Pop or Soda? Using Dialogue to Create Regional Characters

 

Following up on last week’s blog, today’s post gives more tips for using dialogue. This is a reprint of another article I wrote for the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog. It was published there on June 22, 2016, and I have made a few minor modifications to the original post. Unfortunately, I also had to remove several links that no longer work.

Pop or Soda? Using Dialogue to Create Regional Characters

Writers often create characters who aren’t native to the story setting. Giving these individuals particular dialogue traits makes it easy for readers to identify them during a conversation, but it can also provide hazards for the writer. Then there are those stories where all the characters come from the same region but the region itself has a distinctive dialect.

We can create regional characters by using regional speech patterns. Those patterns contain three components: pronunciation, grammar, and word usage. All affect dialect.

And each component has its own pitfalls.

Pronunciation

Some writers (e.g., Mark Twain) portray dialect sounds very well, but most don’t. You’ve probably read at least one book where you had to stop and try to figure out what the character was saying. That takes the reader out of the story, which is a cardinal sin.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott ends her chapter on dialogue this way:

One last thing: dialogue that is written in dialect is very tiring to read. If you can do it brilliantly, fine. If other writers read your work and rave about your use of dialect, go for it. But be positive that you do it well, because otherwise it is a lot of work to read short stories or novels that are written in dialect. It makes our necks feel funny. We are, as you know, a tense people, and we have a lot of problems of our own without you adding to them.

But even doing it brilliantly is not enough. You also need to do it right.

Dialects have their own pronunciation rules, and if you choose to write a dialect as it sounds, you had better be aware of those rules. Take Bostonian English, which is considered “r-less.” According to linguist Natalie Schilling, Bostonians tend to drop final Rs and Rs that come between a vowel and a consonant, but they never drop initial Rs, Rs that follow a consonant, and those that are inserted between vowels. For example:

·       THIS: He missed the pa’ty because he blew a tire when driving around a pa’ked ca’ blocking the road.

·       BUT NOT THIS: He missed the pa’ty because he blew a ti’e when d’iving a’ound a pa’ked ca’ blocking the ‘oad.

If you ignore those rules, expect an onslaught of complaints from the Boston area.

So how can a writer indicate a character’s regional origins without risking the hazards of bad dialect usage? Try this:

Hearing a familiar Southern drawl, I froze. Had Candice returned from vacation already?

From now on, we can identify Candice as the speaker by throwing in an occasional “y’all” without attempting to replicate the rest of her speech patterns—if she is from Georgia. People from Kentucky have less of a drawl and are more likely to say “you all” than “y’all.” (See https://www.quora.com/How-can-you-tell-apart-the-different-Southern-accents and the Kentucky results from the Harvard Dialect Survey, mentioned below.)

Grammar

Pronunciation and grammar are the ends of a sliding scale. Is using “git” for “get” primarily pronunciation or primarily grammar? I’d argue that it can be easily identified as either, putting it in the middle of the scale.

Most people don’t consider the use of pa’ty as a grammatical issue, so it fits on the pronunciation end. Then there are those practices that come down clearly on the grammar side. Take a-prefixing in Appalachian English, which is the practice of adding “a” before an “ing” verb and dropping the “g” at the end—think “a-goin’ a-fishin’.” As with Bostonian r-lessness, however, a-prefixing also has rules. An a-prefix can be attached to “ing” verbs but not to gerunds, adjectives, or objects of prepositions, even if those words also end with “ing.” (See http://theweek.com/articles/461642/grammar-rules-behind-3-commonly-disparaged-dialects.)

So if you are going to use either pronunciation or grammar to create a regional character, make sure you know the rules. 

Word Usage

When we talk about dialect, we usually mean pronunciation and sometimes grammar, but word usage is also important. Do you say “pop” or “soda?” If your character grew up in Michigan and calls it “soda,” be prepared for another onslaught of complaints from all those Michiganders who know better.

Using data from the Harvard Dialect Survey, the graphic at the head of this post shows word differences between people from Illinois or Michigan (on the left side) and people from Pennsylvania (on the right side). I didn’t include Indiana because those of us who live in the northern part of the state talk more like people from Illinois or Michigan than like people from the rest of Indiana.*

It’s usually easy to get our own region’s dialogue right because we know it when we hear it, but other regions can be filled with booby-traps. So where can a writer go to keep from making regional errors? Here are some resources:

• Use this link to the Harvard Dialect Survey to discover usages in the various states: dialect.redlog.net. The pages are static but the links work within the site.

• And here is a link to the Dictionary of American Regional English: http://dare.wisc.edu/

Finally, and just for fun, take the Harvard Dialect Survey to see how well your speech reflects your roots. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html?_r=0

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* Southern Illinois might align more with southern Indiana, but the Illinois figures are heavily influenced by the Chicago results.

Words, Words, Words

This week I’m covering the last two classifications in the rubric. The first has to do with the spoken word as depicted on the page, and the second covers the technicalities of the written word.

Dialogue

Objective 1: To identify who is talking without using irrelevant action or unnecessary dialogue tags.

Notice that the objective talks about unnecessary dialogue tags. I don’t agree with those people who say a writer should never use them. When not overused, “said” and “asked” are valid ways to handle attribution because they tend to fade into the background. But words like “interjected” and “articulated” should be avoided, as should adverbs such as in “said excitedly.” Those tags yell “look at me” instead of disappearing on the page. Instead of “said excitedly,” show her excitement in her actions.

That’s one way to avoid dialogue tags. Try something like this instead:

“It’s from Graham.” Lucy’s eyes sparkled as she grabbed the letter and tore it open.

As with any other action, however, one used for attribution must show characterization or move the story along. Dinner scenes can be especially hard to write because I am tempted to have my characters pass the potatoes or pour another cup of coffee for attribution purposes, and that gets boring after a while. It also sounds forced.

Objective 2: To write dialogue that feels realistic rather than dialogue that is realistic.

We all know how people really talk. “I, uh, saw Sue yesterday at, uh, the grocery store. In the produce section. She, uh, told me to tell you . . . Billy, stop pulling that dog’s tail! Now what was I saying? Oh yes, she, uh, told me to say hi.” Then there are the times when people talk over each other. And so on. Imagine putting real dialogue in a book without losing your reader. Impossible.

If a conversation doesn’t contribute to characterization or move the story along, leave it out. Or maybe you only need part of it. Two friends meet for lunch and talk about trivial things until they finish their dessert. Then Joan tells Cindy that Joan saw Cindy’s husband with another woman. You could provide a brief excerpt from the chit-chat or leave it out altogether and start the conversation with the bombshell. Unless you are using the chit-chat for a purpose, that is. Maybe Joan rushes from one trivial topic to another because she is too nervous to say what is really on her mind. Throwing in an “um” or two can also signal nervousness. But don’t overdo it, or you will still lose your reader.

Dialogue is one place where you should break the grammar rules. People rarely talk in complete sentences, for example, and the informality of their speech varies. If you have a very formal character, you can use his perfect grammar as a distinguishing feature. Otherwise, go ahead and break the grammar rules to make the conversation more realistic if—and this is a big if—the reader can understand the dialogue without slowing down to figure out what is being said.

That’s the problem with using dialects. They can be a lot of work for the reader. I have slave dialect in a book I am currently working on, and I tried oh so hard to get it right. (See the blog post on writing slave dialect that is linked below, which was written before I gave the manuscript to my beta readers.) I even cleared it with an African American writer friend. But when I gave the manuscript to my beta readers, they had too much trouble following it. So now I need to figure out how to provide the flavor without the actual dialect.

For purposes of the rubric, Objectives 1 and 2 are each worth 5% of the score, giving dialogue a total of 10%.

Language Use

Objective 1: To write clearly and concisely.

Any book is worthless if the reader can’t follow it. Writing is communication, and clarity is key. That includes novels and short stories as well as informative articles or blog posts like this one.

One way to NOT write clearly is to use long, convoluted sentences filled with adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. Another way is to use big words or allusions your reader won’t understand.

Obviously, there are times when you want a scene or some element of it to be ambiguous. But those instances will be infrequent.

When in doubt, keep it simple.

Objective 2: To use purposeful grammar and avoid typographical errors.

Writers who break the grammar rules because they don’t know what they are come across as uneducated. Worse, since grammar rules exist to provide clarity, those who break them out of ignorance may lose their readers along the way.

Notice that the objective talks about purposeful grammar use rather than proper grammar use. It’s okay to break the rules if you do it intentionally to achieve a certain effect. But you should know the grammar rules before you break them.

Here is a quote from Ernest Hemingway:

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements. [1925 letter to Horace Liveright, quoted in Ernest Hemingway on Writing. Emphasis in original.]

The second half of the objective speaks to the importance of proofreading. That should be self-evident, so I won’t discuss it here.

For purposes of the rubric, Objective 1 is worth 15% of the score and Objective 2 is worth 5%, giving language use a total of 20%.

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TO LEARN MORE:

For more of my advice on dialogue and language use, check out these earlier blog posts.

Dialogue:

·       Who Said That? (IWC Blog, June 8, 2016)]

·       Pop or Soda? Using Dialogue to Create Regional Characters (IWC Blog, June 22, 2016)

·       Writing Slave Dialogue (December 4, 2017)

Language Use:

·       "It is I" (September 8, 2014)

·       The Oxford Comma: A Metter of Clarity (January 12, 2015)

·       Writing is Communication (February 8, 2016)