Fiction Writer's Workshop (8 page)

THE QUESTION OF DIALECT

Most people assume that dialect has to be a part of dialogue. My answer is that it can be, and in certain circumstances it ought to be, but
the writer must never feel compelled to duplicate dialects simply for the sake of "authenticity."
The writer who thinks she is writing dialect because she is clipping the ends off of words and stretching out others is often taking delight more in her own experimentation that in any real sense of story. She may be shooting for a folksy charm or for a root authenticity, but most often she fails miserably. Try all you want to make the words unrecognizable—misspell them, cut them in half, throw in a fistful of apostrophes, sound out every groan the character makes—the truth is, they are still words you're dealing with. Consider this example. Two grandmothers sit on a porch in Tennessee; one of them is hying to convince the other to go into town to get a pie from the grocery store to serve at dinner the next day.

"Sho' 'nuff smo time leff fo you to git on downtown fo' 'nother pan dat pie."

"Ain't but a-our o' two leff in the day. Dat walk take lease three hours, dere and back."

"But 'choo know dey love dat pie. Ah shore-ly do. You too. Ah love to serve that pie at a good suppa. Please git on."

"Ah had a car, Ah'd go. Aint no car workin' in walkin distance tis whole place. Ah know you want dat pie. Ah know you do. Ah set out, maybe to barra Kip's hahrse and buggy."

"Ah hope so, light's afailin."

This is incredibly bad. The story is okay (we'll get to that). But the language is absurdly disguised behind the pretense of dialect. To be sure, it is an exaggeration. But each choice made by the writer—a misspelling here, an apostrophe there—is a little piece of what most people consider to be the essence of writing dialect. That is, it shoots for the sound of the words rather than the words themselves. In this case, it is difficult to read, complicated to decipher and once done, it's hard for the reader to get a sense of anything outside of the basic question set up by the exposition that preceded it.

But wait. Perhaps you
can
read it, and while maybe you can't understand every detail, you like it. That's right, you think, that's the way they talk in the South! You
like
reading dialogue aloud, sounding words out for their music. I give you high marks for liking the music of language, but if you like this kind of writing, buy yourself a French horn and try to blow Shakespeare through it. You're sure to get a clearer use of language than that garbage. While you're at it, you might coat-check your preconceptions on human beings in the southern half of the United States because no matter how poor, how ignorant, how little traveled people in Tennessee might be (or in the Bronx for that matter), they use language when they speak, and language is more than jamming a washcloth in the mouth of the speaker to get at the "sound." Don't be so high-minded as to assume you know a dialect because you've seen some reruns of
The Dukes of Hazzard
and you own a copy of
As I Lay Dying.
All language has a logic; all language has dignity. It's words as much as sounds.

If you are from Tennessee, right now you are (rightly) about to throw this book across the room, because every attempt at tonality in that exchange is slightly off, every instance of localized syntax is forced and there are, you can surely see, inconsistencies of dialect even within the sentences these people speak. Go ahead, throw it. But only if you're from Tennessee. Then pick it back up because we're about to translate that passage and fix it.

The first thing to do with any piece of dialogue is figure out the story. Read that crummy one about the pie again. Don't look for the entire story, but more simply for the story of this dialogue. In a case like this, with bad dialogue, we're translating more than anything else. Still, not surprisingly, you should begin with character. What does each person want? Determining this should allow you some sense of pace and rhythm. Examine tension next. What is holding these people together or keeping them apart? Then I'd look at setting. What's brought them to the same place? Where are they?

As we saw in chapter two, when discussing tension, these are good diagnostic questions for nearly any dialogue. The answers to them show us what dialogue should do in the broadest sense:

• bring characters and conflict into focus

• be driven by the needs of the characters, more than by the needs of the story

• locate us, give us a sense of where we are, who we are listening to

Lett's apply these questions to the dialogue involving the women and the pie.

• What do they want?
The women seem to want pie. But one woman wants, or needs (we can't be sure), the other woman to go get the pie. It appears someone is coming to visit them ("dey" love it; there is mention of a "good suppa"; there's anxiety about getting the pie before night falls).

• What's holding them together?
It would appear they depend on each other somehow. One woman is urging the other to do something for the both of them. It would appear that the issues of the larger story might come out of this question.

• Where are they?
Somewhere isolated (as the walk for the pie is over three hours), as they don't seem to have any neighbors with cars who could help them.

When a story is choked by dialect, the way this little dialogue is, you have to work your way back to story through language. The writer of this sort of dialogue would probably say you have to read it aloud to understand it. When you do that, it becomes clear that "Ah" equals "I" and "dat" is "that." This is a good illustration of relying too heavily on dialect. Right now you are probably saying words like "Ah" out loud. To some of them, this reads like the sound the doctor asks you to make before he swabs your tonsils for strep; for other readers, it is more nasal, sounding like a grunt made in midstride of an argument ("Ah ... yeah. That's true, but... ah ... I have another point to make on that matter."). The word has become a sound. A word created to mimic sound has to be an absolute success in terms of its music. There are entire novels where this happens (Alice Walker's
The Color Purple
comes to mind), but in these books, the entire thread of the novel teaches the reader the language of these sounds. We can't presume to do the same within the short dialogue we're discussing, but tweaking just a little bit for tension and otherwise just translating the dialogue, it looks something like this.

Sho' 'nuff smo time leff fo you to git on downtown fo' 'nother pan dat pie.
"There's still time enough for you to get downtown for another pan of that pie."

Ain't but a-our o' two leff in the day. Dat walk take lease three hours, dere and back.
"Ain't but an hour left in the day. That walk would take at least three hours, there and back."

But 'choo know dey love dat pie. Ah shore-ly do. You too. Ah love to serve that pie at a good suppa. Please git on.
"Please get on. You know they love that pie. I surely do. You do too. At a good supper, I love to serve that pie. Please."

Ah had a car, Ah'd go. Ain't no car workin' in walkin distance tis whole place. Ah know you want dat pie. Ah know you do. Ah set out, maybe to barra Kip's hahrse and buggy.
"If I had a car, I'd go. Ain't no working car even in walking distance. Shoot. I know you want that pie. I know it. Maybe I'll set out to borrow Kip's horse and buggy."

Ah hope so, light's afailin.
"I hope so. The light's failing."

The language here contains plenty of dialect. But now the dialect is basically confined to word choice and syntax rather than spelling and misspelling. The machinations of dialect no longer keep us from meaning; rather they lead us to it. The accent is there for the reader, but it doesn't overwhelm the scene. Nor should it, ever.

Dialect That Works

There are writers crafting excellent dialect out there: Gloria Naylor, Junot Diaz, Sherman Alexie, Alice Walker, the poet June Jordan, Susan Straight, Sapphire, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Gus Lee, Earl Lovelace, among others. Then there are the champions of the ages. William Faulkner comes to mind immediately. What works beautifully in Faulkner's dialect is that it is so heavily modulated with the narrative it becomes a sort of true music. The sounds of the characters' language tears through the narrative consciousness of the novel. It is a part of the sound of the whole novel, the whole experience of reading a Faulkner story, the experience of Faulkner's world. Consider this passage from
The Bear.
Watch how the narrative shifts fluidly from the one dialect to the other and then into the movement of the narration. In this scene, seven strangers wander in to join in Major De Spain's epic hunt for the bear.

They were swampers: gaunt, malaria-ridden men appearing from nowhere, who ran trap-lines for coons or perhaps farmed

little patches of cotton and corn along the edge of the bottom, in clothes but little better than Sam Father's and nowhere near as good as Tennie Jim's, with worn shotguns and rifles, already squatting patiently in the cold drizzle in the side yard when the day broke. They had a spokesman. . . . "Mawnin, Major. We heerd you was aimin to put that ere blue dawg on that old two-toed bear this mawnin. We figgered we'd come up and watch, if you don't mind. We won't do no shooting, lessen he runs over us."

"You are welcome," Major De Spain said. 'You are welcome to shoot. He's more your bear than ours."

"I reckon that ain't no lie. I done fed him enough cawn to have a sheer in him. Not to mention a shoat three year sago."

"I reckon I got a sheer too," another said. "Only it ain't in the bear." Major De Spain looked at him. He was chewing tobacco. He spat. "It was a heifer calf. Nice un too. Last year. When I finally found her, I reckon she looked about like that colt of yourn last June."

"Oh," said Major De Spain. "Be welcome. If you see game in front of my dogs shoot it."

The center of this scene is the meeting of these men and the history they share. The scene does not revolve around Faulkner's use of dialect. It is merely an element within the scene. The dialect is governed by a logic and consistency, demonstrated here and throughout the novel. It is difficult to read, but it ebbs and flows through the momentum of the narrative, never obscuring meaning.

Many exciting contemporary writers try to bring dialect to the center of their work. James Kelman, a Scottish writer, brings dialect into play in the opening lines of his wonderfully dark novel,
How Late It Was, How Late.

Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can ye no do it; the words filling yer head; then the other words; there's something wrong; there's something far far wrong; ye're no a good man, ye're just no a good man. Edging back into awareness, of where ye are; here slumped in this corner, with these thoughts filling ye. And oh christ his back was sore; stiff, and the head pounding. He shivered and hunched up his shoulders, shut his eyes, rubbed into the corners with his fingertips; seeing all kinds of spots and lights. Where in the name of fuck . . .

The dialect is inescapable, difficult and brilliant. Notice that it is not pressed into dialogue in pieces, but instead it is the voice of the narrative consciousness. Dialect is the sound of the entire book. This is what I meant earlier by narrative voice. The good reader has more patience with it and accepts that the endeavor of picking up a novel like this is to
feel
the language of it as part of the experience of reading it.

Why does this work, where that first "pie" dialect exchange does not work? The sound of the voice is consistent and musical. The particular spellings are not thrown across the page ("spots and lights" could have been spelled any number of ways to give in to this accent). Throughout this novel, the voice of the dialect is an internal component of the protagonist, Sammy, a Glasgow street person, who has been brutalized by the state. This voice intertwines with a more direct consciousness that works externally and more straightforwardly. Examine the following dialogue, which occurs in the first chapter of the book after Sammy takes a beating by some soldiers and wakes up in jail, blind. The book then becomes a story of voices, overwhelming at times, but always clearly governed by a dual consciousness: the voice of Sammy and the narrative voice.

His back, it was sore. The spine especially; down there at the bottom, roundabout the lower ribs. He had to stand up. He stood up. He stepped a pace to the left, then worked his hands in where it was hurting, massaging with the tips of his fingers. His right foot kicked against something metal.

Sit down. Samuels: sit down.

I need to stretch my legs.

Just sit on yer arse.

Can I no even get standing up?

Thirty seconds.

Thanks.

That's twenty of them.

Kelman does not overwhelm the reader with idiom and accent. No intentional misspellings ("arse" actually appears in the British dictionary by the way). Diction and syntax are manipulated to create these patterns. Here the dialect rises out of words, that is, sound and meaning, rather than mere sound. It works for that very reason. Kelman trusts the language. It is, after all, the language as he knows it. When writing dialect, that is your charge:
Trust the language as you know it.