‘Hell is other people’. Of course it is. And that’s not me being existential (although I subscribe totally to that view of the world and especially that interpretation of identity and social interaction), it’s just me stating the obvious. We’re judged by how we look and what we wear. And I’m not just bemoaning the fact that, as a decrepit male, I can’t be photographed standing naked behind a pile of my books and hope it’ll create a sudden boost in sales. Anyway, perhaps most of all, we’re judged by how we speak.
(As an aside, I should add that writers are also judged by their books. After reading a passage from my first book where my detective sits at traffic lights watching schoolgirls cross the road and reflecting on how they look, my wife said ‘Oh. So you fancy schoolgirls then, do you?’)
No, as a writer of both novels and plays, it’s the speaking bit of the equation that interests me. Without wishing to offend anyone, I’d suggest that if you have a character saying ‘The proliferation of epistolary exegesis prohibits the development of arcane terminology to a devastating extent’, he won’t be carrying a hod on a building site. Nor will he be sharing a pint with someone who says ‘Oi, wanker! Shift your arse.’ But, again, that’s self-evident.
No, the real problems arise when you want to convey accents. If someone has a strong regional accent of any sort, that’s part of who they are. Take the accent away from them and they cease to be the same person. The trouble for the writer is that he/she needs to convey the accent in such a way that the reader doesn’t have to stop to ask ‘WTF’s that all about?’
I encountered this with that first book. It’s set where I live, in Aberdeen. I come originally from Plymouth, so you can imagine the disparity between the accents I heard when I was growing up and those I hear nowadays. In a pub in Plymouth (and I know because I lived in one) you’ll hear ‘Wobbe gwain ev?’ The same question in an Aberdeen pub might be ‘Fitchy for?’ Both are asking you what you want to drink. In ‘correct’ English, the first is ‘What are you going to have?’ and the second is ‘What are you for?’
So when, naturally enough, I made some of my fictional local coppers speak with an Aberdeen accent, my editor in London put me straight right away. ‘Fa ye spikkin till?’ (To whom are you speaking?) and ‘Fa’s ‘e loon?’ (Who is that boy?) would mean nothing at all to anyone south of Stonehaven and her suggestion was that I should restrict myself to letting the characters say ‘Aye’ to indicate that they were Scots. In the end, there had to be a compromise, so they weren’t incomprehensible, but they did retain some of their accents.
The annoying thing then was that, in an otherwise very enthusiastic review of my second book, the local paper wrote ‘Some of the Scots dialogue is a little suspect and inconsistent’.
See what I mean? Hell really is other people.
HA HA HA!!! yes, I feel your pain. I absolutely loathe accents written in full – HAGRID STAB SYNDROME for example – but try and invoke a feel by the rhythm of the speech and words here and there. I admit not understanding any of your phrases without translation, but I am south of the Watford Gap.
I’ve just written something where the character uses thees and thous and I really wish I hadn’t half way through the book.
Heh! I got into so many tortuous explanations during the editing of Crossing The Line, mostly about the construction ‘See you’ or ‘See if… ‘ The one I had to argue hardest for was somebody saying ‘See that smell?’ The ed just wouldn’t believe me for AGES.
As for the schoolgirls – my H picked up the CTL manuscript and read the bit where Nick goes swimming naked with his girlfriend, and he said ‘Ah-ha, I didn’t know you went through a lesbian phase at school.’
Unless your name is, Irvine Welsh or James Kelman, of course. Perhaps with the latter he was deemed to be more “literary” and therefore in the name of “lierature” he could get away with it.
LOL! I think you were right that you can’t take away a character’s accent and expect him to be the same person, but otoh, I have to agree that too much dialect is offputting. I think the only Dorothy L.Sayer book I didn’t really enjoy was ‘The Five Red Herrings’ because it took me forever to work out what her characters were saying.
I grew up in Liverpool and you want to try conveying that dialect phonetically! it’s virtually impossible because there is no written equivalent for the glottal stop…
A former real life writer’s group took exception to some of the characters in ‘Roses in December’ because, and I quote, ‘they didn’t sound Irish enough’. I couldn’t seem to make them understand that you can’t use ‘begorrah’ and ‘bejasus’ these days; that you have to be more subtle; and that Irish people mostly speak normal English, just with an Irish accent… *rolls eyes*
The glottal stop’s a particular problem. It exists in Aberdonian but try writing a sentence actually heard by a friend of mine when one of his neighbours asked her friend, Betty, whether she was feeling better. The question went ‘Ye feelin a bi’ie be’er, Be’y?’. Substitute double t for the apostrophe and it makes sense, but which reader would guess it from the phonetic version?