news is that there is no surefire way to write an absolutely perfect piece of Beatle-speak within your story. If it was that easy to do, then the Internet would be inundated with hundreds of high-quality entertaining Beatle epics, which we know couldn’t be further from the truth!

However, don’t throw out that story you’ve been working on for weeks just because the dialogue needs some re-tooling. The good news is that a number of strategies exist that you can utilize to make the Beatles and the other characters in your fan fics sound more believable.

Okay, what’s the big deal about dialogue?

Dialogue and narration are the two main elements of any piece of fiction. To give you a simple definition of both, dialogue is anything that your characters are saying, and narration is everything in between (e.g. “The sky was a vivid blue that day. The rain from the night before had left everything outside looking green and vibrant….”).

Dialogue, however, isn’t merely the simple conversation between two or more characters. It also contributes to a number of story elements, such as setting, plot and pacing, and, most importantly, character development. The words your characters use can make or break a story, no matter what the genre is. In general, poorly written or ineffective dialogue can be a major turn-off, and readers may find it difficult to read beyond the first few paragraphs of your work.

So where do I start?

First and foremost, read and listen to the Beatles! When you read through any transcripts of interviews they have done or writings they’ve composed, you get an idea of what words they used and how their sentences are arranged.

Listening and observing are also of key importance. When you watch any of their press conference interviews, for example, you get a good sense of the up-and-down cadence of their speech, so you’ll be prepared to choose the right words for your characters to say.

Honestly, this reading-and-listening suggestion should not be anything too torturous for most fans. We’ve all seen A Hard Day’s Night at least ten times and read countless interviews with the lads, so everyone should be somewhat well versed in this area.

What do I do while writing?

After following the read-and-listen suggestion, the next step is to get inside the Beatles’ heads and think about how they might respond to someone talking to them. Let’s say you’re writing a scene where, for instance, a snotty reporter is relentlessly irritating John and Paul during a press conference. After engaging in massive Beatle-study as most of us fans have done, it’s not hard to guess that both Beatles would respond very differently to the person pestering them. Paul might exhibit a bit more decorum in such a scenario, but John, on the other hand, might offer a sarcastic comment instead.

As you start putting words into the Beatles’ mouths, keep in mind that the characters in any fiction you might write, Beatle stories or otherwise, should not start spouting out tired, clichéd speech that we’ve heard in movies or on TV innumerable times. Your female lead character is going to come across as a drip if she spits out a line like, “Oh, Paul, I’ve loved you since the moment we met” in the middle of an emotional scene. While this may truly be your character’s thoughts, a simple re-wording of the same sentiment will create a much more striking effect on the reader.

Specifically regarding Beatle fan fiction, the most common and perhaps most important challenge to the genre is making the boys actually sound British. There’s no point in writing about the Beatles if your John character is going to walk up to someone and say, “Howdy, pardner!” like he’s living in the Old West.

The easiest way to make them sound as if they’re actually from England would be to include various well-known regionalisms in their speech. If Paul is meeting someone in a formal situation in your story, for example, he might say, “How d’ya do?” instead of “Hello, how are you?” There are a million-and-one other words or phrases you can toss into your characters’ statements when necessary (luv, cuppa, smashing, bird, he’s cheesed off, bloody ‘ell, etc.). However, don’t overdo it with slang, otherwise you’ll end up with a rather loony image of the Beatles if every single sentence they utter sounds like “He got dead cheesed off at the bird before he popped off to the shop for a pack of crisps.” Your readers shouldn’t have to have a British-to-American dictionary at their side to get through your story. Add just enough of those regionalisms to give the Beatles’ speech the appropriate flavor.

Additionally, there is the issue of writing in dialect, which is slightly different from simply including key British words within the dialogue. Dialects are “distinguished by vocabulary, pronunciation, and/or syntax.” (Hodges, Hodges’ Harbrace Handbook, p. G-24). In other words, the writer re-shapes the words and sentences to create the desired effect. For an example of dialect, one can read a bit of dialogue from Mammy in Gone With the Wind:

Ah specs it’s kase gempmums doan know whut dey wants. Dey jes’ knows whut dey thinks dey wants. An’ givin dem whut dey thinks dey wants saves a pile of mizry an’ bein’ a ole maid. (Mitchell, p. 71)

Many readers are going to have one heck of a time “translating” what Mammy was saying. Likewise in the fan fic world, some people may attempt to write John’s dialogue as something like “’Ey, ‘e’s off his ‘ead, luv, ‘e ‘is. ‘E doesn’t know what ‘e’s talkin’ about, ya know?” Not only will Spell-Check on your computer go crazy with red underlining, but sometimes writing dialect takes more effort than it’s worth and distracts the writer from developing other areas of the story.         

When dialect is done well, it works. When it’s not done well—which is usually the case for most novice writers—it gets very distracting. We know the Beatles are British; you don’t need to “write in” their Scouser accents. For most fan fic writers, the general consensus is to stay away from dialect until you’ve had plenty of practice writing effective dialogue.

On a similar thought, besides getting the Beatles to sound British, their speech—as well as the speech of other characters in the story—should be authentic to the time period the story is set in. A female character living in 1964 England, for example, should not sound like a 1980s Valley Girl (e.g. “Like, oh my god, meeting the Beatles was, like, totally the most radical thing that’s ever happened to me!”), and the Beatles should certainly not sound like that, either!

Profanity is not out of the question either. The reader would hardly expect the Fabs to say, “Oh, shucks, that’s awful!” in a situation where the plot has taken a turn for the worse. As long as the swearing does not get out of control within your story, it can be used effectively.

Now that I’m done with the first draft, what’s next?

In regards to dialogue (as well as the rest of the story), nothing is truly “done” until you’ve gone back and read through the completed work. Your readers truly deserve a high-quality piece of fiction. Just because you’re putting your story on your personal website and not handing it to a teacher doesn’t mean you can skip the final editing stage. More often than not, you’re going to find that you want to change things around or re-write entire sections of your story to make it more effective.

Regarding the topic at hand, you can concentrate solely on writing effective Beatle-speak if you make time to go back and re-read the work to look for grammatical or punctuation errors instead of concentrating on everything at once. Most writers don’t want to be bothered with spelling and grammar if they’re “swept up in the moment” as they’re creating a highly emotional discussion…but good writers will go back to what they’ve written at a later date and fix any unintentional errors.

Once you’ve written a scene or two, the easiest way to self-check your work is to read it aloud. If you’ve done things right, you should be able to see and hear the Beatles talking as you read…and don’t worry about the odd looks your family might give you as they hear Liverpudlian accents floating through the hallway from your computer room!

If you read your work aloud and something doesn’t quite sound right, you can always go back and change things around—that’s why word processing programs were invented! If you’re writing something like a one-act play rather than a short story, this is an especially crucial step when editing, since your work depends completely on effective dialogue.

When the rest of your story is written to your satisfaction, then it’s time to go through the story and take a look at the way your dialogue is structured. A number of general rules exist when writing conventional dialogue, not only for fan fiction but also for any type of creative writing:

• Please use proper punctuation! Make sure there are quotation marks around your character’s statements. The correct format for quotations is: He said, “This is great.” The wrong way would be: He said “This is great”. Grammar-Check will pick up some of your errors, but not all of them, so be sure and proofread.
  
• Don’t overuse italics, boldface, underlining, or CAPS. For instance, someone shouting out “What the hell is he doing?” does not need to be typed in all CAPS. The reader already knows that it’s an exclamation—anything more is overkill.
  
• When someone speaks, use “said” instead of “cried,” “shouted,” etc. The speaker’s tone of voice should be inherent within the words they choose. Overusing “he yelled,” “he cried,” and such gives your story the appearance that you’ve thrown in as many big words as you could. This doesn’t mean you can never use those other words, but try to use them sparingly.

• If your character is giving a long speech and you feel the sentences need to be broken up, you can use ellipsis (…) to indicate a dramatic pause between ideas:

“He got up and walked right out of the room at dinner tonight! He didn’t say a word to any of us about what was bothering him. He threw that napkin on the table and went stomping into the kitchen…I don’t know what he’s thinking sometimes.”

Dashes (--) can also be used to indicate sudden shifts in thought within a sentence: 

“It was that lady, Miss—oh, I can’t remember her name—the crazy woman who paid her entire electric bill in pennies.

As with any sort of style-based punctuation, ellipsis and dashes should be used sparingly in accordance with the pace of the story. A printed page of dialogue with too many dashes, for example, will look like Emily Dickinson has come back from beyond the grave and gone crazy with the hyphen key on your computer.

• You might find that you want to cut out some unnecessary dialogue. The pace of a story might be slowed down too much by something like the following:

 Katie took a deep breath and said, “Hello, John.”  
“Hello, Katie.”  
“Hi, Paul.”  
“Hi, luv. Good to see you again.”  
“Hello, Ringo. Hello, George.”  
“Hi Kate,” they both answered.  
“So, how did the concert go tonight?” Katie asked them anxiously.

Since it’s not really crucial that the reader hears each and every hello to the Beatles, that entire segment can be condensed in one sentence without losing any of its meaning:

Katie took a deep breath and greeted all four of the Beatles before asking the question that had been on her mind all evening. “How did the concert go tonight?”   

• Again, regarding organization, break up your dialogue when necessary. Three pages of talking and no action are just as tedious to read as three pages of description and no talking. Get your characters to move around and do something while they’re talking:

Paul lit a cigarette and pocketed his lighter. “I don’t understand the old mixer at all,” he said. “He’s not the most trustworthy person in the world.”  

Sharon nodded, rubbing Paul’s shoulders as he reclined lazily in his chair. “I agree. I’ve known him all my life and he’s never changed.”

A few World Wide Web sites also might assist you with your work:

·  Writing Dialogue
(http://faculty.valencia.cc.fl.us/jfuhrman/writingcenter/writing2.htm) includes more tips on proper dialogue punctuation.

·  Beatlespeech (http://www.arcomnet.net.au/~porter/beatlespeech.html) lists some of the British slang that you might want to utilize for the Beatles’ dialogue in your story.

·  ‘60s Slang 
(http://cougartown.com/slang.html) might help you select the right words for your non-Beatle characters to say for a story set during the 1960s.

As mentioned previously, these strategies outlined in this article are in no way all-inclusive when it comes to writing good dialogue, but they should give you a good start in writing effective Beatle-speak. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be very surprised how easily the right words will come to you!

Tina Kukla has been writing since she was 8 years old. Besides filling up a filing cabinet with short stories and historical novels over the years, she is also the author of the Beatles fan fics "Live at 12 Cold Creek Street" and "Days in the Life," featured on her website, Beatlegirl's World.

A lifelong Chicago-area resident, Tina is a also a preschool teacher and is nearing completion of her master's degree in education. Besides writing and the Beatles, her other interests include reading and anything to do with computers.

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