Dreyer's English - Benjamin Dreyer 2022

Miscellaneously
The realities of fiction
The stuff in the front

· If you’re writing a novel in English that’s set, say, in France, all of whose characters are supposed to be speaking French, do not pepper their dialogue with actual French words and phrases—maman and oui and n’est-ce pas. It’s silly, cheap, obvious, and any other adjectives you might like if they’ll stop you from doing this sort of thing. (Whenever I encounter these bits of would-be local color, I assume that the characters are suddenly speaking in English.)

· Conversely, real-life nonnative speakers of English, I find, rarely lapse into their native tongue simply to say yes, no, or thank you.

· And I implore you: Do not attempt, here in the twenty-first century, to convey the utterance of a character who may be speaking other than what, for the sake of convenience, I’ll call standard English with the use of tortured phonetic spellings, the relentless replacement of terminal g’s with apostrophes, or any of the other tricks that might have worked for Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, or William Faulkner but are, I assure you, not going to work for you. At best you’ll come off as classist and condescending; at worst, in some cases, you’ll tip over into racism.

A lot can be accomplished in the conveyance of eccentricity of speech with word choice and word order. Make good use of those.

· I’ve mentioned this before, and it applies to all writing, but I think it applies especially to fiction: Reading your writing aloud highlights strengths and exposes weaknesses. I heartily recommend it.

SKIP NOTES

*1  As a rule, the consumption of beverages is not as interesting as many writers seem to think it is.

*2  I’ve bookmarked timeanddate.com.

*3  It was. You can find your own way to IMDb.

*4  It didn’t. It aired on Thursdays. Wikipedia is great for this sort of thing.

*5  I was recently advised of a novel in which the word “spatulate”—I didn’t recognize it either; it’s an adjective that means “shaped like a spatula”—showed up twice in two pages, referring to two entirely unrelated nouns. Oh dear.

*6  Hoorah for L. Frank Baum and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, of which these paragraphs are (nearly) the opening.

*7  Beyond eliminating the “up” repetition, you’ve also replaced a prepositional phrase with a more precise single-word verb, which almost invariably declutters and improves a sentence.

*8  How bothersome are these tiny repetitions to your average reader? I don’t know, but as a copy editor I’m highly aware of them and will always point them out. Beyond that it’s up to the writer.

*9 There’s a different standard for graphic novels. You’d still do well to limit use of exclamation points, but they’re an expected and accepted convention in that genre. You’ll also see double punctuation in graphic novels, but you should never see it—or use it—outside of that. Pick one punctuation mark and use it confidently.

*10  I originally wrote “such a summer for daffodils.” My copy editor corrected me.

*11  The speaker just comma-spliced, and I feel fine about that. The occasional comma splice isn’t going to kill anyone. You could, if you chose, break up that last bit into two sentences, but it’s not as effective, nor does it quite convey the intended sound of the utterance.