One of my first beta readers, way back when, suggested that
my plotting was strong but that characters lacked distinctive speech patterns.
I so took this to heart that the result of my revision yielded
awkward dialogue lines. I was even dinged on this in a
Kirkus review. I continued this misguided effort in a subsequent manuscript
only to be asked by my first agent to change (as in completely alter) the
way one of my secondary characters’ speech represented on the page. This
character may be speaking Gullah Geechee, but on the page, I better have her
lines be standard English.
I have more writing experience now and have (thankfully)
learned a few things. One of them is not to capture distinctive speech in any
way that jumps off the page. Write-it-as-I-hear-it-in-my-head does the job. If
I don’t hear a distinction, I don’t force any.
I think this
excellent post brings up the question a writer would do well to ask
themselves when considering distinctive speech. The gist of what we should ask
ourselves is why we wish to highlight the distinction, and the how
to do it will flow from that.
Good observations. I once wrote a story that included some eastern Kentucky dialect. (It's where I grew up.) But that story never went anywhere.
ReplyDeleteGood post. I've had a hard time reading the Mark Twain classics because of the heavy use of dialect. A little goes a long way. One can give characters a distinct voice just by how they string words together.
ReplyDeleteAs a reader, I don't like wading through a lot of dialect or phonetic speech. In my own writing, I try to capture speech patterns, which I find fascinating, rather than phonetic spellings, etc. Your dialogue in Kirkus made me smile, because I've sometimes written dialogue like that too.
ReplyDeleteSometimes I appreciate the vernacular speech of a character for authenticity. Sometimes it’s hard to read and sound out correctly. Audiobooks resolve that if the narrator is skillful.
ReplyDeleteAs a reader, I find dialect distracting. In one of my novels, two characters whose second language is English talk to an English-speaking character. I used slightly different word order to show this.
ReplyDelete