Writing Great Fiction

to reproduce the accent of an old sailor from Yorkshire. The use of

dialect, as in Mark Twain’s +XFNOHEHUU\)LQQ or Zora Neale Hurston’s

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or stereotypical.

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to follow, and unless the entire work is written in dialect (as

+XFNOHEHUU\ )LQQ is, for example), dialect can set certain

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for readers to think of them as fully human.

o Today, most writers evoke dialect in a more subtle fashion,

relying on word choice and variations in grammar and syntax

to suggest regional speech or social class, rather than trying to

reproduce it in every detail. Consider Toni Morrison’s %HORYHG,

a novel about an African American family in the aftermath

of the Civil War. The characters speak a straightforward,

conversational, modern English, with just an occasional hint of

slang or nonstandard syntax or grammar to suggest their race,

social class, and era.

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stake or something they want, and the best way to evoke character
with dialogue is to have them
express what they want, though
not necessarily directly. In
other words, creating effective
dialogue for a character involves
inhabiting that character’s
point of view, not necessarily
reproducing an accent or a
particular pattern of speech.

z It’s also true that characters
sometimes just talk—not about
what they want or about the
situation they’re in—but about
something tangential or even

Creating a character’s speech is less

about reproducing a real-life dialect

and more about who that character

is and how his or her speech might

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nervous character, for example, may

stammer or ramble.

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