Authentic to Who? The Trap of "Real" Dialogue

 

The beauty of writing is the beauty of language. For example, the first 100 pages of K.S. Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt are simply beautiful. It is a joy to roll the elegant prose around in your mouth. Sure, it’s a literary book and it should be pretty. 

But part of the beauty is in the simplicity. The Years of Rice and Salt has a multicultural, multilingual-group cast. It spans about 1000 years of alternative history, (here, the plague wipes out 90% of Europe instead of 40%) and human development. Robinson does so with brilliant and succinct dialogue. 

 

Robinson’s dialogue rings authentic, across millennia mostly because it hits us where we live. It touches our hopes and fears. Without gimmick or artifice.

 

We are in a golden age of genre. Science fiction masterpieces, (Asimov’s Foundation et al) have been produced for television. Edgy alternate histories, (PKD’s Man in the High Castle) and fantasies, (Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone) too. Like Robinson’s high-class alt-history genre gems transcend genre to reach us in our hearts.

 

Then there’s this...

In all fairness, no one went to see this for the dialogue.

Without giving anything away, there’s a character in the new Deadpool movie who speaks with a Cajun accent. Really more like a Cracker-Barrel-gumbo-accent. It’s played for a gag as one would expect. Which is sad because the actor draws some phrasing that is deep in Louisiana French culture. That work is wasted on a 90-second gag. 

 

Anyone who has ever spoken with a bayou-born Cajun will tell you that much of what they say is lost in translation. Not Cajun-French-to-English translation. The conveyance-of-thought-through-speech-speed-and-cadence translation. One of my wife’s Creole cousins swears that he does not speak fluent Creole French (slightly different from Cajun French).

 

Yet his phrasing and cadence (more than accent) makes his English difficult for my lazy Texas ears to follow. His children, his wife, his neighbors, (and his cousin, my dear wife) all understand him perfectly. They grew up in the patois of the Creole language, (French with Spanish and even some Indigenous dialects) and whether they speak it or not, the family understand the rhythm and phrasing.

 

The reason that type of representation is difficult to do well in print is the necessity to be direct. Read your work email and you will see two things: 1) people type with the assumption that the reader knows the thoughts behind the author’s words and 2) tone is incredibly difficult to gauge in text-based communication.

 

Or, with a little experience and ear to conversations around you…it’s really easy to get it really wrong

As a child I watched the Burt Reynolds’ film White Lightening, (don't judge we only had five channels and I said I was a child) where-in Roy, (Bo Hopkin) tells Gator (Reynolds) about bootlegging kingpin, Big Bear. “Bear said if them feds don’t leave him alone he’s gonna go over to communist China—and he’s just crazy enough to do it.”

 

I asked my father if people really talked like that. He shrugged and shook his head. There was no way people talk like that. Then I listened to the conversations at my old man’s bar. Damned if there aren’t people who really talk like that. 

William W. Norton, who wrote the White Lightning didn’t set out to write a turkey. He was a combat veteran and worked construction. He heard working men, making working men conversation. But like many other aspects of “real life,” just because it happens doesn’t mean it is page worthy.

The problem with authentic dialogue is that all-too often it is exploitive—at best. Most commonly it is simply caricature and brings no insight or meaningful weight to the narrative. Worse, it is flat and unentertaining. 

 

“Shoots fast as lightnin’ but it loads a might slow…” Steve Earle

By contrast if you want to get the feel of southern or sun-belt dialogue, (North Florida through Texas anyway) listen to the first half of Steve Earle’s Copperhead Road. From old-west pistoleros on Devil’s Right Hand to WWII pilots from Texas on Johnny Come Lately, to (real) Appalachian moonshiners, (title track) to working people who never expected to lose everything in America on Back to the Wall, Earle nails the vernacular with mean economy. 

 

Who does it well in print

Author, Cormac McCarthy, was raised in Middle-Class comfort in Tennessee. But he sought the southwest and traveled, often on the edge of poverty, through Texas and New Mexico. Consequently, (his talent had something to do with it too) his Border Trilogy sounds a lot like my old rancher uncles telling stories of their youth. It’s not in accents but in the phrasing and the easy-slow sentences that read like a Texas drawl. Mostly, it’s saying hard things in simple ways. 

“I’m hurt, I’m hurt bad.”

“I know, bud. I know and I don’t care. You gotta keep fighting.” —Lacey Rollins and John Grady Cole, All the Pretty Horses

 

Authenticity will pop up where you expect it least. Karen Traviss wrote ten Star Wars extended-universe books and created much of the lore currently seen in The Mandalorian. That culture was not born in a vacuum. Nor was the dialogue.

Really, it's much better than it looks.

Traviss has served in both the English Territorial Army as well as the Naval Reserves in addition to working as a BBC military correspondent. When she writes grunts talking kit, gripes, and tactics, she knows what she’s typing about. Her dialogue is sharp and pointy, with minimal jargon but chock-full of take-your-pay-and-march humor. Nowhere is it pedestrian.

 

Sometimes, "show" is overrated

 

When in doubt, “tell.”. George Orwell was too busy writing a century-defining work of fiction to create a language or dialect in 1984. Instead, he limits the language and cuts the dialogue to immediate-and-arresting urgent. He tells us the purpose of the limits and we read accordingly.

 

When Boston Police Captain Martin Quirk stops rogue feds from beating up his private investigator friend, Spenser, the feds make the first mistake of teasing Quirk’s Boston brogue. Then they test his will and end up on the floor. Author, Robert B. Parker doesn’t insult us with accent marks and truncations. The dialogue sings, in plain English. The action seizes the page. 

 

Frank Herbert does the same in his meeting of different, (diametrically opposed) persons in Dune Messiah. Rather than bother with accents and/or awkward phrasing, he lets the characters speak, plain and to the point.

 

This is what we should all paramountly do with our dialogue. No games. No tricks. No shows. Let the people speak.

I own none of the photos above. All are used for instructional/educational purposes, as covered by the Fair Use Act.