Dialogue, Dialect, and Representation
An' not just t' obvious, fer whut it's worth. (apologies profusely offered)
I direct you to Louise Harnby's essay How to convey accents in fiction writing: Beyond phonetic spelling, which I have read several times over the last year, always feeling that I am pushing my luck in attempting to capture regional distinctiveness.
Accents in print are damned difficult to pull off with style, and I've always been immensely impressed with anyone with the ability to capture a regional dialect without seeming forced. I have a lingering soft spot for Emily Bronte's use of Yorkshire dialogue, but it was Dylan Thomas, specifically, who piqued my interest in non-standard dialogue with Under Milk Wood, through Richard Burton's magnificent reading - I heard his reading when I was of an impressionable enough age to have it burned into my brain. Having checked, I assume I was fourteen at the time. It was later, when I went looking for other examples of authors capturing specific locations, and the characters therein, that James Kelman's how late it was, how late found it's way into my hands. I doubt that I purchased it on initial release - in the era of the Net Book Agreement I would have had to pay full price, and as a teen, with other things to spend money on, it seems unlikely. Not impossible, mind you.
There are few novels which have made me nearly breathless with their audacity, but Kelman managed this - I will love that book to the end of time.
I'll admit this, though, in the knowledge that there are writers who can use such dialogue freely and without concern: I'm always bloody terrified of screwing up. My concern is serious, and I will edit and rework, rewrite, and tinker obsessively if I think there is any chance, whatsoever, that some piece I have fashioned might upset readers from any location selected. Regional dialects are not something which routinely generates a great deal of discussion among writers, and should probably be given more thought as we find ourselves under greater scrutiny from under-represented communities.
I can't remember the last time I sat down with a work which felt so immediately real as May un Mar Lady, with it's wonderful Potteries dialect. When I use the term “under-represented” it is places such as Stoke-on-Trent which come to mind.
Questions surrounding the use of language which evokes a place has been playing on my mind of late, having attempted - to whatever degree of success, or failure, remains to be seen - to capture something of the Sheffield tongue, and in doing so I am acutely aware that I am not a resident of this area. Wider topics of cultural appropriation are always thorny subjects, with all manner of obvious pitfalls, but attempting to translate some degree of realism to a page, with appropriate dialogue, is something that is important to writers and readers alike. While there's a security blanket of sorts in using proof-readers from any locations depicted, there are undoubtedly things which might slip through regardless.
I'm on fairly safe ground with quirks of Essex, Kentish, and Sussex dialogue, and I can slide into writing in numerous London accents without much trouble, but - aside from a generic lowland Scots - most accents from the north have proved rather difficult to completely submerge myself in. The answer, which is often proffered by "helpful" friends, is to move to an area for a while to get a handle on sentence-phrasing and unique terms, but this, sadly, is something which is outside of my ability to accommodate. I dread to think of what costs might be incurred for a short story, or a quick little script, and it would likely eat up whatever I make for these, and then some.
It’s probably improper to reveal how much one is paid for providing work, but you would likely be horrified at how low page rates for scripts are, and aghast at what I make from short stories.
Reading works in a dialect only gets you so far, at which point there is need to reach out to people who speak these dialects to get phrasing correct, or to refine what might seem clunky and difficult in print. There's no singular resource for the accents of Britain that I have discovered, and I doubt that one of suitable scope will soon be apparent. It's all the more important to have these preserved, as cultural influences (American television being one pervasive force, though the internet, as a whole, might now be more influential) bring a certain conformity to how people communicate, and a great many wonderful turns of phrase come ever-closer to extinction.
My line of thought here - which may be rather telling - arose due to reading through various British science fiction novels, and noting how rarely they contain characters from more substantial locales than London. It may have been a cultural powerhouse, thanks to the BBC, and so many publishers located there, but Britain is not London, and we must not be beholden to any representation of a "typical" British individual. These depictions ignore an amazing amount of diversity within this nation. How refreshing a Walsall accent would be in a space opera, or a Cornish accent in a gritty crime drama...
We've been trained, through years of centralised media, to associate accents with specific roles, and this had had a devastating effect on properly depicting how people actually talk. I've been picking up various things written by Paul Abbott, Phil Redmond, and the like, to see if they have (on paper) anything which leaps out as being distinctively regional, but television scripts tend to be poor relations to plays as far as language goes. Phil Redmond's biography (Mid-Term Report) is well worth anyone's time, though, so it hasn't been a complete wash, and I've discovered a few television shows I'll need to find time to see at some point. Adding new items to an ever-growing list means that I now must live to… *checks* just a shade over three hundred years ought to cover it all.
My reservations about offending speakers aside, I want to put together a half dozen or so stories which feature characters who might not otherwise be considered appropriate fits for genre storytelling - primarily horror, SF, and urban fantasy - and see if there's any interest for these. It's always felt rather suspect that protagonists would journey from London to investigate all manner of oddities rather than locals, which has been the case since Victorian times - Sherlock Holmes uncovering the plot in The Hound of the Baskervilles set the stage for any number of heroes to travel the length and breadth of Britain setting things straight.
If a redcap were to be investigated, the hero ought, by rights, to be from the Borders. Although I adore the somewhat-hokey 1966 film Island of Terror, it specifically brings in a London-based pathologist (Peter Cushing in fine form, unsurprisingly) to find answers, diluting the purity of it's premise. 2012's Grabbers largely avoids such pitfalls, and proved to me that maintaining a cast local to an area - absent any outside assistance - works magnificently. It helps somewhat that there's a strong comedic element at play, heightening the effectiveness of the rich Irish brogue spoken by much of the film's cast. You can feel how grounded it is in the opening scenes thanks to an absence of any audience surrogate.
I slightly hate that term. A good story, told well, ought not to need an audience surrogate.
Maybe it is only the privileged few - Irvine Welsh, for one, and maybe Alan Moore as well, specifically with Voice of the Fire - who can write whatever they want, without concern, but I feel the pressure of future critics waiting to judge me on my choices.