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story
under the sun, so being conscious of your antecedents can help you
bring out the archetypal power of the characters and themes you’re
working with.

    Alexandra
Sokoloff—http://www.alexandrasokoloff.com
    ###

    21. Talking Points: Dialogue
    By Scott Nicholson
    http://www.hauntedcomputer.com

    Sometimes you just have to talk it out, even
when you don’t know what you’re talking about.
    That’s why narrative fiction so heavily
relies on dialogue. It creates conflict, gives information to the
reader, moves the plot, develops the characters, and builds a sense
of place. In short, it does everything, all the time, just like
every element of your work should, whether it’s fiction or
non-fiction.
    Speech denotes class, racial, cultural,
educational, and geographic differences. Make sure each character
speaks consistently. In real life, our grammar can change depending
on the company we’re keeping, but in fiction you have to keep it
simple for the reader. The character who says “ain’t” on page three
shouldn’t be saying “most certainly is not” by page 300, unless
that character has gone to Harvard during the middle chapters.
    Beware of dialect. When conveying dialect, a
little is usually plenty. Otherwise, it becomes parody and you lose
the reader. For example, your Dodge City sheriff shouldn’t say,
“I’m amblin’ over yonder to wet muh whistle.” Your Southern
character shouldn’t lose all the g’s in her action verbs: enough
“fussin’ and feudin’” and your reader’s eyesight will blur. Use
colloquialisms in moderation, and let your grammar do most of the
work instead of relying on tics, tricks, and dropped letters. “We
don’t have no pumpkins,” or “We ain’t got no pumpkins” is fine, but
make sure all the characters don’t talk alike. And you might need
to only drop the effect once or twice to plant the idea in the
reader’s mind.
    In my novel The Manor , I have a minor
character who is a Southern belle. She is educated, and therefore I
simply said she was from the South and didn’t attempt to drench her
with slang, moonshine, and magnolias. In fact, the only direct
reference to her accent is when she is mocked by her lover: “Why
don’t ya’ll get yosef gone with the wind?” She never actually says
“ya’ll” herself. I know Southern speech patterns fairly well, and
much of the effect is oral rather than literal. It’s not just
Southerners who drop the g in –ing words, and they’re not doing it
because they’re dumb, shiftless, and lazy. In fact, much of the
Appalachian speech often seen as backwoods and backward (“I’m
afixin’ to feed the chickens”) is the remnant of very formal Celtic
speech that crossed the Atlantic several hundred years
ago.
    In the same novel, I have a
character who has adopted a fake British accent because he wants to
appear classy. He’s atrocious and almost a parody. He says things
like, “Bloody hell,” and “Righty right,” and a lot of the little
phrases you hear in movies like Shaun of
the Dead and The
Full Monty . It works because that’s where
he “learned” his accent. If I had used a real British character, I
would have had to work much harder, because most of my exposure to
British speech is through movies and the occasional book, which
can’t be fully trusted to convey authentic speech.
    I am not a huge Lovecraft fan, and I think a
lot of it has to do with his attempts to tag rural New England
dialect. “Ye can have ye’re money back. I don’t want truck with any
kin o’ Septimus Bishop. It’s jest aoutside my door. Snufflin’
araoun.’” Lovecraft’s educated characters display few distinctive
speech patterns. It’s lazy, it’s classist, it’s just plain bad
writing, Lovecraft’s unique ideas aside.
    For the opposite reason, I love Elmore
Leonard’s work. Somehow even his nasty characters seem to have a
dignity about them. This is from the mouth of a black houseman:
“Mmmm, that musta impressed