Good dialogue or bad writing?

[Scandilove]

Hi all,

I'm writing some dialogue and I want to show that the character is working class and speaks in a certain manner. For example, the character would probably say "Me and Susie went to the park" rather than "Susie and I went to the park". The story is in first person and the character is also the narrator.

I think my building of the character is good and the reader will get a good sense of her background but I feel like I'm treading a line between having the character speak in a way natural for her and ensuring the reader gets that it's character voice and not shitty writing, though it may also be that .

Any ideas or advice?

Thanks

S

 

[Nezhul]

I would make narration lines to always be of good style. No mannerisms. narration should be well written, or nobody'll be able to stand it.

As for speech, you can express character's mannerisms there.

 

[oggbashan]

Don't overdo it.

A few awkward phrases occasionally are enough to give the impression. Writing the whole dialogue as she might speak it would be too much.

Rudyard Kipling gives a horrible example of how not to do it with his soldiers in India. He created a form of dialogue which no soldier, then or now, ever used and continued with it for whole books.

The critics of his era complained about his dialogue. So did the soldiers in India. His stories were good and had the flavour of the soldiers' life but the dialogue made people wince.

 

[hadruprider]

Yes, of course you can have your characters speak ungrammatically!
Many great authors have done this, Charles Dickens being the most obvious one who comes to mind.
Sam Weller, Mr Jingle, Mrs Gamp... Wouldn't have been the entertaining characters they are if they spoke all proper, would vey now?

 

[jehoram]

Yes, of course you can have your characters speak ungrammatically!
Many great authors have done this, Charles Dickens being the most obvious one who comes to mind.
Sam Weller, Mr Jingle, Mrs Gamp... Wouldn't have been the entertaining characters they are if they spoke all proper, would vey now?

For that matter, you can have your narrator speak ungrammatically, if you want him to be identified as a member of a class that talks that way. But your ear had better be good for that kind of dialog. It really has to flow naturally, and it can't take center stage at the expense of the story.

I would add that Ian Fleming's use of American lower-class idiom was, IMHO, painful to read. He obviously got all his understanding of it second-hand, from trash novels and B movies, and applied it indiscriminately to his American characters, whatever their ethnicity or class was.

 

[Scandilove]

Thanks for the replies. Reading them, I guess it's the narration by the character I'm most concerned about. It would be strange to have her character speak one way and her narrator voice noticeably different. Wouldn't it? As a reader I think I'd find it strange.

 

[JoanneA]

Why does she have to be working class? Can you give us an example?

 

[Scandilove]

Why does she have to be working class? Can you give us an example?

She doesn't have to be but she is. I'm trying to be aware of stereotyping but for the purposes of the story she's a cleaner struggling to make ends meet.

 

[yukonnights]

I would make narration lines to always be of good style. No mannerisms. narration should be well written, or nobody'll be able to stand it.

As for speech, you can express character's mannerisms there.

I second this opinion. The dialogue will get the point across without over doing it.

Or you could go third person for the "voice in the head" of the characters. Third person narrative form is writing from the omniscent point of view. Here, you use the he-she form.

But as in all art, it's up to what you like !

 

[visioneer]

I think oggbashan's advice is good for both dialogue and narration, especially if the narration is her inner dialogue from her POV. The key, like he says, is to suggest, but not overdo, the mannerisms of her speech. You can show her "voice" both in her vocabulary and her choice of sentences, thus giving the reader clues to how she views and relates to the world around her.

Again, a light touch is important. If the reader has to step out of your fantasy world to decode/translate colloquialisms, slang, etc., then you have gone too far.

Though I have not read the book, I have seen excerpts from "The Color Purple" used as examples of how to do this well.

 

[Scandilove]

Lots of good advice here. Thanks for the responses, they're much appreciated!

S

 

[hylas_]

I would definitely write 1st person narration in the same way the POV character speaks. Sometimes, I even let a character's voice bleed a little into 3rd person narration. Just don't overdo it, both in the narration and in the dialogue.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Blue collar and red necks rely on aphorisms and plenty of mild cursing. Grammar's got little to do with their speech.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

In the midst of it there came along a man in a cart with a load of wood. We exchanged the time of day and I remarked upon the smallness of his load.

“Yes,” he said, “but it’s a pretty heavy load to drag seven or eight miles over such roads.”

Possibly he understood me as implying that he seemed to be in rather a small business, although I had no such purpose, but he went on to say: “In 1861, when the war broke out, my father owned niggers, and we didn’t have to do this back then. But I don’t complain. If I hadn’t got a bullet in me, I should do pretty well. ”
“Then you were in the war?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, yes, sir! I was in the Confederate service. Yes, sir, I’m a Southerner to the backbone.” He swore it.

His complexion was swarthy, and in all simplicity I asked if he was a Minorcan. I might as well have touched a lighted match to gun powder. His eyes flashed, and he came round the tail of the cart at me, gesticulating with his stick.

“Minorcan!” He broke out. “Spain and the island of Minorca are two places, ain’t they?”

I admitted meekly that they were.

“You shoulda paid closer attention when you was learning geography,” he frowned.

I owned it.

“Well, I’m Spanish. That ain’t Minorcan. My grandfather was a colonel, and commanded St. Augustine. He couldn’t have done that if he was Minorcan.”

He quieted down a bit before speaking more. He added how his father remembered the Indian war, and he had heard him tell about it. I recalled it, too, but kept quiet.

“Those were dangerous times,” he remarked. “You couldn’t have been standing out here in the woods then.”

“Things are pretty calm now, the real danger’s all in the past,” I replied.

“No, no, not now.” But as he continued along he said that he wasn’t afraid of anything; he wasn’t that kind of a man. Then, with a final turn, he added, what I could not dispute, “A man’s life is always in danger.”

I changed the subject when I spotted a curious flower along the way “What do you call this flower?” said I.

“Valentine’s flower,” he answered at once.

“Ah,” said I, “because it is in bloom on St. Valentine’s Day, I suppose?”

“No, sir,” he said. “Do you speak Spanish?” I had to shake my head. “Because I can explain it better in Spanish,” he continued, as if by way of apology; but he went on in perfectly good English: “If you put one of them under your pillow, and think of someone you would like very much to see, someone who has been dead a long time, you will be likely to dream of him. It is a very pretty flower,” he added.

It is not prudent, to judge a Southern man’s blood, in either sense of the word, by his dress or occupation. This man had brought seven or eight miles a load of wood that might possibly be worth fifty cents, and for clothing wore a pair of trousers and a blue cotton shirt, the latter full of holes through which the skin was visible; yet his father had “owned niggers.” It’s never wise to be too much interested in a man as a specimen that you quite forget your manners.

 

[Ibrennus]

I've always felt that grammar should take a back seat to the story. Don't get me wrong, grammar certainly has its place but people don't speak like that. Good grammar often makes for a horrible story. Read the dialog from any of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. The Last Good Country is a good example. The dialog between Nick and his sister is loaded with regional idioms and colloquialisms but it flows naturally. Another master of casual dialog, especially in the first person narrative was Louis L'amour. Many of his Sackett novels are great examples.