“Excep’ talk. I’d forgot that. You ain’t asked to talk more’n you’ve a mind to aboard the We’re Here. Keep your eyes open, an’ help Dan to do ez he’s bid, an’ sechlike, an’ I’ll give you—you ain’t wuth it, but I’ll give—ten an’ a ha’af a month; say thirty-five at the end o’ the trip. A little work will ease up your head, and you kin tell us all abaout your dad an’ your ma an’ your money afterwards.”
Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling, 1897
A century or so ago dialects and accents featured heavily in fiction. Then the fashion changed. Perhaps people found reading accents hard going, or realized that sometimes the dialogue was flattened by striving for effect or that the attempt was wildly inaccurate.
If you’ve ever heard Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins attempting a Cockney accent you’ll know what I mean.
Nowadays the flavour of an accent is hinted at, and at its best, achieved by the rhythm of the writing. Mary Jane Staples wrote pitch perfect Cockney.
Sammy, practical though he was, could not help being touched by the request. He said, “In consideration of you being a credit to me business, Miss Brown, I am happy to inform you I’ll use me highly regarded influence on your behalf.”
King of Camberwell by Mary Jane Staples (pseudonym for Reginald Thomas Staples)
Dialogue is difficult. When you’re writing it well a reader should be able to tell who’s talking even without tags. However, it’s possible to go too far in that direction and end up with a caricature rather than a character. Also, when a scene is moving swiftly, unobtrustive tags (who-saids and actions) are necessary to avoid confusion. Dialogue can’t do everything.
Basically I think of dialogue as poetry: when you get it right, it sings!
Comments
4 responses to “Now We’re Talking”
Another aspect to consider – I’m not a native speaker (I’m German), but I almost exclusively read fiction in English. That’s for 3 reasons:
1 – in pre-internet times some books were never or very late, sometimes years, translated, but readily available in English for mail-order (or loaned from my siblings who lived in the UK)
2 – the wait! You still have to wait months to a year for translations.
3 – another language might not have the neccessary words / sayings / concepts. I started reading in English with Anne McCaffrey. I had found the Pern series in Germany, but her other series, like Crystal Singer and Brainship just weren’t available, so I switched to English. And then one of my siblings gifted me a Discworld novel that had just been published and OMG the puns! And the political undertones! I had been reading the translations, they were funny, but the original was a revelation. Never looked back.
All that to say that dialog written in supposed dialect is hard for non-native speakers. I don’t “hear it” in my head and it can take me a while to figure out what it means, . That takes me right out of a story. Do it too much or too “bad” and I’ll dnf. And might never return to that author. For the Kipling quote the two words I had trouble with I could figure out – “ez” by saying it out loud, “wuth” from context, but had I read it not in a blog post, I would have been mayorly annoyed. The Staples quote on the other hand wasn’t a problem.
The difference to RL is this – I as a participant in dialog can ask for clarification, while I as a reader can not.
And I absolutely agree, well done dialogue _is_ like poetry.
I had to concentrate hard to read the rest of your comment (which was excellent and I really appreciate the insight) because I am another HUGE Discworld fan and I agree so much with all you love about it. Happy sigh at great memories of reading and rereading and just being lured into how amazing fantasy novels can be at delivering compassionate yet stinging satire.
Attempts to write dialect were frequent in US novels set in both the deep south and Appalachia in the late 19th and early 20th century. I find them torturous to read. Also, in truth, the efforts at “thief” dialect in some of Mercedes Lackey’s fantasies.
I can read Mark Twain without getting too lost in the dialects. When I stop to think of other examples, though, I realise how few American books of that era I’ve read. Gene Stratton Porter, but I think she was more northern?