If a character says y’all too much, his or her author is probably not from the South. I’ve lived primarily in the South for about fifteen years now and have come to hate the way some people mangle “Southernese” when they try to immitate it.
I hate prison stories. Almost every time somebody gets raped, the victim UNDER reacts. I think. I’m not an ex-con, nor have I been raped, but it seems to me a lot of fictional rape victims shrug their ordeal off a little too easily. Also, I don’t buy into how the younger con always meets an older guy who protects him out of strictly altruistic motives. I’m sort of thinking about The Shawshank Redemption here, and some other stories I read years ago.
I agree with SandyHook about Koontz. I’ve read all three of Dean’s novels and I believe that he has little first hand knowledge about most of the jobs his characters have or the cultures they supposedly inhabit. I understand that Koontz was once a teacher, though.
Oh, I definitely know that - it also has the only Ikea in the state. I only referred to it that way because the author referred to Redmondas the place where Hendrix is buried.
I think it was The Street Lawyer by Grisham. In the beginning he was careful to say that natives of Washington, DC always and only refer to it as “the District”. Huh? Yeah, we call it the District. Or DC, or the City, or occasionally Washington. More often we refer to whatever specific part of the city we’re talking about, like “Georgetown” or “Southeast”.
Obligatory grits story: A family friend of ours was living up north somewhere (Ohio or Minnesota or someplace). One day she went to the store to get some grits, but couldn’t find them in the breakfast cereals. However, she ended up seeing them in the coffee section. The inventory people had no idea what grits were, so they must’ve figured they were chickahominy or something.
Yeah, I know. He never gets the snow and winters right. His winters and snows always seem to be New England winters that he transplants to Colorado and they’re just not like that.
I was reading a mystery one time and a fellow was coming directly into Denver by passenger train from the east via southern Nebraska (which is not possible since you can’t go directly that way - but I was willing to let that go).
Then the guy jumped off the train and became lost in a forest in northeast Colorado. People in that area joke that eastern Colorado’s state tree is the telephone pole because there are so few trees there. Think western Kansas and Nebraska for eastern Colorado countryside. No forests.
A movie that always got me from the reverse angle was True Grit. They filmed it in the High Country of Colorado so you see the majastic Rockies rising all around …Fort Smith, ARKANSAS.
That reminds me of Taken, where they showed the beautiful mountain country of central North Dakota. Please, this is a place where they had to plant trees for shelter belts to keep all the topsoil from blowing away.
Phony Southern accents are a dead give-a-way for me too. I opened and closed one book on the first page because of the male use of “honeychild.” Puuuuuuullleeeez!
A large number of authors seem to think that Baltimore and Washington D.C. are practically right next to each other…you always get dialogue like “I’m in D.C. right now. I’ll meet in you Baltimore in 10 minutes” when in fact the cities are about 40 miles apart and factoring in traffic it would take you at least 30 minutes if you were driving like hell.
The general rule for “y’all” is that non-Southerners misuse the word, while true Southerners misspell it (always write “ya’ll”).
Sometimes I’ll catch myself using it in a misleading way around non-Southerners; I’ll be talking to a single person and say something like “When are y’all coming over?” referring to that person and any guests he would like to bring with him. But I know that subtlety will be lost, and he’s going to write a book and get it wrong, and I’m going to be partly to blame. As if I didn’t get enough guilt for being from the south…
30 minutes in the middle of the night! Hell, it’ll take damn near 25 minutes to get outta downtown DC to the DC beltway, and you still have to get to 95 or the Parkway to get to B-more.
In the middle of the night you could always do NY Avenue/50 to 197 to the BW Parkway, and be assured of little traffic, but it’d take just as long. It’d be a good route in a book for someone who wanted to be sure that he wasn’t being followed, though.
There are certain regional (even a wide region, but still regional) products. You can’t get Hellmans Mayo, nor Edy’s Ice Cream on the west coast. Nor, from what I understand, are you ever going to find an east coast child carrying a Pee-Chee.
You also cannot see the Pacific Ocean from Seattle. No matter how many people write about viewing it from outside their windows - it’s too far away.
Cooking grits over an open fire would be a hell of a trick, I should think. It is easy to cook BACON over an open fire – bacon being simply strips of meat – but since grits are, in fact, granulated, I’d think you’d have trouble with the stuff falling through the grille…
Overly specific place names are a good clue. Here in my community, for instance, is a place officially called Henry Snac Park. (It is named after Mr. Henry Snac, of course.) This is the name that appears on formal maps of the area. Locals always call it simply Snac Park; most of us have no idea that Mr. Snac even HAD a first name. A novel by Jonathan Kellerman refers to the park as Henry Snac Park–a clear tipoff that Mr. K got the name out of an atlas. Ah well!
I know Orson Scott Card lives in Greensboro, NC, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Homebody. Whenever the main character goes somewhere across town, he’s there in fifteen minutes. Never happens. Never ever happens.
At the risk of beating this hijack to death, I can assure you that you can just run down to the grocery store in New Hamsphire and pick up a box of grits. I did just that less than a year ago. You’ll find them near the oatmeal at any Wal-Mart supercenter, and I think other stores as well. Try them one time, you might like them. They’re good with sausage gravy or grated cheese.
But I think you’re right in saying they’re unsual in New England. I m the only person I know around here who actually eats the stuff regularly. Somebody else must buy them, since they keep them in stock.
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