Revisin’ Dialogue
So, this one is brief—briefer than my previous posts anyway.
I enjoy writing dialogue. I think it’s one of my strengths. But with this project (remember, it’s set in the rural South) I struggled to find a consistent and helpful method for dropping the g off of –ing words. I began by dropping nearly every g in sight. Everybody was workin and runnin and thinkin. This quickly became overwhelming and annoying. Just start writing like this intentionally and you’ll see how often –ing words show up. So then I started keeping all the gs and only dropped the ones that I could rationalize in some way. Eventually this, too, stopped, and now there’s practically a g on the end of everything. (Get it?) You wouldn’t think one letter could be such a worry, but in my story—or any other that attempts to render a dialect—there is a constant balancing act between the “sound” and the “standard” conventions of language. The question that I keep asking myself is: how much do I need to spell out for my readers to hear these characters’ accents? Increasingly, I am trying to bring the accents out through syntax and diction, rather than through dropped gs and the like.