Hearing Voices - Vernacular

A few years ago, I edited a manuscript that had characters from all over the world – different worlds, in fact. Each spoke in his own particular slang and it didn’t take long for my eyes to cross. The plot held a grandmother from the Deep South, teenagers, foreigners, biblical characters, fantasy characters, and even talking animals. None had distinct, strong voices, even though the author had tried to convey speech patterns in the dialogue. Perhaps from trying too hard, the writing was terribly difficult to read, even for an adult. A youngster wouldn’t have gotten through ten pages without giving up.

What went wrong in this scenario? Most importantly, the writer had not created a strong and simple vocabulary for each character. Most of the time, less is more when it comes to writing vernacular.

For example, if one character uses the regional “y’all” for “you all”, stick to that. Don’t throw in y’ar and ye and youse. It’s especially important if your biblical characters are using “ye” and your city slicker says “youse” a lot. Give each character a specific word that only they use. You can keep your characters very distinct by assigning key slang, regional phrases, and even grammatical errors to their individual vocabularies.

Also be sure you’re using slang that is appropriate for age groups of the time. Urban Dictionary is a great way to check modern expressions, especially to make sure you’re not saying something age inappropriate. Create this speech dictionary before your characters open their mouths and you’ll have clearer writing and fewer changes during revision.

In a future post, I’ll introduce an author who has character voice down to a fine art. Exquisitely spare, Donis Casey’s main character, Alafair Tucker leaves no doubt you’ve just met a strong, kind, curious, intelligent farm woman from Oklahoma. The Alafair Tucker mystery series, set in the early 1900s, creates a distinct and strong sense of place and is firmly rooted in its regional history. Stay tuned for a review of the latest novel, Crying Blood, and an interview with Donis about developing strong voices that flow easily into the modern day. 

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Dani Greer is founding member of the Blood-Red Pencil, teaches authors how to build their own blog book tours with occasional online classes, offers developmental editing services (with a special interest in historic voice and accuracy), and is special projects coordinator for Little PicklePress, the coolest kidlit publisher ever!