Dialogue Part 5

DIALOGUE PART 5

Or:  Some Moron More on Dialogue

Guest Post on Dialects in Dialogue 

by Indie Author, Robert Bevan

“Why, yoo gitton outta’here, yung feller. Go’on, now! Yir no better then a five-legged horny toad inna butt-lickin’ contest!”

What’s wrong with the quote above? If you said it’s insanely stupid, congratulations! You’re right!

Also, it’s a good example of some really bad dialogue.

If you were the sort of person who might be inclined to write something like that, you might have been thinking something along the lines of “I’m being true to this character’s voice. That’s how he’d talk.”

But a person reading that would probably think something more along the lines of “What the fuck?”

Here are some things to consider when writing dialects:

1. Consider not doing it. Is it really necessary? Will it add what you want it to add to your story? Can you maybe add that element some other way? Perhaps with word choice?

The problem is that your job as a writer is to make the reader forget that they’re at home on the sofa, or in the dentist’s waiting room, or are still on their first year of a life sentence for first degree murder… or whatever. They are supposed to be in the world of your story, right there beside your protagonist, caught up in whatever danger or struggles he or she is going through.

Guess what happens when the reader has to stop and try to figure out what that jumbled mess of misspelled words and haphazardly placed apostrophes is supposed to be saying. Snap! “Damn. I’m back in my cell. I really hope Ice Pick will take the night off from raping me. My butt hurts.” You’ve failed.

2. Okay, fine. You’re convinced that one of your characters absolutely needs to speak with a different dialect. Consider a sprinkle rather than a dump. It’s like applying a touch of cologne, rather than smashing the bottle over your head and rubbing yourself down with the shit.

“Why, you get on outta’ here, young feller. Go on, now! You’re no better than a five-legged horny toad in a butt-lickin’ contest!”

Yeah, it’s still stupid, but at least it’s comprehensible, and the voice still comes through loud and clear.

It’s hard to write a heavy dialect well while keeping the reader from having to stop and figure it out. One author I’ve read who manages to make it work is Christopher Brookmyre, in his novel A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil. All the characters are Scots. And just like real Scots, you have no idea what they’re on about until you take a little time to sort it out in your head. But once it clicks, it becomes smooth sailing. So yeah, that’s a book I’d recommend for anyone who wants to take a close look at dialects written well, or for anyone who just wants to read a well-told story. I really enjoyed it.

3. Whatever you do, be consistent. If you’re going to have a character say “yer” at one point, make sure he doesn’t say “your” at any other point. If he drops the ‘g’ when he’s talkin’, make sure he also drops it when he’s walkin’.

4. One exception to the above suggestions is if you want your main character to also not understand what the dialect character is saying. Hell, if it’s meant to be misunderstood, lay it on thick. Does that work? Let’s see…

“Why, yoo gitton outta’here, yung feller. Go’on, now! Yer no better then a five-legged horny toad inna butt-lickin’ contest!”

“I’m sorry. Could you please take the cock out of your mouth and say that again?”

5. Word choice. Different sorts of people will use different words to describe the same thing. A carbonated beverage, for instance, might be called “pop” in the northern United States. A person from the southwest would say “soda”. If they just call it a “Coke," the odds are good that the speaker is from the deep south. If the person speaking fondly remembers the Coolidge administration, they might even call it a “tonic.”

But it’s not just regional. Word choice can also tell you something about what kind of person a character is, no matter where they are from. If a character refers to a child as a “pupil," you can bet that person is a teacher with a yardstick shoved up his or her ass. A cartoonishly generic old person might call the kid a “whipper-snapper” (probably best not to use “whipper-snapper”). If the character refers to the child as a “precious angel” or “spoiled little shit," the speaker is probably one of the kid’s parents. The word “minor” would most likely be spoken by a police detective or a pedophile.

If your choice of words can show me the difference between a burnt-out cop in Chicago still five long years away from retirement and a southern housewife who is desperately refusing to believe that her best years haven’t yet passed her by, then you’re doing your job as a writer.

Robert Bevan is an American author and university English teacher living in South Korea. He is a husband and father of two. When he isn't busy writing, teaching, fathering, or husbanding (a small window of time on Friday nights), he still plays third edition Dungeons and Dragons.

His newest release is "Shipfaced," a short story available on Amazon. An attempt at an honest day's work turns into a disaster, as Tim, Dave, Julian, and Cooper try to avoid getting raped by pirates and spending the rest of their lives staring at each other's dongs.  

 

His debut novel, "Critical Failures", attempts to bring a little something different to the comic fantasy genre. It is available on all e-book platforms, as is his growing list of short stories.

***
This wraps up our Dialogue Module. I'll be on WIPBlog vacation for the next three weeks!
Happy Writing and Revising,
J (Twitter: @JoanWIP)


Coming up,

Passive

Verbing

Nat Russo

If you'd like my take on a writerly subject, tweet me! 

 

GUEST: Robert Bevan

Guest Poster: Robert Bevan

On: Writing What You Want To Read,Self-Confidence, and 

Taking Criticism.

Warning: Guest poster cussage. 

So I was telling my good friend, beta partner, and author of the comic fantasy Critical Failures, Robert Bevan, that he should write a guest post for my writery blog. Now, let me infodump a mo here. Bobby and I have been friends for... a year now? Seems like more than a year. A few days ago, I was remembering how we first met and realized that beginning had a valuable message. So I said to Bobby, "Bobby, how did it feel when you first had the idea for CF?" 

Robert Bevan:

I first had the idea for Critical Failures while I was getting toward the end of an entirely unrelated novel that wasn't really falling into place like I thought it would. 

The climactic scene I was writing involved my characters being forced to act stupid in order for my own clever ideas to be implemented (hint: don't do that). And then I had a bunch of boring backstory I still had to dump on the reader in a Scooby-Doo-esque explanatory ending in order for a lot of things in the book to make sense in retrospect (hint: don't do that).


But I'd gotten that far, and I'd be damned if I was going to just abandon it unfinished to start up something new. If I let myself get away with that, I might never finish anything. So I rushed through a shitty ending and then abandoned it so I could start on the then yet-to-be-titled Critical Failures.

The bare-bones premise actually sounds kind of lame when I tell other people about it. A group of guys get transported into the world of their fantasy roleplaying game. For every person who was intrigued by that last sentence, another six people just went back to watching porn.

I got the same reaction when I told people what I was writing while I was writing it. "That sounds a lot like the old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon," they'd say. Yeah? Well it's nothing fucking like that.

So what do you do when you tell people about what you're writing and their eyes glaze over, or they actually come right out and criticize your idea. ("That's been done before." "So you're just writing out your D&D adventure?" "Stop licking me.") First and foremost, you should be doing more writing and less talking about it.

But you're excited about it, and writing a novel is a hard, lonely road. I get that. Sometimes you're going to want to talk about it.

So what do you do about the people who are obviously faking enthusiasm until they can find an escape from the conversation? You learn to pick up on that and then try to help them find their exit. They don't want to listen to you, and so you're not going to get anything useful out of them.

Hopefully you'll run into some people who are genuinely excited by your idea and gush about it. You don't really need advice for that; you know exactly what to do. Bask in that shit.

That leaves you with the people who are paying attention, but just aren't too keen on the idea for whatever reason... hopefully a reason which they will share with you. People who are willing to give you legitimate criticism, be it for your idea about your book, or any aspect of your life, are well worth listening to... at least initially. Take the criticism graciously, consider it thoroughly, and either accept or reject it.

For example, rejecting most of the initial criticism for my book's premise was easy, because I knew why people were criticizing it, and I knew that they were wrong in their preconceptions of what it was going to be. They fell mainly into two camps. People who thought I was trying to rewrite the old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, and people who thought I was simply narrating the D&D adventure that I was currently playing with my friends. I was doing neither of these things. 

But don't let seemingly easy rejections go entirely unexplored. Rejecting Joan's advice to change the POV on my completed first draft manuscript from omni to limited third person seemed like a no-brainer. First of all, I thought it sounded just fine as it was. Secondly, fuck no! That's a shit ton of work to do. But she talked me into it, and it was, of course, the right thing to do.

And hell, even if your idea is lame, keep writing it anyway... at least until an idea comes along that you're absolutely one hundred percent certain you want to abandon your current project for. Writing something shitty is better than writing nothing. You've got to pound out some shit before you write something good anyway. Also, when you're typing through your lame shitty idea, you might be surprised at how often your characters will take the wheel and do something entirely unexpected and cool. In the end, you might find you have something worth salvaging. 

Keep writing.

Thank you, Mr. Bevan. -J

Robert Bevan can be contacted via Twitter and Facebook. His books and short stories can be found on Amazon.


Critical Failures  
"Cave of the Kobolds"
"ZOMBIE ATTACK!!!"



Next week: "In-spuh-ray-shun."