The novel is
a gritty police procedural, which is set on a fictional estate in Nottingham. In
the piece the characters speak in colloquial vernacular, (slang).
Having been
born and raised in Nottingham, I find writing in local dialect very easy. My
characters speak in my mother tongue, the hardest part of the writing is how to
spell the words, I know the sounds but not the spellings. I found a great guide
in the Left Lion magazine. http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/title/aah-ter-talk-notts/id/2965
I must admit
that a lot of my characters swear. This is because I believe that dialogue
should sound authentic. The way a character speaks should be appropriate to
that character. My novel is about drug dealers, readers wouldn’t believe a drug
dealer who said ‘Oh dear,’ they expect such rough and ready characters to use
bad language.
I try to
keep my dialogue short. People don’t usually speak in long sentences, so why
would my characters. What people usually do is add a few ums and urrghs to
their conversations, but writing dialogue the way people literally speak would
quickly become irritating to the person reading it, so I tend to leave out the awkward
pauses, and write my dialogue as realistically as possible, without making my
characters irksome.
I have
stopped using so many dialogue tags, (he said, she said). Since I’ve learnt
about beats I find my dialogue sounds a lot more realistic with some action
interspersed between speakers.
One of the
things I was commended on was that none of my characters call another character
‘Duck’. A lot of people associate Nottingham people with the word duck. Saying
ey up me duck instead of hello, and calling people duck, which is, according to
the Left Lion, a term of endearment. I only call people duck when I’m in a
different Town or City, then I tend to broaden my accent. I know very few Nottingham people who use it,
(although they do say ey up), so I didn’t want my characters to use it.
According to my editing class, to use the term would have been lazy as it’s
stereotypical Nottingham talk.
Although my dialogue
is getting a lot better, it’s still not perfect. One of the things I was picked
up on was question marks. I had left the question mark off a piece of speech,
because although it was a question, the character already knew what the answer
was going to be, so she was really being sarcastic. This lead to a discussion
on when is a question not a question. Apparently they don’t use question marks
in Italy. A lot of the editors thought that I was wrong to leave off the
question mark, and in the end I agreed with them. I have to consider the rule
of the genre, and whether the readers would expect it. I think they would.
