Within the Speech-MarksThe author, unaccustomed to public speaking as he was, gripped the lectern with white-knuckled fists. Cleared his throat. Took a swig of water. Set aside the distraction of imagining the audience naked. Then began: “Today, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,we’re going to talk about dialogue.”
The author suffered a momentary mental-blank and fumbled for his notes. But suddenly he found he could no longer decipher his own writing. It looked as though a spider had crawled across the page, trailing ink from each of its limbs. “Dialogue in fiction,” he said in desperation, “is a multi-faceted thing.”
It was a stop gap. The equivalent of an “erm” or a “so”. He realized he was not presenting himself particularly well. He had a reasonably strong Manchester accent. He dropped the final ‘t’ in about. He pronounced thing as fing. He stumbled over multi-faceted. He felt he sounded stupid. But as this story was not Trainspotting – you have to be very careful writing in dialect; Irvine Welsh’s highly stylized writing pulls off the trick very well and adds to the psychological realism of the story but other novels fail to walkthe tightrope and end up falling into the class of the ‘undecipherable’ – the author chose not to highlight the fact within the speech marks.
The author recalled a book he’d reviewed back in the day – The Knowledge of Good and Evil by Glenn Kleier.
It hadn’t actually been a bad book, but some of the dialect-writing had jarred with him so much that it had forced the author’s hand into writing a (rare) negative review:“the main problem of the book, over and above the imaginative leaps Mr. Kleier asks us to make, is the fact that he does not seem to trust his readers enough to infer things. He has a tendency to over explain. Never is this more apparent than in his handling of the many different accents in this globetrotting novel.
Whether the accents are Eastern European, Irish, or Caribbean, generally, they are poorly done. Take this example, “The man shrugged his big shoulders. ‘You vere on my vay to the airport.’” This bizarre handling lends nothing to the plot, or to character, and in fact detracts from our reading. The villain in question, once we’ve deciphered what it ishe is trying to say, ends up sounding as though he’s just stepped out of a Bond movie.
Another example is his over-egged Irish accent: “There’s more history ta that isle on there than all the rest o’ Ireland combined.” Which is simply annoying. Most of Mr.Kleier’s readers will have heard an Irish accent before and won’t need to have its own particular tics pointed out to them in minute detail—especially not if the accent then descends into cliché like this: “Seems slayin’ the snake’t wasn’t enough ta convert theCelts though, so Patrick gathered ’em out on the isle an’ scribed a big circle in the earth with ’is staff. Straight away a ’ole opened into Purgatory, swallowin’ up the worst sinners, causin’ the rest ta see the light. An’ ta make sure ’is converts didn’t backslide, ’eleft the cave open, a reminder of the perils o’ sin.”
The author realized he’d not said anything of note in some time. He loomed over the lectern, desperate to say something of meaning. “Dialogue,” he said, “must feel real. Dialogue reveals character. It progresses plot. It fills space. But what occurs within the speech marks cannot be forced.”
He saw a few heads nodding along in the audience, and decided to reinforce his point by referencing an external source. “Bartleby Snopes,” he said, “offered their own dialogue-writing tips in a blog of 6th June of this year. They said: “Many authors try to force the story to move through the dialogue. They will attempt to “cheat” by making the characters say unnatural things in order to paint the scene better.”
“Before you start penning your dialogue-only story, take some time to listen to an actual conversation. After you’ve written your story, read it out loud and ask yourself if it actually sounds like people talking. If you can’t imagine someone saying it, then the story probably isn’t going to work.”
