How to create a memorable line?
I recently re-watched the Overwatch animated short "Honor and Glory". You can tell the writers were proud of the line "Live with Honor, Die with Glory", as the characters say it a fair few times for such a short video.
I think it's a good line, even if they beat you over the head with it a bit too often, but I can't tell why. I think it's memorable enough for this short, but I don't know why people would like it or how it can be "inspirational", I guess.
Obviously this is a very surface level kind of memorable quote, there are hundreds of others that are more profound and famous, like "tears in rain". What makes such lines so memorable? How can I create my own?
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The most memorable lines seem organic and natural to both character and situation. There must be a context or it will look and feel out of place - like a motivational poster in the middle of a battlefield.
The ‘Live with Honour, Die with Glory’ line could well be the unit motto and uttered as both a reminder of unity and call for courage in battle as their brothers in arms had shown in the past.
Such a line must contain truth, if only for the character in that situation.
John Burgon’s immortal line ‘a rose red city half as old as time’ is memorable for its beauty and simplicity. It is a wonderful way to say that something is truly ancient.
Sometimes a memorable line is so because of circumstance and wordplay as with Franklin’s ‘We must, indeed,hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately’. Since Franklin’s was a response to a comment, little time was spent crafting it, but it remains and is oft quoted.
How will you craft your own brilliant and memorable line? Find a character who might say something fascinating and put him in situations until he does.
When I am reading something, I often will linger on a paragraph or reread a section that has a particular resonance or beauty - perhaps both. Much of Les Miserables is like that - Hugo describes how a person who remembers Paris remembers not just the streets down which they walked, but those they never passed, homes they entered and more they never even saw, for even that which one did not experience colours and shapes them and is remembered. The beauty of the prose and the profundity of the thought held me there.
The best lines come naturally, part of the whole and inspired by what preceded and what shall follow.
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What makes this phrase meaningful is that it sums up a particular philosophy --the philosophy of these characters and their subculture --in a form that is both brief and meaningful.
If you look at famous philosophers, most of them had their life's work condensed by history into a single pithy quote or paraphrase. "I know only that I know nothing" (Socrates). "I think, therefore I am" (Descartes). "Take the leap of faith," (Kierkegaard). Conversely, maybe it's that we tend to remember only the philosophers whose work can be summed up this way.
If you want your character's catchphrase to be memorable, make it meaningful.
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What makes such lines so memorable? How can I create my own?
An original twist with resonance, often combined with poetry, concision.
The "twist" is a surprise, but resonates with the sentiment. "Tears in the rain" has a twist: We see tears, but "in the rain" they vanish away; meaning a person is crying and expressing grief in public (outside, obviously) but nobody else knows. This is a poetic, concise way to express this feeling we sometimes have of private grief we hide from others.
Live with Honor, is the first part, an easy instruction, pablum really, because every normal person would like to believe they live with honor. Die with Glory is the twist in the command, but it resonates: The opposite of "living" is "dying", usually a tragedy. But now part of living with honor includes the courage to die, and not by running from it but by embracing it. Very few of us want to do that! But we expect our soldiers to be courageous and put their lives on the line; so this aphorism is for the elite that risk their lives; the twist resonates with (adds meaning to) the first part.
"Make My Day," by Dirty Harry, encouraging a criminal to draw on him, so he can kill him. This is just the twist: In the context of this scene, the twist is that in a dangerous situation Harry expresses the opposite of fear: He doesn't fear a shootout, he is eager for it, because it would give him an excuse to kill a criminal and he would enjoy that. None of that is in our conception of an ideal cop, so this is a twist on those expectations. And it resonates (or anti-resonates) with that ideal perfectly for the title character, Dirty Harry.
On top of that, "Make My Day" carries the connotation that even if Harry did kill the perp, he wouldn't care that much, he'd be happy for a day and forget it; on to kill the next crook.
That is why "Make My Day" would be better than "I Dare You".
It helps to have poetry. Not in the rhyming sense necessarily, but notice "Live With Honor" and "Die With Glory" are poetic choices, the same number of syllables with the same stresses, "Live/Die" are opposites, "Honor/Glory" are not opposites but are often used together elsewhere. (They are opposite in the sense that Honor feels more passive and Glory feels more actively heroic).
Related to poetry is concision; being brief. Poets can pack a lot of meaning into a handful of words. Concision is critical to a catch-phrase. Not at the expense of clarity, but the shorter the message, the more punch it has. The typical conversational speaking rate is 2 words per second (2.5 in some cultures / cities, like NYC, 1.5 in other cultures / cities, like the American South).
So as a rule of thumb I'd say your catch phrase should be six words (3 seconds) or less, perhaps seven words. There are studies, in advertising, on the efficacy of slogans and on the words in a headline for an ad or letter. Studying just the number of words, these droop when going from six words to seven, and drop off dramatically going from seven to eight words. There are some exceptions that may be related to poetics (rhyming, rhythm, single syllable words). But as a rule of thumb, keep it short and sweet. And, of course, it should be easy to say, a tongue twister is not a good catch-phrase; and it should not require any thought to understand it. So a puzzle or double entendre is probably not a good catch-phrase if the dimmer half of us might not get the joke. (You should certainly use those elsewhere in dialogue, just not as your iconic phrase.)
Inventing a good catch-phrase is worth weeks of work, which may seem odd for a six word phrase, but in some works, that catch phrase becomes iconic, and the one thing readers take away verbatim from your writing, that means only your writing. If it is good and people use it, it can become a free advertisement for your work.
If your story can use one, it is worth working on.
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