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Perhaps one way to see it is that you are representing reality, not copying it. In the same way that a painting (even those of the photographic realism school) represents or shows reality rather th...
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#3: Attribution notice added
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/20470 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
Perhaps one way to see it is that you are representing reality, not copying it. In the same way that a painting (even those of the photographic realism school) represents or shows reality rather than tries to provide an exact copy of it, so too with writing. I want my characters to sound like real people without actually copying how real people speak -- incomplete sentences, fillers, ect. Even though I read it nearly thirty years ago, I remember some of the voices from Ernest Hemingway's 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' because they were so authentic, yet so different. However, he didn't just 'photocopy' real speech.