"The Politics of Dialect" by Melissa Scholes Young

Every summer, I return to my hometown, Hannibal, Missouri, to reconnect with my roots. I have thirty-seven first cousins and most still live near the dirt road where I grew up.  Ten minutes of chatter on my mom’s front porch, holding fast to a sweaty glass of iced tea, and I sound like me again. Inevitably, one of my children comes up from the pond and asks, “How come you talk funny when we’re here?” I’d like to protest, but I’m already drawing out my vowels and slicing my gerunds.  Instead, I send the kids off to catch fireflies in a glass jar or gather sticks for roasting marshmallows.

Hannibal declared itself “America’s Hometown” because it was Samuel Clemens’s, aka Mark Twain’s, boyhood home, as well as his inspiration. The town name-drops Mark Twain on every street corner and many of us boast Becky Thatcher braids; in July, Hannibal stages the annual National Tom Sawyer Days. Quaintness is a lure that’s hard to resist. So are regional dialects that connect us on the page and in person.

When I set my novel, Flood, in Hannibal, I wanted to give voice to the rural America that raised me and my characters. Writing the dialogue in the rural dialect we use sounded right to me. After my book was published, however, I learned how wrong it sounded to some.

One reader who praised the novel suggested that my sentences might be a bit “inelegant.” A reader aware of Twain’s reception would know why that phrase tickles and haunts me. When Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1885, librarians in Concord, Massachusetts, rejected it for being “rough, coarse and inelegant” and “more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.” 

The common wisdom is that there is a right way to talk and then there is the way uneducated people talk. Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” Folks without a formal education have stories to tell. I believe we should not only listen to their stories but also preserve their voices in writing fiction that their stories inspire.  Rather than impair meaning, dialect can shine a light along the way.

Writing dialect is risky, especially if you haven’t lived in the culture you’re writing about. A few nonstandard spellings can add legitimacy, as colloquialisms can add flavor: however, dialect shouldn’t choke the narration. A tick up or a tick down in dialect can help distinguish characters; for example, the protagonist of Flood, Laura Brooks, knows how to code switch. Her dialect is tamer at the hospital where she works and looser with her best friend, Rose, especially in the rawest moments of their reimagined Tom-and-Huck female friendship.

When the editor at the Atlantic read an excerpt from my novel that included dialect, he wrote that my prose had the ‘raw grit of a young Bobbie Ann Mason,’ which is the kindest way anyone has ever rejected me. As soon as my publisher announced Flood’s late June launch, I knew that I wanted my novel to debut in Hannibal, where we were both born. I was asked to be a celebrity judge for the national fence-painting contest on July 4th, and I strutted up and down Main Street with a costumed Tom and Becky, the mighty Mississippi River flowing at our feet. We all spoke the same language and it fit just right.

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Melissa Scholes Young is the author of the novel Flood. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Washington Post, Narrative, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, and Poets & Writers. She’s a Contributing Editor for Fiction Writers Review and Editor of the Grace & Gravity anthology. She teaches at American University in Washington, D.C. and is a Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellow. You can visit her at www.melissascholesyoung.com

"What Your Characters Are Trying to Tell You" by Michelle Brafman

I talk over people when I drink too much caffeine. I either finish their sentences or cut them off to make my point. Bad manners aside, I miss what they have to say, or how they’re saying it. I also miss their silences, where Grace Paley claims “little truths growl.”  

I can’t blame Diet Coke, however, when I talk over my fictional characters. Authorial intrusions are stealthy, insidious, and capable of sabotaging a perfectly good story, and what’s lost is the hard work invested in creating a character’s voice. 

For example, my first novel, Washing the Dead, tells the story of a Jewish woman’s quest to return to her Orthodox community. In the early drafts of the book, my opinions about the custom of men and women sitting separately during services infested my sentences via snide phrases here and there. I grew up in a synagogue with such gender segregation, but during my first semester in college, writers Sandra Bartky and Andrea Dworkin opened my eyes to the myriad ways women are marginalized. 

After I received too many rejections to count, a wise editor asked why my protagonist wanted to return to a spiritual home she found so distasteful. I felt as though she’d poured an ice-cold glass of Manischevitz over my head. “No, no, that wasn’t it at all!” I wrote her and proceeded to explain that my character yearned deeply to return to this warm, maternal cocoon of the women’s section of her synagogue. In responding to her comment, though, I realized that my protagonist didn’t give a hoot about Sandra Bartky; the term “feminist” was a part of my identity, not my character’s. I tweezed out every snarky phrase and in so doing learned that in order to move forward as a writer, I needed to muzzle the Greek chorus and abandon the various and sundry tags I’d assigned to myself. 

But how?  

An actor once introduced me to a technique called the “Y” model. She used it when she had difficulty relating to the Blanche DuBois character in A Streetcar Named Desire, but I think it’s even more effective when the biographical facts of the author and the character overlap. It works like this: the actor draws on her own emotions to tap into a character’s feeling-state, and this work can be visualized as the base of the letter “Y.” At some point, the actor/writer follows the character’s scent and grants the character the freedom to branch off in her own direction; her interpretation is connected to the scripted character but allows a portrayal unique to this performance. If this separation does not occur, then the actor/writer is at risk of “talking over” the character. 

The “Y” technique helps me both grab a hold of my character’s heart and then let her go, bypassing internal squabbles between disparate parts of my own identity (e.g. Jew versus feminist). Of course, I never would have thought to set my novel in an Orthodox Jewish synagogue had I not spent the formative years in this community. I agree with Willa Cather that “most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” Yet my character had a right to her own reactions to her childhood experiences. 

What I’ve come to learn, albeit glacially, is that in order for me to be the best listener, to both real and fictional characters in my life, I have to forgo the caffeine and focus on them, not on the things I might be waiting to say, and tend to their words with great passion, respect, and tenderness. Ironically, both Hasidic Jews and feminists have shared with me that they felt my portrayal of the women in my fictive community was a refreshing look at the role of Orthodox Jewish women and a feminist statement respectively. I do not tell them that this was not my intention because I can’t speak for my character in this regard either. She already spoke for herself.     

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Michelle Brafman is the author of Washing the Dead and Bertrand Court. Her work has appeared in Slate, Tablet, the Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction writing at the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing program.

“The DNA of the Novel” by Mary Kay Zuravleff

In writing my second novel, I made a discovery about all novels, a discovery that has essentially become my mantra. 

I wrote my first novel on my own instincts and an astonishing number of drafts, twelve years’ worth. That’s a common story; less common and more thrilling was that when I was finished, the book sold within 48 hours to Jonathan Galassi at Farrar Straus and Giroux. 

Then it was time to write my second novel, far more complicated than my first. I kept getting lost among the cast of characters, and the time frame bedeviled me. So I took apart novels I was currently admiring to see the machinery at work. That’s what I do, or if I’m teaching, we do this as a crowd. I make tables and graphs like the nerd that I am, gathering and plotting craft and technique data. 

Within books I’m drawn to, my first discovery was that every subplot restates the plot or theme of that book. For example, in a novel about a reasonable character at war with her instincts, the subplots might pit her rational nature against deeply felt urges, such as her emotional, artistic, or spiritual selves. This allows the author to amplify what our character is up against without being redundant: reason vs. love, beauty, lust, faith. 

Looking in any direction revealed that what holds for plot/subplot is true across the board: every slice of the novel embodies the entire novel. The first line of a book is the whole book, as is the title, point of view, the characters, plots and subplots—even the verb tense and language. 

I call this “the DNA of the novel.” It’s hard to believe that this notion didn’t come up in every literature and writing class I took, or that I didn’t recognize this earlier. I’m telling you: just as a fingernail clipping or a cheek swab contains all the information of an entire human being, just as the acorn carries the entire oak in its little nut package, so does every element of the novel contain the entire book. 

The reader shouldn’t feel tangled in or even consciously register these strands (you don’t see your baby’s DNA; you see the expression of the DNA and find satisfaction in tracing the strands back to their sources—Mom’s eyes; Uncle Frank’s curly hair). Each decision the writer makes reinforces the others to support, layer, and add resonance to the novel’s emotional core. 

I’m hard at work on a feminist immigration novel that centers around Yelena Gomelikoff. My working title, The First American, refers to Yelena’s status and her attitude: “Being the first American in the family is my badge of honor, and I know I sometimes make it sound as if my parents, Ekaterina and Gregor Federoff, crossed the ocean in 1898 to give birth to me.” However, the title also alludes to the treatment our country gave and still gives its first Americans, indigenous or immigrated. 

Yelena has a foot in the Old Country because her family belongs to the Old Believers of the Russian Orthodox church; however, as a New Country citizen she sets herself against other immigrants in their coal mining town—be they Russian, Polish, Italian, or Irish. For that reason, the story is in first person; she’s the first person on this perch. 

It’s also first person because these are my people and I can’t find any evidence of their literary footprint, despite this country’s rich tradition of Russian Jewish immigrant fiction. And so this book is personal.

After Yelena introduces herself, she narrates the novel in past tense, a choice I made for straightforward and devious reasons. The novel documents these immigrants’ experience and includes a visit from Teddy Roosevelt, a mining disaster, and women’s suffrage: history books are past tense. However, as in To Kill a Mockingbird, the past tense offers the reader false comfort: this story happened a while ago, back when folks were racist and sexist. So Yelena says on the novel’s opening page: “although I’d lived my whole life here, I was given as much grief as any foreigner,” way back when people looked down on children of immigrants. 

Diction is challenging in a period piece centered around an immigrant family. Rather than give dozens of examples, I’ll share a pervasive one. “Ma made every effort for American to be my first language”—choosing to write “American” rather than “English” throughout the book uses diction to show the immigrants’ makeshift word choice and underscore their desire to be of this country. 

Stumbling through my story, I often make wrong choices. Like a scientist, I have to discover what makes my book distinct; unlike a scientist, I have to invent it as well, while also creating the body that houses it. My job as a novelist, through many drafts, is both to identify the novel’s DNA and then hew to its expression so that every decision allows the book to be more and more itself.

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Mary Kay is a novelist whose latest book, Man Alive!, was named a Washington Post Notable Book. She is the recipient of American Academy’s Rosenthal Award, James Jones Society’s First Novel Award, and numerous DC Commission on the Arts Fellowships. Mary Kay serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, helped launch DC Women Writers, and cofounded NoveltyDC, which offers master classes in writing and revising the novel. www.mkzuravleff.com