Because it's hours till Angel -- A Usage Post!

There’s something that plagues fanfic that could be almost as polarizing among people who do or don’t take writing seriously as punctuation – the dreaded dialect. I touched on this a long time ago (sorry for such lengthy delays on these posts) when I discussed writing phrases such as “would of” instead of “would have” as a way to indicate a character’s intellect or speech patterns, and it’s something I’ve seen discussed at length in many forums. I’m not here to tell you what’s right or wrong, but explain why it’s generally considered a bad idea, and why it can be dangerous, especially for the amateur writer. A lot of this comes from a post I made on a Magnificent 7 list, so the characters will figure prominently in the examples – and also, Mag 7 has the highest ratio of crap to quality of any fandom I know, and a lot of that has to do with dialect.

One of the most important things a fanfic writer will need to know about dialect is that it’s mostly unnecessary and can often be intrusive – and that’s why the writing cognoscenti always pick on the people who do it. We really don't have to impart the characters’ voices by physically representing in words and letters exactly how they say words. In the same way that the newbie writer or the amateur will overwrite most things – too much explanation, too much geography of “he moved here, and picked that up,” using epithets instead of names or proper nouns – dialect is a form of overwork on the writer’s part: they’re spending a lot of energy trying to replicate the spoken word on the page just in case you, the reader, are too damn stupid to grok it. And most of the time, readers are smart enough to get it without the writer’s help.

Dialect is essentially a clue, and if you treat it that way, you’ll be doing your readers a huge favor. It’s a special effect, if you will -- something that, used sparingly and with good description by a writer, will add to an impression overall, but won't substitute for simple good dialog and good characterization. The writer's job is to convey who a person is -- and if they do that job, then we as readers will fill in blanks about how those characters speak. If we know (because you set up his character) that Ezra is a southerner, we don't have to read him saying in print things like "Ah trah" for “I try,” and we don't need every G dropped at the end of an -ing word to understand that Vin speaks like a typical uneducated man in the Old West.

A writer uses dialect, then, as a clue in the early stages of characterization to show us a *little* of how someone speaks (if they’re not really doing it by creating a background or portrait of the character), but not with every single word. Once someone’s speech patterns – if they’re important enough to be singled out through dialect -- are established, use dialect very sparingly throughout, mostly when it's needed for effect. Frankly, I hardly ever use it because it’s so unnecessary. Occasionally, when the need feels right, Spike will drop a G at the end of an –ing word, but I rarely need to go beyond that.

Books on writing and most of the workshops I've been to don't even address dialect, I think because so few pro writers ever really use it (and as lordshiva can probably tell you, many publishers are afraid of certain types of dialect). I sometimes wonder if most fan writers, however, have actually ever read a professionally published book, because they'd see that this just does not happen often, and the few in dialect are written by people who clearly know the rules and know how to break them well. Trainspotting, a lot of Faulkner (even though I hate Faulkner), Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and many other books that are often held up as examples when talking about dialect are written by people who chose to go that path with an understanding of how to make it fairly readable to the audience. Because the truth is, it’s hard work. Dialect tends to cause confusion and slows a reader down -- the cardinal sin in writing is to make the reader work harder than they should to understand what's happening, and dialect causes people to try to sound out, in their head, what is being said, because it's being forced on them in print. Readability studies show that punctuation trips people up during reading, and can affect retention and understanding -- even something as innocuous as a period on a headline will stop a reader for a moment, and can cause misunderstanding. So throwing in a pound of apostrophes per paragraph in order to effect Vin's speech not only ends up being comical, but can dramatically affect how your reader perceives a story if they put effort into reading it. The more contorted the spelling to make a word look like how Duncan MacLeod might say it as a Highland laddie, the worse you make it for your reader.

The saddest thing is that as fan writers, we have a superior tactical advantage: the people reading these stories, by and large, know the speech patterns and peculiarities of the characters already. It's even less necessary to try to mimic speech in print, where it can't really successfully be done. The closest we can get in written dialect is a vague approximation of vernacular or patterns; it will never be accurate to the spoken word, which is difficult at best to represent in print. So a good author gives you clues -- they may introduce Ezra by telling us he had a sophisticated Savannah accent and sprinkled his conversation with the largest, most unusual words he could find. They might, if they’re feeling frisky, throw in a couple of Ahs for I and that sort of thing -- but they won't rely on it, and frankly, if you left it up to me, they wouldn't do this at all.

Because we know from watching the show how he talks anyway, and someone unfamiliar with the show would get the idea from the good character description and background that of course the writer would give us (har). This is what I mean about clues -- the author's job is to clue the audience in to who these characters are, and then let the dialog and actions do the rest of the job of telling us that stuff. Dialect cannot substitute for that, but in M7 fic, I've seen people rely on extreme dialect as if it somehow does the job of characterization for them.

And sadly, once it gets started in a fandom, far too many people who don't know the rules will believe that this is how good writing is done, and end up repeating these mistakes until it becomes the accepted practice. They don't know any better, and then it's almost like fanon -- everyone believes this is how it should be, so rather than learning how it's really done, they follow the path others have walked. Especially if you’re stuck a “nice” fandom where no one seems to have a vested interest in saying something contrary or telling people that maybe, just maybe, they're doing it badly.

In Spike fic one of the things I see is that since Spike's English and has affected a working class accent, everyone mistakenly writes and describes him as Cockney, which he is not. He’ll say "wiv" for with, dropping Hs all over the place, which he does not do ever on the show. I can't tell if the people doing this are just morons, or if they really hear this when they watch the show, and simply can't make the distinction because any accent sounds the same to them, and that Eliza Doolittle approach is the only thing they know. In Mag 7, we get "yer" for your and you’re, only it's as wrong as the Cockney thing, because people don't quite talk that way: your/you’re can be pronounced with the longer or sound, or the flattened er sound. It depends largely on which part of the sentence your/you're fulfill -- English is like that: we can pronounce the same word differently based on its position in a sentence and which grammatical part it serves. When writing in dialect, the distinctions get lost, so a guy will be saying yer every single time (makes my head explode, I tell you), and it's wrong, just as it's wrong for Spike to be speaking like Bob Hoskins.

In Mag 7 it gets far worse, because far more stories are written in the modern AUs of the ATF world or any of the other bajillion modern alternates (Star Trek, male escorts, Star Wars, you name it, it’s been done) that serve as fandom in this world. Bringing dialect into such stories makes a character like Vin or Nathan sound like sister-marrying Appalachian hillbilly cretins, because people don't talk that way anymore -- they don't string sentences together that way, they don't talk that "drawly" or speak that colloquially. By putting the seven in a modern universe, yet writing them talking as if they're in the Old West, the writer makes them look like fools and feebs. In most cases, they wouldn't be able to get those jobs speaking in a way that betrays a lack of education, so the premise becomes unintentionally funny.

In the western books of Dorothy M. Johnson, who wrote A Man Called Horse and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, among others, and Larry McMurtry's westerns, especially Lonesome Dove, there is dialect, but it’s used extremely sparingly, as a clue. They show the characters through their manner of speech and the words they use, not by trying to spell out their speech patterns. What little dialect they employ is used to flesh out details of a character -- for instance, in one of Johnson's stories, a Mexican woman says "ees" for is, but Johnson doesn't overdo it. It's a part of the character, not what defines her. And again, we fanfic writers have this incredible advantage that commercial authors don’t -- our audience knows who these people are and how they sound. This is invaluable, especially if an author is not good enough to accurately describe Buck's unique line deliveries. The writer might think she’s good enough to convey Duncan MacLeod’s Scottish accent by spelling out his Scottish-accented words, but more often than not, it becomes torturous for the reader to follow, and frequently far too laughable when she goes into such contortions – and we already know how Duncan sounds circa 1700, so the work is unnecessary. Worse, if the writer really doesn’t know the vernacular of a particular region, she makes an idiot of herself to the people from that region – I well remember English Professionals fans (and many Yanks) tearing their hair out over the non-Brit writers who’d have Doyle and Bodie dropping Hs and doing the Hoskins thing.

I often use no dialect at all -- no dropped Gs for Spike or Vin -- relying simply on the patterns that exist: use of ain't or the positions of verbs and nouns in sentences particular to the time period of the Old West, or the abbreviated speech Spike employs. Frankly, I'm happier with that than when I succumb to a few dropped Gs or what have you. We just don't need to see that Nathan says cain't in print -- our minds will fill that in very easily once we know where he comes from and his education and all. You might write him as using "don't got me no", and that gives us a clue that when he says can't, it'll sound like cain't. I like it better when I don't let myself give in to that temptation to spell out cain't, because it's just not necessary if I'm doing my job. Readers don’t like being hit on the head with hammers; they tend to prefer filling things in on their own. The kind of work they don't want to do is puzzle over words as they read them on the page, sounding them out in their head, because it slows them down. Unless you’re a superior writer who knows how to carefully, judiciously, and correctly apply dialect, most people will advise using it as little as possible. We’re blessed in fandom with premade characters, so spend time writing the other stuff, not agonizingly spelling out how each word sounds in the vernacular of your characters. Yer readers will love ya.