Writing dialogue (Page 3 of 3)

It has become all about your style and process—and for good reason. It is a superior process for capturing the sense of real conversation without subjecting your dear readers to an aspiring writer's juvenile attempts to replicate the sounds of oral and anal flatulence.

For instance, your dear readers "hear" their own version of these sounds in your narrative passage: It's a lot like Tourette's syndrome but without the forgivable clinical diagnosis. You'd think by now we'd have learned to tolerate, or at the very least ignore, the explicit tirades and the constant mimicking and sniffling and spitting but he continues to surprise us and make us squirm on a daily basis.

Indeed, the mark of a master creating the "true" sound of human speech in words on the page for every reader.

Memphis

The best stories I read are short on dialogue and long on reported dialogue. By reported dialogue I mean what was said, with an analysis by the reporter of what it meant to them. Real time noise (spoken thoughts) in these stories slow the story from the speed of light to the speed of sound.

A skilled reporter efficiently processes the histories of the noisemakers, their body language, the grunts, moans, barks, and farts of the pauciloquent communicators and make them "sound" like the man on the six o'clock news with his edited pictures propping up his narrative.

Memphis

I don't agree that this thread should fade away. Aspiring writers processing their critical thinking, struggling to explain themselves is the very best kind of thing that happens in these online workshop sites.

Follows an essay I posted 9 years and 3 days ago—the good old days?—in the TNBW forums (¿If I'm not mistaken, it may have been a response in a conversation you participated in, John Hamler?):

Verisimilitude

Verisimilitude in writing dialogue and dialectal dialogue is a topic of great interest to me.

A few years ago in a workshop, I was made aware of the thinking of Flannery O’Connor, a brilliant southern writer, who held the theory that dialect should be delivered in a modified way not so heavily laced with phonetical reality. She posited that readers given the hint of the speech patterns of the characters would tune their inner ears to “hear” the dialect sufficient for their purposes.

Mark Twain, who to my ear was a master of dialect, probably was more rigorous in his work to deliver a “real” dialect than was O'Connor. At least that is my view after having read his scathing comments about James Fenimore Cooper’s writing. Twain derided Cooper mercilessly for having Natty Bumpo talk in one passage like an ignoramus and in another passage like a high-toned society matron.

I find myself coming down firmly on both sides of the question. On the one hand, I find some of the dialogue I read that sounds like actual speech to be aggravating and have the feeling of being contrived. For instance, when I encounter sounds in dialogue that actually occur in real life: throat clearings, simple ‘Yeses’ to a ‘Yes or No’ long question, ‘Ahcoos’, etc. it causes me to think I will put down the book without reading further the next time I encounter such speech in the story. I believe it is incumbent upon a good writer to have responders in a dialogue move the ball down the field much more efficiently than verisimilitude permits. My all time favorite ugly verisimiltudinous writing is reading one side of a telephone conversation and being left to figure out what questions the POV character is blurting out answers to.

When I write dialogue heavily laced with “true” dialect, I worry about how good I am at the dialect. Once I made the mistake of asking the best storyteller I ever heard in person, one of my hillbilly uncles, to read a piece I wrote, which was always heavily laced with the dialect I grew up speaking. Uncle Willard was also a master workshop-type critic: He started off his critique with the positive view of my story that “he liked it” as if he’d been attending all the same workshops I’d been going to. Then things turned ugly and often: Uncle Willard concluded his critique by pointing to my brilliant dialectal gems and said, “… ‘n futhermore, Memphis, you need to larn some spellin’.” What Uncle Willard pointed to, of course, was my physical representations of the sounds I “heard” coming out of his mouth. He didn’t hear what he sounded like, much in the same way I don’t recognize my own voice when I hear it coming from a tape recorder.

I suspect also that my representations of hillbilly speech sounds may have bruised Uncle Willard’s feelings some but I didn’t press the issue—city slickers were bragging on me something fierce for my dialectal offerings.

If I were heavily into writing novels with a lot of black dialect in them—or some other minority dialect (Latino, Arab, Boston, etc.)—I’d do so with even more caution. I would open myself up for even more cogent scorn than Uncle Willard’s from those among readers who took umbrage to the fact that I didn’t truly “hear” their dialect.

What to do? I’ve been trying to get good enough at exercising Flannery O’Connor’s counsel to modify dialect and dialogue (direct and indirect) to capture the essence of the speech and thought of the characters without subjecting readers to the chore of translating my efforts. I guess this is the sort of enigmas we condemn ourselves to when we take up the pen to use symbols to create pictures and sounds.

I recently read Kieron Smith, Boy by James Kelman, a Booker Prize winning author. The novel was written from the POV of a 10-year old Scottish lad in Scottish brogue. To my inexperienced ear and eye, at least, the language of the book was a new language. I managed somehow to endure the read long enough to learn the language and by the end of the book I was really gratified and proud that I had persisted. At the end of the book, I felt like I saw a glimmer of why some critics were calling it Kelman’s masterpiece and learned a bit about the courage required to write masterpieces. I wish I could recall now what it was I learnt without having to go back and read the book again.   

I sometimes believe if this writing thing weren’t so hard, hard working writers would have given up a long time ago.

Memphis

Dialect is an entirely different subject--and as there are SO many schools of thought, it's impossible to work in absolutes. My first series had an Immigrant primary character and I went back and forth for years, sometimes using a lot, other times very little...in the end, I went with enough to color, yet not so much to sound artificial, or hard to understand. I'm quite happy with the result. And that's really what it all comes down to--taste.

Can someone direct me to a recent novel, published by a reputable publisher, which expresses dialect any way other than via syntax and word use? That is to say: which highly modifies spelling, truncates words, introduces non-standard contractions, etc., to mimic the actual sound of a character’s speech? I read an awful lot, and I don't recall ever seeing such. If it's out there, I'd be curious to check it out.

Thanks, Temple. Looking at these books, it strikes me most are Lit Fic. And CM could qualify as such. I rarely read Lit Fic, which I guess is how the likes of Zora Neale Hurston escaped me.
I think Lit Fic writers have more leeway for experimentation in general. I wonder if there is any genre fiction that gets into the kind of heavy, phonetic language modification as some of these.