Tag: dialect

How much Regional Accent and Dialect is Too Much in Historical Fiction?

When it comes to using dialect or regional accents in a novel, there are no definitive rules. It depends on the writer’s voice, the genre, and personal taste. Personal taste is where the rubber meets the road.

Too much of something like dialect in a novel sort of falls into the “I know it when I see it” category.

The rule of thumb

The rule of thumb is to avoid using it to the point of making the novel difficult to read. If the reader finds it exhausting to decipher the words, it means you have crossed that imaginary line. If the reader must wade through so much dialect that they are yanked out of the story, it means there is too much dialect.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

My experience with “y’all” in “Slip Sliding Away”

In my early drafts of my historical short story, “Slip Sliding Away,” I set the plot in the late 1700s. Something kept nagging at me, though. I wanted to use “y’all” in the story.

If you have read the story and you are from the southern part of the United States, you know the funeral scene with the intoxicated pallbearers struggling to get up the hill to the cemetery just screams out for the use of “y’all.”

There was a problem, though. My trusty resource for determining when a word came into common usage, English Through the Ages, by William Brohaugh, failed me! I did not find ‘y’all” in the book.

My second resource for such dilemmas is Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, for it tells when words came into common use. I looked up “y’all” and to my great disappointment, the dictionary just said, “var [variation] of you-all.”

I cringed. Why would anyone say, “You all” when there is a perfectly good contraction that just rolls off the southern tongue?

While I’m airing my grievances about the use and misuse of “y’all,” let me just say that if one is going to write the contraction, please put the apostrophe in the correct place. Don’t make me cringe by writing, “ya’ll.” I see it on all kinds of southern merch and it’s just not right. But I digress.

I turned several pages beyond “y’all” in the dictionary and looked up “you all.” First, I discovered it is hyphenated. Who knew? Then I learned that “you-all” was in common use in 1824. That information was helpful. It told me that I had to move my late-1700s story to 1824 or later.

I never did find anything definitive telling me when southerners started taking the easy way out by addressing two or more people as “y’all.” I figure that surely by the 1870s the word was in use, so I set the final draft of “Slip Sliding Away” in that decade.

Did you have any idea about the minutiae writers of historical fiction have to deal with? (Yes, I know. I’m not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition; however, it just seems awkward to write – or read – “Did you have any idea about the minutiae with which writers of historical fiction have to deal?” My mother was an English teacher, and I think she would agree with me on this one.)

What about the dialect in Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens?

After reading Where the Crawdads Sing, I found myself alone in the world in saying that novel contained too much dialect. Everyone else who read it absolutely loved it. I liked it, too, but I was distracted by the amount of dialect used. Maybe I had read too many articles and books about the craft of writing and I was just hyper aware of the dialect.

With more than 617,000 reviews with an average of 4.7 out of 5 stars on Amazon and 18 million copies sold worldwide, Where the Crawdads Sing is obviously an amazing novel. Apparently, Delia Owens knew exactly how much dialect to include in it to please millions of readers. I wish I were talented enough to have written it!

Since my last blog post

It was a busy week and I got to check off one big task that has been on my to-do list for months. On Friday, my church friend who took the cover photograph for my two local history books, Harrisburg, Did You Know? Cabarrus History, Book 1 and Harrisburg, Did You Know? Cabarrus History, Book 2, took photographs for the cover of the family cookbook my sister and I have been compiling for a couple of years. With the formatting finally completed, I felt safe in getting the cover designed. Look for an announcement regarding the publication of The Aunts in the Kitchen: Southern Family Recipes in a future blog post and in my November newsletter.

My sister and I took a day trip that was a combination Revolutionary War/genealogy trip. It was a wonderful day. I’ll tell you about in my November newsletter.

Speaking of my newsletter, you can find out about the cookbook, my various other writing projects, and the historical “field trips” I take if you simply go to https://www.janetmorrisonbooks.com and click on the “Subscribe” button. You will immediately receive a free downloadable copy of “Slip Sliding Away” as well as my future every-other-month newsletters. Thank you to all 42 of you who have taken the time to subscribe.

Until my next blog post

What do you have to say about the amount of regional accent or dialect in a novel? I would like to hear your thoughts on the topic.

Have you ordered my American Revolution e-ghost story?  “Ghost of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse: An American Revolutionary War Ghost Story” is available from Amazon, along with my other books: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CH7JCP11/.

Take time for friends and family.

Thank you for taking time to read my blog post. Y’all come back now, ya hear?

Remember the people of Ukraine, Maui, Libya,….

Janet

A Wake-Up Call from Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“Find Your Roots” with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on PBS

I’ve enjoyed the various television series Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has done on PBS (the Public Broadcasting System in the United States.) With my interest in genealogy, I’ve especially enjoyed his “Finding Your Roots” series where he (and his assistants) do a thorough genealogical search for well-known Americans. Many times, the findings are surprising.

In my blog post last Monday, https://janetswritingblog.com/2019/06/03/4-or-5-books-i-read-in-may-2019/ , I wrote about the books I read in May. I mentioned reading the first two chapters of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s new book, Stony the Road:   Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow.

Stony the Road:   Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and The Rise of Jim Crow, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The events and facts Dr. Gates included in his book were not in the history textbooks of my youth. This period in our nation’s history was omitted from our textbooks, as were the dark decades which followed in which “Jim Crow” laws were enacted and strictly enforced. All this was swept under the rug and not talked about. The precious little I was taught about the Reconstruction Era could be summed up as, “After the Civil War the ‘carpetbaggers’ from “up North” came down here to tell us what to do.” This always had negative connotations. I grew up in North Carolina.

As a lover of history, even at a young age, I lamented the fact that every year in school we’d study the years up to the end of the American Civil War, the school year would end, and the same thing would happen the next year. It always came across as a lack of time to study anything that happened after that war but, with the perspective I’ve gained in the last several years, I now wonder if this was part of a grand design by the State of North Carolina. Perhaps it was by intention that we never studied the Reconstruction Era.

A snapshot of my school years

So you’ll know the background from which I speak, here are the highlights of my school years as far as race goes: I attended an all-white public school through the sixth grade; racial desegregation was optional in 1965 when I was in the seventh grade (meaning there were three children from a black family who desegregated our school of grades 1-12 with around 1,000 students); the historic black public schools in our county were closed at the end of my seventh grade year, so the schools were completely racially-integrated thereafter.

Can you imagine being one of just three students of color in a school of 1,000 white students? I cannot imagine how Carolyn Morris and her two siblings felt. I also cannot imagine how all the black students in our county felt the following year when their schools were closed and they had no choice but to attend the schools that had preciously been all-white. It was a blessing that five of the six county high schools were consolidated in 1967 into two new high schools, so Central Cabarrus High School and Northwest Cabarrus High School were never racially-segregated.

Back to Dr. Gates’ book

From Dr. Gates’ book I learned in greater detail than I had before that great strides were made for racial integration during Reconstruction; however, “Jim Crow” laws started popping up all over the country (yes, even in The North) to squelch that progress. One fact that epitomizes the century after the American Civil War is that the University of South Carolina was racially-integrated after the War, but then laws were instituted to prohibit black students. The university wasn’t desegregated again until 1963.

The most important thing I learned as a writer

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and The Rise of Jim Crow, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The most important thing I learned as a writer from reading Dr. Gates’ book is about the use of “Plantation Dialect” in fiction. It is something I have wrestled with in the years I’ve written and re-written my manuscript for The Spanish Coin/The Doubloon. With every revision I’ve deleted words of dialect. I had it down to just a couple of words (nawsuh for No, sir; Yessum for Yes, ma’am) by the time I read Dr. Gates’ book. Now I realize how that use of dialect, no doubt, comes across to an African-American reader.

As a white Southerner, I don’t like it when someone mocks my accent. I’m proud of my accent, but to see it overdone in spoken or written word is demeaning.

I’m fascinated by the regional accents in the United States. It’s a subject I’d like to study. I think these regional accents are a beautiful warp and weft in the fabric of our nation. If we all spoke just alike, life would be boring.

In next Monday’s blog post, I plan to delve more deeply into this subject as Dr. Gates’ book prompted me to do additional research about the use of dialect and accents in fiction. Learning to write fiction is a journey.

Since my last blog post

For a variety of reasons, I’ve made only scant progress on my manuscript for The Doubloon; however, what I’ve learned about the use of accent and dialect in fiction is far more important than my novel’s word count.

Until my next blog post

I hope you have a good book to read. I’m reading The Things We Cannot Say, by Kelly Rimmer and The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, by Kim Michele Richardson.

If you’re a writer, I hope you have productive writing time.

Thank you for reading my blog. You could have spent the last few minutes doing something else, but you chose to read my blog.

Let’s continue the conversation

What is your experience in writing or reading fiction in which dialect and accent were overdone? Have you noticed an evolution in how dialect and accent are handled in novels?

Janet