MORE on DIALECT

By Sharon May

Recently, I’ve had two occasions to discover more about dialect. First, I “zoomed in” on the SCWA Summer Series, which addressed dialogue, and naturally, the conversation turned to dialect. Second, I received a critique of a chapter of my novel. The reviewer suggested I limit the use of dialect. On both occasions, I realized many people think dialect is best found, or only found, in dialogue and in alternate spellings. That is a too simplified and limited interpretation of dialect.

I have learned over the past 60 years that readers and listeners of English apparently believe there is no dialect being used if the tale is told in Standard American English. Not being flippant, but that is a dialect, and actually, the privileged dialect, and thus, preferred by editors, publishers, and maybe even readers because that is what they are most used to.  

After trying to read William Faulkner or James Joyce, most people may hate works that are written in other dialects. These authors take on the task of writing phonetic spellings, which complicates the readers’ task even more.

My narrators, who are also characters, have unique (I hope) voices, each using a form of eastern Kentucky Appalachian English. Note that someone from the mountains of Maine will have a different dialect than someone from my hometown, though both are geographically Appalachian. A speaker in Maine is apt to speak quickly, and often use run-ons, while Kentucky hillbillies tend to mumble at about medium to slow speed, and like my narrator Lafe drop words and thus, have more fragments.

Dialect is more than just some odd pronunciations and spellings. I tend not to use phonetic spellings, which the reviewer suggested as an alternative, since they can mark the narrators/speakers as lower class and/or uneducated, which are both stereotypes of hillbillies.

Dialect is also about word choice, colloquialisms, and sentence structure, which mirror the way a character or narrator thinks and engages with other characters and the audience. Lafe has a tendency to drop first-person pronouns at the beginning of sentences. The reviewer suggested no one really talks like that and thus somewhat distracting.

I know several people who speak, write, and I assume, think the way Lafe does. While I may reduce how often he drops words, I do plan to use this pattern for his voice. It is the way he thinks and speaks. Sounds weird, but he’s been that way since the first time he spoke to me.

The use of dialect isn’t simply to establish characters’ speech, but to immerse us in new worlds. My goal for the novel is to depict eastern Kentucky as it was in the 1980s. To do so, I want to create authentic voices to emphasize the diversity and complexity of the region. That requires the use of dialect to its fullest extent.

Read Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove for examples of effective use of dialect.  

GET A CAT; PREPARE FOR SLEEPLESSNESS; STAY CLEAR OF STRONG ELIXIRS - SEVEN TOP WRITERS’ TIPS ON WRITING

By El Ochiis

Cats are mascots for writers. More importantly, Edgar Allen Poe had one; Hemingway had twenty-three; and, TS Elliot wrote a poem to them.

I have a cat, yet, I haven’t written anything since the beginning of the pandemic; then, the unrest of protesting for justice came crashing down, tearing at my moral responsibility to fellow humans, further spiraling me into writing silence. I reached out to an old guru who was stuck in self-isolation and asked him for advice to try to get my writing mojo back.

He told me to put down what I was trying to complete and just write, anything. I took this advice, which propelled me into researching other writing advice. It occurred to me that there isn’t a correct way to set about writing creatively. Some writers thrive in isolation; others can hammer out award-winning prose at local coffee shops; whilst others, though a struggle, are able to snatch time between chores and cleaning little, runny noses.

Conversely, it became abundantly clearer that along with a variety of approaches, there are specific ideas and pieces of advice that many writers hold in common.

Here are seven that held my attention that I feel will help you as a writer:

1.  “Writing anything is better than nothing,” -Katherine Mansfield. Don’t get it right, get it written – “Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you are doomed,” -Ray Bradbury.

2. “Just take a page at a time,” - John Steinbeck. This advice is spot on: “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day. It helps.”

3. “Get offline,” -Zadie Smith – Take a long hard sigh, and, turn off the Wi-Fi – it’s so much more productive if you can “Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.”

4. “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it,” -Elmore Leonard; Steinbeck too.  

5. “Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action." -Kurt Vonnegut.

6.  “You constantly hurry your narrative … by telling it, in a sort of impetuous breathless way, your own person, when the person [characters] should tell it and act it for themselves,” -Charles Dickens. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” -Anton Checkhov. “Show don’t tell.”

7. “…what grabs readers isn’t beautiful writing, a rip-roaring plot, or surface drama; what grabs readers is what gives those things meaning and power:  the story itself,” -Lisa Cron.

The best writing serves the reader, not the writer, so don’t sit there waiting for perfect, beautiful sentences – you’ll be sitting there forever. Start out by tripping, you will fall, then get up and fall again – the key is to keep getting up after you have fallen, then, keep writing. Oh, if you were thinking about taking a sip of hard liquor, Leo Tolstoy and F Scott Fitzgerald warned: “Don’t write and drink.”

READING and WRITING

By Jerry Pate 

When working on my book recently I hammered away over several days thinking Wow, this thing is moving! only to discover I had morphed into default Radio-TV narrator copy…again. It was interesting but lifeless and didn’t encourage readers to continue. Additionally, I was having difficulty with point-of-view.

On the web I found several articles on narrative voice and POV which were helpful. One of the most interesting for me was a November, 2017 post by Rae Elliott. In it, Elliot provides definitions, examples, and advice on various points of view: 1st person, 2nd person, and 3rd person both omniscient and limited. Elliot’s advice was to consider each character in the story and examine how framing the story from that character’s viewpoint would affect the narrative.

My own work-in-progress has several compelling candidates for POV and as I consider which character or characters to focus the story on, I thought to read some compelling narratives and see what I could learn.

And, while realizing I was not reading nearly enough books, I picked up From Russia With Love (Ian Fleming, Glidrose Productions, Ltd. 1957). It is a great example of Limited Third Person Narrator.

The first three chapters flesh out the book’s primary evil character from the viewpoint of: a masseuse, a flashback to the character’s transformation into a brutal unfeeling teenager, and the impressions of him by a Russian security officer all while carrying the story forward.

After reading the early chapters I realized I must read more books. So, today I have begun to establish a schedule for reading and writing and other activities. Feel free to ask me how I’m doing on this in the coming weeks. Writing is a process, not an event.

Readio

WHO INSPIRES YOU TO WRITE?

Ruth P. Saunders

Perhaps it was an encouraging word from a teacher that cleared your path to writing. Maybe reading the words of an accomplished author moved you. Possibly you just loved words and putting them together to convey ideas, images, or feelings. Or it could be a combination of things that inspired, motivated, or facilitated your becoming a writer.

Many people influenced me. A trusted high school teacher encouraged me to write for the school newspaper. Before that I had never considered writing, and those first encouraging words unlocked the door to future possibilities. An English professor in college supported my literary writing when I had doubts about my abilities. My professors in graduate school nurtured my academic writing.

But the first and foremost person instrumental in my becoming a writer was my mother. She did this through word and example.

As a child I was prone to frustration if every line of prose or picture did not flow from my fingers onto the page in final form. In exasperation I crumpled incomplete narratives and partial pictures into tight balls and tossed them into the trash—until my mother stopped me. She explained that real artists finish the work before evaluating it. I learned over time to separate the creative process from the editing process, to let the words flow without judgment until later, when it was time to revise and edit.

As many youngsters, I compared my work to that of others and despaired because mine fell short. My mother explained the reality that someone will always be ahead of you in any endeavor. Evaluating your products this way will make you unhappy and stop you from doing the good work you can do. Life is enriched when you learn from people rather than compete with them. My work is enhanced when I engage collaboratively with a writing community.

My mother went to business college when she finished high school and became a legal secretary. She read widely, and there were always books in the house. She read to her children until we could read on our own, and we were encouraged to think, question, and discuss ideas. These early exposures formed the foundation for self-expression in written words.

An adept storyteller, my mother enrolled in college English classes in her 60s at the Walterboro Salkehatchie branch of the University of South Carolina with the goal of becoming a better writer. Being the only older adult in a classroom of college students was daunting to her, but she wanted to commit her stories to paper for future generations.

She wrote and self-published her book, Low Country Children, in 1986. My mother died in 2013, but her work was the inspiration and model for the stories and essays I have shared with the Columbia II Writers’ Workshop for the past year and a half. I will self-publish my collection this summer. I know my mother would be pleased.

Who inspires you?