In this passage from Charles Portis’s Gringos, Jimmy Burns, an American expatriate from Arkansas now living in the Yucatan, talks to a Mexican friend who, though fluent in English, is drunk:
A few minutes later there was more rapping at the door. It was Nardo again. He had to brace himself with both hands against the door jambs. “I forgot to tell you something,” he said. “Did you notice I was feeling low tonight?”
“No, I thought you were in good form.”
“It was off just a little, my natural charm, you know, that everybody talks about. You must have noticed. A touch of opresión. I wanted to explain.”
“I didn’t notice anything.”
“But you already know, don’t you?”
“Know what?”
“Is there any need to explain? I think you can guess why I’m feeling low.”
“No, I can’t.”
“The yanquis took half my country in 1848.”
“They took all of mine in 1865. We can’t keep moping over it.”
Not the difference in expression between Jimmy Burns and Nardo, which clearly distinguishes them without calling attention to itself. Jimmy Burns’s speech is direct, colloquial, and simple. Nardo speaks in considerably more high-flown, periodic style, and while one might assume he has a trace of an accent he uses only two foreign words. The rest is pure suggestion—we hear this conversation accurately in our heads without a lot of phonetic spelling or apostrophes to render it exactamente.
That passage is also, you’ll note, a perfectly structured joke. One of Portis’s many skills.
Here’s another model of economy, one that I’ve shared before in reflecting on creating distinct and memorable minor characters, from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men:
[Anton Chigurh, the novel’s main antagonist] drove down and parked in front of the [trailer park] office and went in. Yessir, the woman said.
I’m looking for Llewelyn Moss.
She studied him. Did you go up to his trailer?
Yes I did.
Well I’d say he’s at work. Did you want to leave a message?
Where does he work?
Sir I aint at liberty to give out no information about our residents.
Chigurh looked around at the little plywood office. He looked at the woman.
Where does he work.
Sir?
I said where does he work.
Did you not hear me? We cant give out no information.
A toilet flushed somewhere. A doorlatch clicked. Chigurh looked at the woman again. Then he went out and got in the Ramcharger and left.
I’ll note briefly what I noted in that previous post. We don’t get much information about Chigurh but his directness is unsettling. The lady working in the trailer park office, whom we only “see” in this passage, is economically but vividly drawn. And while McCarthy draws no attention to her dialect, we perceive it with one aint, one yessir, and careful attention to her syntax and “speech tune.” I especially admire her recognizable blend of informality and officiousness. McCarthy’s writing is full of dialect like this.
An aside on italicizing foreign words
Here’s a more minute mechanical note: Something else I picked up from McCarthy was his refusal to italicize words or speech in foreign languages. (Portis also does not italicize or otherwise draw attention to Nardo’s opresión or yanquis.) In No Country for Old Men and other novels, English and Spanish are exchanged with no typographic indication to indicate the difference.
This is matter of pure preference, I think, but I really like that. I think it more accurately depicts the way we hear each other, and I’ve also grown increasingly distrustful of any writing that is dependent on typography to be comprehensible. I haven’t gone the whole hog and given up even quotation marks yet, but I have stopped italicizing foreign speech in my own writing. For example, depending on the viewpoint character in a given passage, the German characters in Dark Full of Enemies speak untranslated and unitalicized German.
Getting it right—letting the rhythms play out
Now for the deep dive. I include these three longer samples to show how a skilled writer can bring out the rhythms of regional speech and let them play out across a scene, creating new rhythms of their own as they harmonize with the speech of other characters.
In this passage from from Chapter IV of The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald presents us with two Midwesterners—one of whom is putting on airs—and a New York Jew having a conversation over lunch:
Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the restaurant, whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.
“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.
“This is a nice restaurant here,”’ said Mr. Wolfshiem, looking at the Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. “But I like across the street better!”
“Yes, highballs,” agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr. Wolfshiem: “It’s too hot over there.”
“Hot and small—yes,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, “but full of memories.”
“What place is that?” I asked.
“The old Metropole.”
“The old Metropole,” brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. “Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us at the table, and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. When it was almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says somebody wants to speak to him outside. ‘All right,’ says Rosy, and begins to get up, and I pulled him down in his chair.
“‘Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don’t you, so help me, move outside this room.’
“It was four o’clock in the morning then, and if we’d of raised the blinds we’d of seen daylight.”
“Did he go?” I asked innocently.
“Sure he went.” Mr. Wolfshiem’s nose flashed at me indignantly. “He turned around in the door and says: ‘Don’t let that waiter take away my coffee!’ Then he went out on the sidewalk, and they shot him three times in his full belly and drove away.”
“Four of them were electrocuted,” I said, remembering.
“Five, with Becker.” His nostrils turned to me in an interested way. “I understand you’re looking for a business gonnegtion.”
The juxtaposition of these two remarks was startling. Gatsby answered for me:
“Oh, no,” he exclaimed, ‘‘this isn’t the man.”
“No?” Mr. Wolfshiem seemed disappointed.
“This is just a friend. I told you we’d talk about that some other time.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, “I had a wrong man.”
A succulent hash arrived, and Mr. Wolfshiem, forgetting the more sentimental atmosphere of the old Metropole, began to eat with ferocious delicacy. His eyes, meanwhile, roved very slowly all around the room—he completed the arc by turning to inspect the people directly behind. I think that, except for my presence, he would have taken one short glance beneath our own table.
“Look here, old sport,” said Gatsby, leaning toward me, “I’m afraid I made you a little angry this morning in the car.”
There was the smile again, but this time I held out against it.
“I don’t like mysteries,” I answered, “and I don’t understand why you won’t come out frankly and tell me what you want. Why has it all got to come through Miss Baker?”
“Oh, it’s nothing underhand,” he assured me. “Miss Baker’s a great sportswoman, you know, and she’d never do anything that wasn’t all right.”
Suddenly he looked at his watch, jumped up, and hurried from the room, leaving me with Mr. Wolfshiem at the table.
“He has to telephone,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, following him with his eyes. “Fine fellow, isn’t he? Handsome to look at and a perfect gentleman.”
“Yes.”
“He’s an Oggsford man.”
“Oh!”
“He went to Oggsford College in England. You know Oggsford College?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“It’s one of the most famous colleges in the world.”
“Have you known Gatsby for a long time?” I inquired.
“Several years,” he answered in a gratified way.
Notice how Fitzgerald makes each man’s dialect distinct enough that he doesn’t have to rely on dialogue tags to tell us who’s speaking. Carraway and Gatsby, the two Midwesterners, speak very similarly, despite Gatsby’s pretensions. Wolfshiem’s speech is the most obviously regional. (I pause here to note the usual arrogant Midwestern assumption that their English is normal English.) Fitzgerald uses more phonetic spellings here than the other writers we’ll look at, but by doing so he gives us a distinct sense of the overall tone of Wolfshiem’s speech. We intuit that his voice is deeper and throatier than Gatsby or Carraway’s. And while no one would characterize his English as broken, some of the rhythms of his speech are foreign—“It was six of us at the table” is how you would phrase that idea in German or Yiddish, not English—and this slightly more florid idiom, especially the grandiloquent circumlocutions in his remembrance of “the old Metropole,” give us a good sense of his character. This is the speech tune in action.
In this early passage from Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a family on a roadtrip stops at the Tower, a barbeque joint run by a man named Red Sammy Butts, for lunch:
“Ain’t she cute?” Red Sam’s wife said, leaning over the counter. “Would you like to come be my little girl?”
“No I certainly wouldn’t,” June Star said. “I wouldn’t live in a broken-down place like this for a minion bucks!” and she ran back to the table.
“Ain’t she cute?” the woman repeated, stretching her mouth politely.
“Arn’t you ashamed?” hissed the grandmother.
Red Sam came in and told his wife to quit lounging on the counter and hurry up with these people’s order. His khaki trousers reached just to his hip bones and his stomach hung over them like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt. He came over and sat down at a table nearby and let out a combination sigh and yodel. “You can’t win,” he said. “You can’t win,” and he wiped his sweating red face off with a gray handkerchief. “These days you don’t know who to trust,” he said. “Ain’t that the truth?”
“People are certainly not nice like they used to be,” said the grandmother.
“Two fellers come in here last week,” Red Sammy said, “driving a Chrysler. It was a old beat-up car but it was a good one and these boys looked all right to me. Said they worked at the mill and you know I let them fellers charge the gas they bought? Now why did I do that?”
“Because you’re a good man!” the grandmother said at once.
“Yes’m, I suppose so,” Red Sam said as if he were struck with this answer.
His wife brought the orders, carrying the five plates all at once without a tray, two in each hand and one balanced on her arm. “It isn’t a soul in this green world of God’s that you can trust,” she said. “And I don’t count nobody out of that, not nobody,” she repeated, looking at Red Sammy.
“Did you read about that criminal, The Misfit, that’s escaped?” asked the grandmother.
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he didn’t attact this place right here,” said the woman. “If he hears about it being here, I wouldn’t be none surprised to see him. If he hears it’s two cent in the cash register, I wouldn’t be a tall surprised if he . . .”
“That’ll do,” Red Sam said. “Go bring these people their Co’-Colas,” and the woman went off to get the rest of the order.
“A good man is hard to find,” Red Sammy said. “Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.”
He and the grandmother discussed better times.
O’Connor’s dialect is always good, and here we see her introducing multiple layers of character—class most obviously but generation throughout—through the way each character speaks. Everyone in this scene is “a Southerner,” but notice how different each is, how vividly we can picture all of them, and how clearly we can hear. This in spite of O’Connor’s very spare use of a few dialect words—Co’-Cola, attact, fellers. This is owing to her attention to the differing rhythms of each character’s speech. Look back at Red Sammy’s wife’s dialogue in particular, and compare it to the prim and proper eluction of the grandmother.
You can listen to O’Connor herself read this story here. Listen to the whole thing, and pay close attention to how natural the dialogue sounds as O’Connor—whose accent reminds me a great deal of my late grandmother, an Athens native—reads it.
Finally, it would be bad form to work through some examples of this rule in action without looking at what Leonard himself does with it. Here’s a longish chunk from the opening chapter of his crime novel Freaky Deaky. Members of the Detroit PD bomb squad have been called to the home of Booker, a lowlife gangster, who has been told there is a bomb in his armchair that will explode if he stands up. (Language warning for those concerned.)
Chris said most of the squad was out on a run, picking up illegal fireworks, but there was another guy coming, Jerry Baker. Chris said, “You know what today is?” And waited for the guy from Narcotics to say no, what? “It’s my last day on the Bomb Squad. Next week I get transferred out.” He waited again.
The guy from Narcotics said, “Yeah, is that right?”
He didn’t get it.
“It’s the last time I’ll ever have to handle a bomb, if that’s what we have, and hope to Christ I don’t make a mistake.”
The guy still didn’t get it. He said, “Well, that’s what Booker says it is. He gets up, it blows up. What kind of bomb is that?”
“I won’t know till I look at it,” Chris said.
“Booker says it’s the fucking Italians,” the guy from Narcotics said, “trying to tell him something. It makes sense, otherwise why not shoot the fucker? Like we know Booker’s done guys we find out at Metro in long-term parking. Guy’s in the trunk of his car, two in the back of the head. Booker’s a bad fucking dude, man. If there was such a thing as justice in the world we’d leave his ass sitting there, let him work it out.”
Chris said, “Get your people out of the house. When my partner gets here, don’t stop and chat, okay? I’ll let you know if we need Fire or EMS, or if we have to evacuate the houses next door. Now where’s Booker?”
The guy from Narcotics took Chris down the hall toward the back of the house, saying, “Wait’ll you see what [Booker] did to the library. Looks like a fucking tent.”
It did. Green-and-white striped parachute cloth was draped on four sides from the center point of the high ceiling to the top of the walls. The Jacuzzi bubbled in the middle of the room, a border of green tile around it. Booker sat beyond the sunken bath in his green leather wingback. He was holding on to the round arms, clutching them, his fingers spread open. Behind him, French doors opened onto a backyard patio.
“I been waiting,” Booker said. “You know how long I been waiting on your? I don’t know where anybody’s at, I been calling—you see Juicy Mouth?”
“Who’s Juicy Mouth?”
“Suppose to be guarding my body. Man, I got to go the toilet.”
Chris walked up to him, looking at the base of the chair. “Tell me what the woman said on the phone.”
“Was the bitch suppose to be in love with me.”
“What’d she tell you?”
“Say I get up I’m blown up.”
“That’s all?”
“Is that all? Man, that’s final, that’s all there is all, nothing else.”
Chris said, “Yeah, but do you believe it?”
“Asshole, you expect me to stand up and find out?”
Chris was wearing a beige tweed sportcoat, an old one with sagging pockets. He brought a Mini-Mag flashlight out of the left side pocket, went down flat on the floor and played the light beam into the four-inch clearance beneath the chair. The space was empty. He came to his knees, placed the Mini-Mag on the floor, brought a stainless Spyder-Co lockback pocketknife from the right side pocket and flicked open the short blade with one hand in a quick, practiced motion.
Booker said, “Hey,” pushing back in the chair.
“Cover yourself,” Chris said. “I don’t want to cut anything off by mistake.”
“Man, be careful there,” Booker said, bringing his hands off the chair arms to bunch the skirts of the robe between his bare legs, up tight against his crotch.
“You feel anything under you?”
“When I sat down it felt… like, different.”
Chris slit open the facing of the seat cushion, held the edges apart and looked in. He said, “Hmmmmm.”
Booker said, “What you mean hmmmmm? Don’t give me no hmmmmm shit. What’s in there?”
Chris looked up at Booker and said, “Ten sticks of dynamite.”
Booker was clutching the chair arms again, his body upright, stiff, telling Chris, “Get that shit out from under me, man. Get it out, get it out of there!”
Chris said, “Somebody doesn’t like you, Booker. Two sticks would’ve been plenty.”
There are only three characters here but each has an utterly distinct attitude, even “the guy from Narcotics” who we won’t see again. As with the sample from O’Connor above, there’s a lot going on here—with the added layers of race and whether or not one is on the right side of the law, Chris being a white cop and Booker being a black gangster—and though Leonard tells us one or two of these things we really get to know them through the dialogue. Notice how little actual narration or exposition or even dialogue tags there are, and yet we understand these characters and can even hear them.
You can see Leonard himself read the whole first chapter here.
What all three of the above excerpts have in common:
Minimal and precisely applied phonetic spelling.
Careful attention to syntax and rhythm.
Use of dialogue not only for characterization but for action
Building on Leonard’s rule
As I’ve said before, one of the things I appreciate about Leonard’s ten rules is his frequent emphasis that they are his rules and may not work for others. In fact, there are several that I take exception to. In the original article in which he published his ten rules he even provides examples of writers who “break” some of his rules but do so with excellent results—but not this one.
This is perhaps the one of the ten that I agree with most strongly. Having thought a lot about dialect in fictional speech, both before and after discovering Leonard’s rules, let me offer my elaborations or glosses on this one:
Use dialect-specific words judiciously, selecting them for maximum impact rather than sprinkling them in randomly.
Ditto foreign words used in English. Don’t settle for oui oui or si, Señor or jawohl or nyet! Make meaningful choices about which native words your character will still use—especially if they slip into them when emotional.
Use context to make regionalisms or dialect words clear. Even if a given word or expression is unknown to the reader, he should be able to infer the meaning from the context.
Keep phonetic spelling to a minimum, using it always to suggest a broader pattern that you don’t render.
Pay more attention to syntax and rhythm than accent. Render the “speech tune” properly with standard spelling and the reader’s imagination will supply the accent.
And, finally, for the sake of flexibility and adaptability:
Suggested exercises
Here are two possible exercises for working out the mechanics of regional dialect and finding your own best way to render it.
Watch a movie with strong regional dialect and transcribe the dialogue twice. First, do it as exactly as possible, with phonetic spellings, apostrophes for dropped letters—the works. Then, transcribe it using those features as sparingly as possible while still preserving what Brooks calls the “speech tune” or Leonard calls the “flavor” of the dialect. I’d suggest any of the Coen brothers’ movies, but perhaps start with Raising Arizona, Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou? or The Big Lebowski, all of which have very specific and very carefully observed regional speech. An alternative might be any of the slew of Boston-based crime movies of the last fifteen years.
A second possible exercise, and probably the better of the two, is field work. Wherever you live, go to the places the locals—that is, people who have always lived there—hang out. Restaurants, especially non-chain restaurants serving regional cooking (see Red Sam’s barbeque joint above), are your best bet. Talk to people, but most especially listen. Listen to your waitress, to the kitchen staff (in a real local dive you’ll certainly hear them), and especially to the other customers. But don’t just listen for accent, listen through the accent for the components of each individual’s speech tune as described by Brooks above. Later try to write as much of what you heard as you can remember (being able to hear and remember dialect is a key part of developing an ear for it) without using phonetic spellings.
Conclusion
It should be obvious by this point that dialect is a topic I care a lot about. Perhaps too much. But if you’ve stuck with me this far, I hope you’ve found this deep dive into the topic helpful. Dialect is a powerful tool for fiction writers and getting it right will strengthen your characters, your work generally, and your readers’ enjoyment.
If you’d like to see how I’ve tried to practice what I’m preaching here, I’ve written two novels set in the modern era. The aforementioned Dark Full of Enemies is my earliest serious experiment with some of what I set out here, and my Civil War novel Griswoldville is the book I worked hardest on in this regard. I hope you’ll check them out, and certainly you should check out the books I’ve sampled above. There’s more good writing where those came from.
Thanks for reading!
