The Fiction Writer's Guide to Dialogue

by John Hough

  There’s a pattern here. Faulkner allocates an accent, or doesn’t, according to social class. His black characters—servants or laborers a couple of generations removed from slavery, if that—speak a dialect of their own, with an accent written into every line of their dialogue. Dilsey and her son, Luster:

  “Whut you up to” she said.

  “Nothin,” Luster said. “Mr. Jason say fer me to find out whar dat water leak in de cellar fum.”

  “En when wus hit he say fer you do do dat?” Disley said. “Last New Year’s day, wasn’t hit?”

  “I thought I jes be lookin whiles dey sleep,” Luster said.

  Wash Jones, Thomas Sutpen’s white retainer in the eponymous short story, which, retold, became a key event in Absalom, Absalom!, is so low-born and ignorant that even Sutpen’s former slaves look down on him. Few of Faulkner’s poor whites speak as colloquially as Wash:

  “I ain’t afraid. Because you air brave. It ain’t that you were a brave man at one minute or day in your life and got a paper to show hit from General Lee. But you air brave, the same as you air alive and breathing . . . And I know that whatever you handle or tech, whether hit’s a regiment of men or a ignorant gal or just a hound dog, that you will make hit right.”

  Air for are, tech for touch, hit’s for it’s—nobody else in the story, Wash, or in Absalom, Absalom! speaks quite like Wash, who is one of Faulkner’s more poignant characters. His dialogue is straitened, like his life, the diction cramped: the voice of the poor white South.

  Like Faulkner, most southern writers give their dialogue an accent, or don’t, depending on social class. In Pete Dexter’s southern gothic novel, Paris Trout, the dialogue of Trout’s educated wife, Hanna—and of the lawyer, Townes, and the county prosecutor, Seagraves—is uninflected, while Trout’s diction is just imperfect enough to convey his country upbringing and the flavor of an accent. The accents in Paris Trout broaden farther down the social ladder. A white policeman brings the young black girl, Rosie Sayers, home, after she’s been bitten by a fox:

  “Miz Sayers,” the police was saying, “I am Officer Andrews, and I brung you something home.”

  The girl’s mother looked around the police until she saw her. “What’s she did?”

  The police’s head moved back until a roll of skin formed over his collar. “Nothin’,” he said. “But a white lady fetched her to the clinic on account she said she been bit by something.”

  Something to notice: the southern accent in this colloquy is implicit. It resides not in phonetic spellings that alter pronunciation—except, perhaps for Miz—but in the syntax and grammatical irregularities. Brung, What’s she did?, on account: they have a languid, country sound that we hear as southern. They read accented.

  The southern characters in Lee Smith’s Family Linen are solidly middle class, and their dialogue, too, is uninflected. But it’s different among the folks of the Virginia hill country. Oral History spans three generations, going back to a time of extreme isolation and want in southern Appalachia, and the dialogue in the first half of the novel is the most colloquial and accented in Smith’s fiction. Early in the novel, Granny Younger—midwife, herbalist, and clairvoyant—counsels Almarine Cantrell, who has come under the spell of the beautiful Red Emmy. Red Emmy, according to local lore, is a witch. Granny Younger is narrating:

  “They’s something else,” Almarine said.

  “They’s always something else,” I said.

  “She’s gonner have a baby,” Almarine says. He cries down into his hands.

  “Good God in heaven,” I say. “It won’t be no baby like none of us-uns ever seed, I’ll tell you that. You get rid of her, Almarine,” what I told him, “afore you get a passel of witch children up there.”

  Almarine and Granny Younger are speaking what amounts to an indigenous language—a dialect. They’s, gonner, and afore aren’t intrinsically southern pronunciations, but the exotic idiom and diction of this dialogue conjure a remote time and place, a bygone language, spoken in an accent more imagined than heard.

  The members of Smith’s musical family in The Devil’s Dream, which also encompasses three generations, get around more and are less provincial than the hillbillies in Oral History. Even among the early generations, their idiom is less eccentric and more modern:

  “If you are going with me,” Daddy said as we started off that evening, “I don’t want to hear no whining, nor no muley-mouthing, nor nothing like it, from either one of you girls. I don’t want to hear nobody say, ‘Daddy, I’m so tired.’ Nor do I want to hear nothing spoke about nobody taking a little sip.”

  There’s backcountry in this speech, with its errant verb forms and double negatives. Notice, however, that the spelling is conventional; Smith relies on syntax to give her dialogue an accent, using words like musical notes and arranging them along the line to produce the melody of the region. Late in the same novel, Ralph Handy gives Katie Cocker a pep talk:

  “Well, now, I’m just a old country boy,” Ralph Handy said—he always said this!—“but I ain’t so sure about that. What it looks to me like, he owes you a lot. He’s in your debt, and not the other way round, and don’t you forget it, honey. It’s your songs.”

  I’m just a old country boy sounds like a lyric at the Grand Ole Opry and probably was, more than once. Consider the difference between What it looks like to me and Ralph Handy’s rendition, What it looks to me like. The transposition of that one word, like, changes the sound of the phrase. It gives it a lift at the end and keeps like on the tongue a fraction longer, opening the word out, giving it a twang. It’s your songs is one of those lines of dialogue that looks easy to write and are not. Maybe Smith heard it somewhere, maybe she concocted it herself. Either way, it sounds just like that old country boy, Ralph Handy.

  Ralph and the singer Blackjack Johnny Raines couldn’t be more different, the one loving and wise, the other a liar and a hustler, but you wouldn’t know it from the sweet sound of Johnny’s voice. He’s coming on to a floozy he picked up in a bar:

  “Honey, I’ve gotta come right out and say something to you. When I saw you sitting in that bar back there, I can’t tell you what come over me, the way I felt, I mean. You look just like my sister, I swear you do. You look just like she would of looked if she’d ever of growed up, I mean.”

  We know what Johnny is up to, and the woman suspects it. She’ll go with him, though. There’s honey in the voice, something smooth and easygoing. The words fall in quaint patterns, like the lyrics of a country song. I can’t tell you what come over me, the way I felt, I mean. Who doesn’t love a southern accent?

  • • •

  Outside of the South, novelists generally ignore regional accents. In almost any fiction—take your pick—the dialogue of a character from Indiana, say, reads pretty much like that of a character from Pennsylvania. Didion’s Californians pronounce their words, as far we can tell, the same way Anne Tyler’s Baltimoreans pronounce theirs. John Cheever’s New Yorkers sound just like his New Englanders.

  A New England accent is distinctive, but most writers leave it alone in their dialogue. (Do not let your grizzled Cape Codder or Maine fisherman call a northeast storm a “nor’easter,” which is an invention of television meteorologists. The old Yankees didn’t pronounce their r’s; “nawth-easter,” they said.) The dialogue in The Friends of Eddie Coyle is packed with local references—the Bruins, Logan Airport, MCI Walpole—but Higgins leaves pronunciation to the reader and, references aside, these guys could be crooks and lawmen in Miami. The crime writer Dennis Lehane and the mystery writer Robert B. Parker set their fiction in and around Boston, and their dialogue is as uninflected as Hemingway’s, and nearly as good.

  John Sayles, curiously, gives his Bostonians a broad and explicit New England accent in Union Dues. The two protagonists, young Hobie McNatt and his father, Hunter, have traveled up separately from West Virginia, Hobie searching for his older brother, Hunter searching for Hobie. The McNatts live in the hills, coal country,
but Sayles gives their dialogue no accent; the New England accents, maybe, are a testament to the foreignness of Boston to Hobie and Hunter.

  Hobie has fetched up in a commune. One of the residents is a young ex-boxer named King:

  “. . . I’m in the quatter finals. I’m gonna fight this kid, Pawto Rican kid from the South End, he’s sposed to take the whole thing. I get by him, I’m golden, prawbly I can coast the rest of the way.”

  Hunter meets a divorcee named Helen, who admires him for leaving home, at his age, for an uncertain future. She couldn’t do it, Helen says:

  “I’m pretty tied down here. There’s the girls, they got their friends and I wouldn’t think of pulling them out of St. Brigid’s. It’s so hod to find a decent school you stot moving around. Then there’s this house, I got the mawgage to keep up with . . .”

  I’m a lifelong New Englander, and it’s true that a lot of us sound like King and Helen. But regional accents, which are common in everyday speech, almost universal, are disproportionate in their effect on dialogue in fiction. New Englanders like Helen may say hod for hard, stot for start, and mawgage for mortgage, but the written words are intrusive. (Mawgage sounds like a squawk.) They call attention to themselves at the expense of the rest of the line. They distract the reader.

  Sayles’s short story, Hoop, written earlier, is also set in Boston, but the dialogue is undoctored. The story is about a high school basketball player who receives counsel in the ways of the world from his father and other loiterers in a South Boston bar and pool room:

  “You keep your eyes open, boy, opportunity is everywhere.” The old man never turned, but talked to Brian by way of the mirror over the bar. “Twenty years on the railroad and never once did I ask myself where those loads, those trains, were heading. That’s where it was, and I never went after it. Right under my nose and there I was, too blind to smell it.”

  “What your father means, Sport, is you go where the action is. You settle for what you got and life passes you by.”

  “Wasted my youth on a dead-end job. And youth, youth you never get back.”

  The clean dialogue in Hoop gets the undistracted reading it deserves. The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! will soon be a hundred years old; their dialects, surely accurate, would seem overdone today. Be wary of improvised spellings as a way of giving dialogue an accent; they can be distracting. An evocative and timely colloquialism, woven into an imaginative syntax, work just as well, or better.

  INDICATING FOREIGN ACCENTS

  Hunter McNatt has found a factory job, and his Italian co-workers are discussing current events during a lunch break in Union Dues:

  “You see what a Presiden say?”

  “I don’ rememb.”

  “Presiden Neex, ee say soon no mo gasoline. No mo automobile. Evvabody buy sick.”

  “Che?”

  “Buy sick. Bicicletta.”

  “That so?”

  “Ee said eemself. Alla price go up. Evvating coast too much. Groun beef, dolar a poun. Forget it.”

  “Where you go buy?”

  Stope anna Shope”

  “You go to Gran Yoon, is jus as good.”

  “Not what they say onna TV.”

  “You gonna bleeve evvating they say? Listen a me, I’m go to Gran Yoon five, seex year now. Jus as good.”

  This phonetic tour de force by John Sayles is one approach to foreign accents. This time Sayles hits the jackpot; it’s wonderful dialogue—antic and unpredictable. Sayles writes it to make us smile, even when the tyrannical foreman, Puglisi, is talking:

  “What you do?”

  “Huh?”

  “You hens! Get em outa you pocket. I don’t care what you do with, jus you nev’ let me catch you with hens in you pocket.”

  I think Sayles’s ear is dead-on here, but the authenticity of the dialogue is beside the point. It sounds authentic; if it didn’t, it would fall embarrassingly flat, like an unfunny standup comedian. Sayles takes a gamble here—he was twenty-seven when he wrote Union Dues—and gets away with it.

  Be careful.

  The dialogue of Sayles’s Italians—even Puglisi’s bullying—works as comic relief. The Italians appear only briefly in the novel; Sayles knows better than to fill a book with dialogue as jerrybuilt and syntactically unruly as this. It can be funny for only so long.

  I had a French uncle who spoke fluent English, and as a child I loved listening to him speak. I loved his softened consonants, his mellifluous vowels. My aunt’s name was Julia: Zhulia, he called her. Boston was Boh-stun, Hemingway, whom he read in English, was Heh-meeng-way.

  If there’s a foreigner in your novel, think hard about his or her dialogue. To write the actual sound of my uncle’s Frenchified speech you would have to alter the English spelling of nearly every word, as Sayles does with the dialogue of his Italians. Over the long haul, and even the short one, this has a disruptive effect: it requires some getting used to, every time, and it gives the lines a gloss that can hog the reader’s attention. Sayles’s Italianated words and phrases are such a delightful corruption of English that we don’t pay much attention to what the others in the room are saying. That’s okay—for a while.

  There’s a much less intrusive alternative to the heavy hand Sayles lays on the dialogue of his Italians. Just as you can evoke a southern accent by manipulating syntax and using the occasional colloquial word or expression, you can make a character from, say, France sound exotic and foreign. Dickens often overdoes accents, both regional and foreign, but he found just the right note in Bleak House, with the dialogue of the passionate and volatile Mademoiselle Hortense. Mademoiselle is an attractive woman with rage in her heart, and she is on a mission. She has come to the home of the lawyer Tulkinghorn, who has been employing her in a dark scheme of his own:

  “I have had great deal of trouble to find you, sir.”

  “Have you!”

  “I have been here very often, sir. It has always been said to me, he is not at home, he is engage, he is not for you.”

  “Quite right, and quite true.”

  “Not true. Lies!”

  “Now, mistress,” says the lawyer, tapping the key hastily on the chimney-piece. “If you have anything to say, say it, say it.”

  “Sir, you have not use me well. You have been mean and shabby.”

  “Mean and shabby, eh?” returns the lawyer.

  “Yes. What is it that I tell you? You know you have. You have attrapped me—catched me—to give you information . . .”

  Spell Check nails only two words here, attrapped and catched, and neither is a phonetic rendering (Hortense probably says cotched). Dickens spoke French and knew how certain literal translations would come out in English: he is not for you, What is it that I tell you? There are other, slighter syntactical oddities: It has always been said to me. Dickens drops the “d” from Hortense’s past participles. My Swiss uncle didn’t use contractions—“I have not the time,” he said—and Mademoiselle doesn’t, either. She says Tulkinghorn has been “mean” and “shabby,” expressive words which don’t quite fit the case.

  Dickens, then, gives Hortense a French accent by implication. He spells conventionally, but plays with her grammar and syntax. Reading her dialogue, you can’t help sounding French, just as you can’t help sounding southern when you read Ralph Handy’s.

  Irwin Shaw didn’t speak German when he wrote his famous short story, Sailor off the Bremen, in 1939, but there’s a crispness, an economy and feel of rigidity, in the dialogue of the Nazi Lueger, the steward who has been lured ashore by a woman in New York:

  “That was a very fine film tonight,” Lueger was saying. “I enjoy Deanna Durbin. Very young, fresh sweet. Like you.”

  It helps to know the language of your foreigner. There’s a diverse cast of Mexicans in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, with a varying command of English. In All the Pretty Horses John Grady Cole is being questioned by the captain after his and Rawlins’ arrest:

  The peoples in this town are qui
et peoples. Everybody here is quiet all the time.

  He leaned forward and stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray.

  Then comes the assassin Blevins to steal horses and kill everybody. Why is this? He was a quiet boy and never do no harm and then he come here and do these things something like that?

  He leaned back and shook his head in that same sad way.

  No, he said. He wagged one finger. No.

  He watched John Grady.

  What is the truth is this: He was no quiet boy. He was this other kind of boy all the time. All the time.

  The captain muddles his verb tenses and subject-verb agreement. He uses double negatives. But amid all this grammatical chaos, everything is spelled correctly, as if it were a point of honor with McCarthy to keep every word intact. Notice, too, that the Captain doesn’t use contractions. Foreigners speaking English tend not to, and it’s an easy way to enhance the unnatural melody and cadence of their dialogue.

  The captain’s Spanish accent seems embedded in his flawed English: the flaws sound like errant translations, and in them we hear, or imagine we do, a skewed pronunciation. But the vicious pimp, Eduardo, in Cities of the Plain, speaks perfect, even elegant, English, and it is McCarthy’s disposition of his words that gives his dialogue an accent, both Spanish and oily. Billy Parham has come to the brothel bringing John Grady’s offer to buy the prostitute, Magdalena:

  Your friend is in the grip of an irrational passion, Eduardo said. Nothing you say to him will matter. He has in his head a certain story. Of how things will be. In this story he will be happy. What is wrong with this story?

  You tell me.

  What is wrong with this story is that it is not a true story. Men have in their minds a picture of how he world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.