“Come get it, Sean, or I’m tossing the lot.”
That’s a line of dialogue which an editor recently suggested inserting into a story of mine. It made my teeth curl.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with it - I understood it perfectly, and the editor’s suggestion that I add something to that effect was entirely correct. But the character speaking was (like me) British, and would never have said that.
“Come and get it, Sean, or I’m chucking it all out.”
There we go.
It’s often the tiniest differences that stand out, to me. Did you have a couple of beers or a couple beers? Did you do it by accident or on accident, while you visited your friend or visited with them? Never mind the sidewalks and the faucets and the constant bewilderment of pants, it’s the structure of a phrase that can instantly puncture the authenticity of dialogue. It’s the written equivalent of the power of saying it right.
Recently, I sent a story out for beta-reading. Several people picked up on the same line of dialogue:
“I’ve been shouting of you for ages.”
This doesn’t seem right, said one. Shouted for? after? at? to? queried another.
My characters often (like me) have the speech patterns of someone who grew up in the north-east of England. I lost most of my accent years ago (though the astute will pick it up when I say “bath” or “hook” or “cherry”) - but I retain numerous quirks, oddities and dialect words.
“I’ve been shouting of you” was not a typo, it was exactly what I meant. None of the others felt right. Shouting for was too polite, shouting at too overtly aggressive. The more I thought about it, the more I built up the difference in my head: the character, angry and controlling, standing in one room of the flat shouting of his girlfriend. I could hear it - I have heard it. It’s the way countless people in my world would say it.
At the same time, if the vast majority of readers would simply trip over the phrase and think it an error, what was the point of keeping it?
I’ve often read stories - set in India, or South Africa, or among Black Americans - where a lot of the dialogue has been alien to me. Unfamiliar words slide into the sentences, phrases don’t mean quite what I think they mean. I keep reading, go with the flow, trusting that I’ll be able to pick up the thread where it matters.
Perhaps the key, here, is that a string of unexpected words indicates a cultural difference; an isolated one looks like a mistake. Perhaps if my character had been hollering of wor lass nobody would have batted an eyelid. If you want to represent a particular spoken idiom, you have to go all in - or make sure you present it in a way that will lead your readers to trust you.
I hadn’t considered any of these things: “I was shouting of you” is something initially I wrote without realising it would sound odd to non-northerners. And this is why we have beta readers. Read your own dialogue out loud, imagine it in the local accent of your choosing - but be sure to get an outside perspective as well. You don’t have to make sure your reader understands every last word - variety is everything, flavour is important - just make sure everyone knows it’s deliberate.