Building Believable Characters: Utilizing dialect and other ways you can enhance your characters through dialogue.
“W’en old man Rabbit say ‘scoot,’ dey scooted, en w’en ole Miss Rabbit say ‘scat,’ dey scatted. Dey did dat. En dey kep’ der cloze clean, and day ain’t had no smut on der nose nudder.”
Uncle Remus – A Story About Little Rabbits, Joel Chandler Harris.
We have a long literary tradition of writing dialogue in accents and dialect. Mark Twain comes to mind, as a master of the written idiom. Dialect instantly gives characters authenticity and offers insight into their attitudes, background, and education. An accent allows the reader to use their sense of hearing and creates depth to a character.
One tactic is to reflect dialect with commonly spoken words in commonly spelled ways. A writer could insert “gonna” for “going to.” The reader registers these words easily but the speech pattern also conveys information about the characters.
A writer can pay close attention to phrases and idioms that pertain to a character’s geographic location or time in history. Phrases, such as “she’s dumber than a box of rocks, bless her heart,” places someone in the American South. “The craic is mighty,” puts someone in modern day Ireland, along with sayings like “Top of the morning to you.”
Take this as an example, imagine your character grew up in a mining town in rural Minnesota near the Canadian border, and he tells his mining foreman this:
“Oh, yeah, you betcha der, chieftain. Goin’ down wit dat der new fella, don’tcha know, and we’ll git dat der whole kit and kaboodle up the shaft der lickety split, ya know. ”
Now that’s a mouthful, and definitely not an easy read. Here’s the translation:
“Oh, yeah, chief. Going down with that new guy, and we’ll get everything up the shaft right away.”
Here’s the problem. If you write the dialogue phonetically, it’s interesting and rich with complexity, yet much more difficult to read. If you write it entirely in Standard English, you lose all the uniqueness and flavor, and unfortunately, the dialogue becomes forgettable.
Solution: moderation.
It’s okay to toss in a few phonetic words here and there to highlight the accent or dialect, but use it sparingly. Moderation will save you from frustrating your readers.
“You betcha, chief. Going down with the new fella, ya know, and we’ll get the whole kit and kaboodle up the shaft lickety split.
You want to flavor the character, provide authenticity, but don’t overdo it.
A fallback option for communicating a character’s accent to readers is to use standard spelling along with a description of the character’s speech in the text introducing the character. One might write, “Her roots in the South were evident in her slow, melodious speech,” while using standard spelling when writing out her speech. You can put regions in their dialogue as well. “Pop” in the Midwest is “soda” in the Northeast, someone’s father in the South, and the sound bubblegum makes in California.
So, use dialect in moderation to lend authenticity to the voice of your characters, showing the reader where they are from rather than telling.
Show your character through dialogue. Showing character through dialogue is all about being sensitive to the nuances of these different flavors, and picking the one that best matches the traits of the character saying the line. If you know your characters this can flow from your fingertips.
You can convey nuances of respect or disrespect using questions, statements, and commands as your tools. And remember, respect and disrespect factor into all sorts of personality traits. For example, simple arrogance—a character who always feels he knows better than everyone else—can manifest as a tendency towards issuing commands rather than stating his opinions declaratively. He would say “You don’t want to do that,” rather than “Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Command versus declaration.
Dialogue is a wonderful way of showing moods and emotional states. A flustered character who totally freaks out, stutters and splutters, speaking fragments, re-starting sentences or changing the subject mid-sentence.
Is the character shy or outgoing? Cool towards others, or engaging and warm? Expansiveness versus brevity, let how the characters say something display their character to the reader.
Something all writers should be careful not to do, is having all your characters sound alike, most likely just an extension of you. Teens should sound like teens, not little kids and not Stepford perfect children. Snarky usually is a good fit. Your elderly will use a few sayings that have not been incorporated in the vernacular of the younger generations, “don’t cha know?” “Oh, dear. I didn’t mean to say that.”
Your street drug dealer will use curse words, and most likely some Ebonics. Your prep school graduates will not sound like the kids you have coming for candy at Halloween.
And if your writing style is short and terse, don’t fall into the trap of having more than one character with that voice. Women should not sound like Rocky or the Godfather. Men should not sound like women unless they are queens. If you are a parent or grandparent and have children, teenage, or young adult characters, have someone from their generation read the manuscript and let you know if it sounds age appropriate. If they say no, please change it. As much as you want to believe that your teenage son or daughter is perfect and speaks well when out with friends, if he/she comes home hale and hearty every day, they do not speak that way in front of friends.
Exercise: Write up a single page of conversation between two or three of your characters. Let us SEE the characters based on what they say and who they say it to. A mother telling her child she is a bleeping bleep is far different from her telling some pervert to get his bleeping bleep hands off her daughter. In the first example she would be considered a poor excuse for a mother, in the second she is a protective, caring mother.