I’m actually a big fan of just barely indicating an accent with a few word choices or single characteristic. Ideally, you can do it with mostly dialect, not with fake or respelled words.
My main restriction is that I should not ever have to stop and try to figure out what you mean. As long as you pull that off, I’m fine with it.
I do understand that you want to have your characters have distinct voices, and giving someone an accent is sometimes a way to do that. Just don’t make it hard to read.
Mary opened the notebook and said, “Like, y’know, I can’t seem to understand what Bill was talking about last night.” “Youse guys need to calm down,” Joe remarked, “there wasn’t any microphone on the stoop.” Suddenly, Frank interjected, saying, “Hey, I forgot that my car needs washed, anyone want to come with?”
Mary - Southern California (SoCal)
Joe - New York City
Frank - Pennsylvania Dutch Country
Well, some of those could be other locations, too. Joe can be Chicago (unless “microphone” has a specialized meaning, but we use “youse guys” here, too, and “stoop,” depending on the neighborhood. “Come with” is also standard in Chicago, but not “needs washed.” You will start getting a sprinkling of that as you head towards Indiana or Ohio, though.
I read Cloud Atlas, and grew to like the dialect. It became easier to read after a few pages, and felt like a more truthsome sayin’ of his sees and feels.
For some reason, I just always expected that this is what “good” books do. It has never occurred to me that an author would write dialogue that does NOT fit a character, and I would find it bizarre.
As other have said, it really depends on how well the dialogue is written. I enjoyed “Trainspotting” despite it mostly being written dialectally, but I gave up on “Everything is Illuminated” as I found the dialogue to be incredibly forced. It didn’t seem as natural.
Yes, more than anything in the world.
For me, that’s what I find hyper-annoying; and / or, as BigT remarks just below, “respelled words” in general: it equally irritates me when, in pages-and-pages-long passages, words are spelt in other than standard fashion, to try to represent phonetically, how they sound (differingly from the sound in standard English) in the speaker’s accent. (The apostrophe ploy tends to bother me less – it’s the tampering with the actual spelling that pee’s me off.) Actual respelling – in more than small doses – irritates and distracts me and makes me find the whole thing too toilsome to persevere with. (As mentioned by me previously, in respect of Kipling’s Irish-soldier narrating character.)
Hearty agreement with all those sentiments, BigT.
There are in this thread quite numerous mentions of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the majority of them commenting that the poster was able to handle that, “without tears”. That goes for me; only, I first read – and possibly re-read – without a struggle – HF, decades ago: loved it at the time, but haven’t looked at it since. Am not sure whether Twain somehow manages here to accomplish the dialect-transcribing thing in a way which doesn’t grate; or whether, back when I read this work, I was less of a hard-to-please curmudgeon than I have since become.
It generally doesn’t bother me, because you get accustomed to it in 19th-century to early 20th-century literature, although if I find it used in contemporary writing I may go :dubious:. For example, once in a bookstore I browsed one of James Herriot’s books and the first thing I noticed was how he transcribed a farmer’s utterances into broad dialect. It read as a naïve throwback to an antiquated style of writing and did not make a good impression.
It’s different when a modern author uses it for a definite literary purpose, like in Riddley Walker. That entire book is written in a sort of badly decomposed English. But I read right through it and got used to its strangeness and even came to love it. I had little trouble following and the strangeness only enhanced my reading instead of interfering. When a 20th-century text in standard English was discovered and quoted somewhere in the middle of the book, it was actually a bit jarring. I’ve always liked wordplay and word puzzles, and when they’re used to make literature, I get pleasure from working through them.
I read right through Cloud Atlas with no difficulty. “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ever’thin’ After” was linguistically enjoyable to see how the author developed a possible future direction of English in a post-technology retro-primitive America (just like Riddley Walker and Stephen King’s Wizard and Glass).
As a matter of fact, before reading the book I had watched the movie of Cloud Atlas, which opened with Tom Hanks mumbling that primitivized future English. I found all of that material practically impossible to understand and had to watch it 3 times to make head or tail of it. A large part of the problem was the poor audio mix on the DVD which made the dialogue hard to hear. It made me crave to read the book, so that I could find out what Old Georgie and them were saying. When I saw it on the printed page, it was clear and easy to follow. I never fully understood that segment of the story until I could read it spelled out.
Going by what I’ve read / heard about Riddley Walker, I’ve never ventured to try it: have taken it for granted that with my rather strong dislike of authors’ “respelling” to indicate non-standard English, the book would drive me mad. In the light of your observations above, perhaps I should try to set prejudice aside and give RW a go. Or perhaps – re the last sentence by you, above (my bolding) – on this issue, you and I are just “different breeds of cat”.
I had no problem understanding it - but then, I was watching with Hebrew subtitles.
(Subtitlers here can be unusually diligent at times, translating stuff that wasn’t translated in the original - like the Latin in West Wing or the Chinese in Firefly)
I had a big problem when I started to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but eventually got used to it. It can be annoying, but I’d rather have it that way than have the dialect passages redacted into standard English, whatever that is anyway.
Sometimes the use of dialect can starkly demonstrate how a character is perceived differently by the various other characters in the story. In the 1939 novel Mr. Johnson, set in colonial Nigeria, the title character is a native clerk to a low-level British administrator in the colonial government. When speaking to his boss or other British people, his speech is larded with stereotypical “Oh sah, yes sah’s” and other markers of stupid obsequiousness. But when he is speaking to other Nigerians in one or another of the native languages, the author uses ordinary English, and moreover makes it clear that Mr. Johnson is a crafty man who understands well the art of gentle persuasion.
I’ve heard others deplore “visual dialect.” I kind of like it. (Yes, I’m the one.)
At least it’s usually recognizable Modern English. Try reading something from before Shakespeare sometime. That’s dizzying.
I just finished reading Dickens’s Hard Times, and I found it annoying when he wrote a character with a lisp. But when Mark Twain does it in Huck Finn, it works. I admit I had trouble reading it aloud to my kid (a very smart kid who had serious problems with reading, so I read a lot to him.) Of course, the dialect wasn’t the hardest part.
As noted above, Heinlein did a great job of it in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.” It was pretty easy to read (not lots of apostrophes, IIRC), and it made sense, and it underscored the division between those living on the Moon and those on Earth. I’d completely forgotten it! Perhaps it’s time to reread that classic, which I haven’t read since Junior High.
I recently started to read that myself. What I found difficult wasn’t the dialect. I kept getting mad … even before the nasty stuff began, because I could just sense it coming! I figured I didn’t need to get that worked up and set it aside. Maybe later, when I’m more mature. After all, I’m only 57.
Going off-topic; but, thanks for mentioning Mr. Johnson. I’ve liked what little other stuff I’ve read by the author, and have kept meaning to read Mr J – this may prompt me to do the deed. Sort-of re this novel, I find myself wondering whether Nigerians were into financial scamming in pre-Internet days – perhaps writing letters to random people in Britain, telling improbable tales to lure the gullible and greedy…
I think it works if characters have different dialects, or there are one or two characters speak differently (like Hagrid in Harry Potter). I recall reading a few books though where everyone speaks with the same accent, so literally every conversation is written in the exact same creative dialect spelling for every character.
My argument is essentially that it should be used to enhance the dialogue. It needs a purpose – to differentiate characters, to highlight the different ways people talk depending on their audience, things like that. If you’re just writing your entire book that way because “that’s what these people sound like” then I think you should just write the dialogue without the apostrophes and phonetic spellings.
Like, if you have a poser character trying to be posh, it’s appropriate to write “Oh DAHLING, I missed you”, but if everyone in your book speaks in a non-rhotic accent it’s just harder to read for no real benefit.
I haven’t read that yet and I’ve been putting off A Clockwork Orange because I’ve glanced at it a few times and realized I can hardly understand some of the sentences. The idea of having to spend 5 minutes on each paragraph trying to understand what is going on in a conversation doesn’t quite appeal to me.
I’m sure I’ll get around to both of them someday.
The thing is done – thanks to Amazon, Mr. Johnson is on its way to me for a total of seven-and-some British pounds, including postage and packing.