Inkless

rhythm is more important than spelling in imitating regional dialect

In Reading Like a Writer, a book on literary analysis for aspiring writers, Francine Prose quotes Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (pg 16). Part of the quote is this piece of dialog:

“Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed towards Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer my conscience if I did.”

As Prose points out, the word “aloose” alone goes along way towards conveying “the rhythm and flavor of a local dialect”. I’d add that the flow of the speaker’s voice, with run-ons and sentence-fragments and the little repetitions of casual speech (look here…see here… Here this fellow) is smooth enough and genuine enough that her unfamiliar word combination doesn’t throw us off. Like many of Flannery O’Connor’s characters, the speaker has a convincing regional accent because O’Connor does most of her work with diction and grammar, and gives us only occasional, well-chosen re-spelled or re-structured words to deal with.

Diction is the focus here. The word means “word choice”, but includes the sense of “enunciation” and “pleasing speaking ability”—word choice that is about words in context, not just words on their own. A character’s speech doesn’t just need to reflect their origins of the speaker, it also has to be smooth enough that readers can slip into the new context. If O’Connor had played too much with the spelling, even if her new words better reflected the proper pronunciation, readers would have to spend much more time sounding out the words and would be less able to get into the feel of the writing. As an analogy, think about how much harder it is to read a Shakespeare play than it is to listen to the play performed (after a couple minutes slipping into the context).

Avoid Being a Bad-Grammar Maven

Take another example of O’Connor’s regional dialect, from Wise Blood. The main character, Haze, a young man from the country, arrives in a city not really knowing where to go, copies down the address of a woman written on the door of a bathroom stall and takes a taxi there:

They had driven a few blocks before Haze noticed him squinting at him through the rear-view mirror. “You ain’t no friend of hers, are you?” the driver asked.

“I never saw her before,” Haze said.

“Where’d you hear about her, She don’t usually have no preachers for company.” He did not disturb the position of the cigar when he spoke; he was able to speak on either side of it.

“I ain’t any preacher,” Haze said, frowning. “I only seen her name in the toilet.”

“You look like a preacher,” the driver said. “That hat looks like a preacher’s hat.”

“It ain’t,” Haze said, and leaned forward and gripped the back of the front seat. “It’s just a hat.”

They stopped in front of a small one-story house between a filling station and a vacant lot. Haze got out and paid his fare through the window.

“It ain’t only the hat,” the driver said. “It’s a look in your face somewheres.”

“Listen,” Haze said, tilting the hat over one eye, “I’m not a preacher.”

The taxi driver says the woman “don’t usually have no preachers for company”, which is fine, many writers use double-negatives to give a feeling of uneducated southernness to a story. But Haze doesn’t say “I ain’t no preacher” he says “I ain’t any preacher”, which feels like the correct grammar for his response to the driver, in a cracked sort of way. He also uses the correct “I’m not a preacher” at the end instead of “I ain’t a preacher”. Both of these instances give the reader the sense that Haze is exerting extra effort to make sure he’s being clear and correct, and the southern context comes through even more clearly than if O’Connor had applied the “rules” of poor grammar more consistently.

Stoning Your Readers

In contrast: take a look at this bit of dialog between two gypsies in Tim Power’s The Anubis Gates:

Responding to the dog’s summons, a dark man in a striped corduroy coat stepped out of the tent and strode across the grass toward Fikee. Like the dogs, he halted well short of the old man. “Good evening, rya,” he said. “Will you eat some dinner? They’ve got a hotchewitchi on the fire, smells very kushto.”

“As kushto as hotchewitchi ever does smell, I suppose,” Fikee muttered absently. “But no, thank you. You all help yourselves.”

“Not I, rya—my Bessie always loved cooked hotchewitchi; so since she mullered I don’t eat it anymore.”

Does this convince you of anything except that Mr. Powers looked up at least four words of Romani language? Perhaps when you were reading it, your reaction was something like mine: “Ok, ‘rya’ means ’sir’, so ‘Sir, there’s hotchewitchi’, some food or another, doesn’t really matter, so ‘Sir there’s some food. It’s very kushto.’ ‘Tasty’, obviously. ‘Sir there’s some food, it’s very tasty.’ Then the other guy, ‘As kush–as tasty as h– as that food ever does smell, I suppose.’ What a waste of my time.”

In Snatch, the itinerant, indigent, “Pikers” use diction and a manner of speaking that clearly reflects who they are, and contributes to the natural flow of their speech (so well that it’s funny). In The Anubis Gate, the foreign words are tossed into the flow of speech like large rocks. The rest of what the gypsy characters say includes none of the peculiarities of grammar or diction that might convince us that these are non-native speakers from a culturally isolated community.

However, Power’ has not subjected us to the worst form of cheater’s dialect: apostrophication (doin’ nuthin’ but talkin’ and cussin’) .

Rule #1 for Dialect: Do not cut off bits of words and dress the wounds with apostrophes unless a madman forces you to do so at gunpoint. Should a madman do so, you are still obliged to try and talk him down first.

Cataloging Dialog

Fiction includes many great examples of dialog in dialect, but in preparing to write stories, we should also analyze our chosen dialects outside of fiction examples in order to increase our authenticity. In a later post, I will try to do something like this for Russian, based on my knowledge of the language and my native-Russian-speaking friends.

One of the first mistakes beginning writers make is that they use too many adverbs. This is probably due to a number of misguided efforts aimed at making writing more vivid:

1) the beginning writer’s desire to cram as many detail words as possible into every sentence

2) the notion that adding adverbs makes writing more active

3) the new writer’s mistaken reliance on descriptive words instead of a combination of descriptive phrases and good detail selection

How can one avoid flabby writing? By having a balanced word diet. Here’s a plan I recommend:

The words you provide to readers should be rich in nouns and verbs. They’re nutritious. Basic punctuation is, of course, necessary but only in smaller quantities. The same is true of adjectives. If you’re tossing in handfuls of commas and em-dashes, or layering multiple adjectives on a single noun, you’re writing will start to become unhealthy.

Finally, adverbs should be sprinkled only lightly throughout your work. If readers have ground through a page of solid nouns with only sparse use of adjectives and essential punctuation, then allow them to have an adverb for sweetening.

This is the third of the eight categories in the Story Gamut, my way of classifying story elements on a scale from micro-elements to macro-elements. It is concerned with the sentence-level organization of writing. As such, it covers many of the no-fun aspects of writing: proper grammar, punctuation, and the technical details that, when written well, dissolve into invisibility.