Young Writers Society

So, I was reading the latest edition of the Squills newsletter and happened across @BlueAfrica's article Adventures in Writing where the topic du jour was how to write characters' dialogue if they speak with a dialect or accent.

The first section is the amazing BlueAfrica saying basically "Don't do that! Don't ever write out the accent in sounds like 'Ay mayt' and 'Nuthin' doin'!" Mostly the reason was because it's a pain in the butt -- which it totally is! It takes more time for you to digest unfamiliar spellings of words than spellings you're familiar with.

BUT

I remember reading Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. If you've read it, you know that there is no escaping exactly what BlueAfrica warns against:

"Love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore."

And I remember that at first it was a little hard to work through. I remember, at first, thinking like it was a pain in the butt and why would the author choose to write this way?

But I think maybe there's a benefit to it.

First of all, we pronounce words in our heads when we read or write them. The silent head voice is always there, and so when we see the words written out that way, that's how we'll read them. It takes longer, but it gives the character their own voice. It was especially important, I think, for the black characters to have a voice separate from the "proper" common writing that has been dominated by white authors.

Secondly, just 'cause something's harder to read doesn't mean that's bad. If you want your reader to take their time, you've got to slow them down with obstacles.

Describing a room as having a bed, a chair, and a window, and the reader moves through that like a piece of cake. Give the bed a pile of comforters on top, the chair a rip in its upholstery, and a window where one panel is replaced by a plastic back, and you've slowed the reader down with details so that they really see the room.

In the same way, writing out accents slows the reader down to really HEAR the dialogue instead of just comprehend it.

I think!


What do you think?
Let's have some awesome writerly discussion~

In fairness, I also did an article where I basically said, "No prologues!!! Don't ever use prologues!!!" even though (admittedly) prologues can be well-done and there are some books I like that have prologues (and in some of them I even like the prologues).

I think the thing about this, though--I mean, for phonetic spellings of accents to work, though, the thing you have to understand is that there is a LOT of research involved. What I would said to definitely never do is just think, "I'm going to write out an accent!" and then just do it and cut off letters here and there where you think they'd be missing.

In the article I mentioned Gone with the Wind (which I love, despite the horrible characters and the phonetically-spelled dialogue). Margaret Mitchell put a LOT of research into the dialogue of her characters. She learned all about the various slave dialects in the regions that her story takes place and also the regions various characters were from. And then she applied all that research, but she didn't just make all the slaves sound the same, either--like Mammy was born and raised in a manor house and has never worked outdoors, and she's also from a more upper-class, old-money area than the area where the O'Haras now live, so her dialect is somewhat different from the other slaves. I mean, it took A LOT A LOT A LOT of work to get that dialogue to where it is, to be as accurate and powerful and to really sound authentic rather than sounding like someone just trying to write out a dialect.

I also think it's important that there's a specific reason you'd spell out your dialogue phonetically. You need to be using it to achieve an effect or get across a point that you can't really get across any other way--again, not just doing it for the sake of doing it or just because you want readers to know that your character sounds French (or whatever).

And that's why I basically said "never do it," because on a site full of young writers it's a lot easier to say "DON'T DO THIS!!!" and let their experiences as they learn further teach them "You can do this, but here are a bunch of things you need to keep in mind while doing so" than to try to tell them the latter.

Plus there's the fact that I know I can be long-winded (this post is a good example) and I really try to keep my Squills articles as close to 1000 words as possible.

Well I use accents. Admittedly not in every book, but in my present one I am. Now, not everyone has accents. The more well-taught people don't have accents. I have a character with a British accent (which I think is extremely easy to write without confusing the reader) and then some who just talk hickish, and others with Irish and Scottish dialect. I write it all out.

Like @Hannah said, I think it gives each person their own personality. It adds flavor to the book. My reviewers so far have really liked it, and except for two minor times where it was hard to understand, they really enjoy having characters with different speech, especially for the time period.

I think it depends on what you are writing about, and most importantly: WHY?

I have it to show the range of speech in my world, and to spice things up. It adds some excitement and change I think.

My two cents

And that's why I basically said "never do it," because on a site full of young writers it's a lot easier to say "DON'T DO THIS!!!" and let their experiences as they learn further teach them "You can do this, but here are a bunch of things you need to keep in mind while doing so" than to try to tell them the latter.

@BlueAfrica, I love this sentiment. It's just hard because we have earlier writers AND later writers, BUT what I especially loved about saying "Don't do this" is that it's inviting writers to say, "Why not? I want to!" and getting them to think about it more deeply~ So in no way was I saying your firmness was wrong or bad, just so you know! I just wanted to get to the discussion, mwuahaha.

The Help is written partly in dialectical speech and partly in proper prose, and I think it works really well - it juxtaposes the characters - there's Skeeter, the well-educated white girl who writes properly, then there's Aibeleen, the black nanny who is a very intelligent woman and writes a lot, but writes in dialectical talk, and then there's Minny, who is not interested in writing and instead her stories are told in a much more anecdotal fashion again. I think it's a very clever way of giving the three characters their own voices. But I know my mother couldn't finish the book because she couldn't tackle the language - she's never been to the Southern United States, she doesn't know the way people talk, and she found it very hard to manage. So I think that writing out things phonetically can be a big problem for people who have never been to that part of the world. Of course locally born people who know the dialect will understand it - but if you're writing about Jackson Mississippi, using alternative spellings, you're surely enriching your writing for those who know the accent - but are you alienating readers who don't?

Irish characters get used a lot by authors and it annoys me because authors use tropes that are not true. Classic "Oirish"ness - where all "i"s become "oi"s - no Irish person sounds like that. Or an author might have an Irish person say, "Top o' the mornin' to you," -- no Irish person says that. It's poor research on their parts. And yet there are turns of phrase that Irish people use that if authors studied it properly they would be able to use to great effect. For instance, the word "sure" in Irish can be placed at the beginning of the sentence, the end of a sentence, used as a conjunction,it's all over the place in our day to day speak. Or "like" and "you know" that pepper the speech of some people. Or turns of phrase - "He made his pregnant wife do all the lifting" becomes "Sure didn't he make his wife do all the lifting - and her pregnant!" And if you wrote that, it immediately becomes more authentically Irish and enriches your writing. But only if you do the research first.

Exactly my point @StellaThomas, and that's in particular why I used the examples from The Rogue Blades (which does the "Oirishness" thing and actually uses the phrase "top o' the morning to ya!" once) and Gone with the Wind (which uses "sure" the way you've described, because Ms. Mitchell did hella research for this book).