Reflecting On My Writing Style · 7:58pm Dec 10th, 2018
Having read the recent review by PresentPerfect of For However Long I'll admit that my first reaction was to get a little defensive about how I write Gilda, but I know that's a flaw of mine so I stopped and gave it some thought. I realised a few things about myself in doing so, specifically about how I write and my influences therein that I hadn't really consciously been aware of up until now.
So for background: growing up I read a great deal. I had no friends so books were my main pastime, specifically I read a lot of Mark Twain. I realise that for all that people praise Mark Twain's writing, there aren't actually a lot of people my age (at least where I live) who have actually read the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which I read over and over. For those of you who haven't... let me give you an excerpt for reference.
"Tom, it was middling warm in school, warn't it?"
"Yes'm."
"Powerful warm, warn't it?"
"Yes'm."
"Didn't you want to go in a-swimming, Tom?"
And now I realise why I write why I do...
See, I also delved deep into H.P. Lovecraft, and to this day one of my most prized possessions is my copy of Lovecraft's unabridged works. I also grew up reading the Redwall books by Brian Jacques where, once again, most accents and such are written phonetically, displaying the myriad speech styles and dialects of England. I ended up realising, as well, that I don't actually like books where the accents aren't actually written out. It feels incredibly lazy to me to just ask the audience to pretend the character is speaking in an accent that could clearly be depicted in the writing if the author was willing to put in a little more effort.
And it is effort, assuming you're doing it right. Mark Twain was praised for his depictions of language because they were perfectly accurate examples of the varying and colorful dialects of the southern and midwestern states along the Mississippi river, and all of it was rigorously researched.
It's the reason I write Crankshaft and Tempest the way I do, they talk like most of my family on my father's side. Stateside Mexican (not Spanish but mexican, WandererD knows what I mean) is a wild sort of pidgin language between English and Spanish, it's not like true 'Mexican' Spanish and has a completely different societal upbringing as a dialect. Most of my cousins have never been to Mexico, and probably never will, but bilinguality is the rule where they live; my younger cousins all talk in an interspersed English/Spanish hybrid dialect that actually really fascinating if you stop and think about how complex the birth of a new dialect really is.
But I digress... and if you can't tell, I love language.
In short, I realised that I write phonetically for two main reasons. The first reason being that I grew up reading books that did precisely that and so it naturally influenced how I ended up writing my own stories, and I think that pretty much happens to every author whether they know it or not. The second reason is that I feel it's more accurate; it's more effort to write a coherent and accurate accent: Zee and Storm's thick Yorkshire accent for instance, or Gilda's city-kid snarl, or Summer Wind's Breaux-Bridge twang.
That's not to say I necessarily disagree with how overwritten phonetic accent writing can come off as, and I think that that's just a natural downside of that style of writing. Every style of writing has positives and negatives, like almost anything else after all. I can truly promise all of you, if you get tired of reading the word 'savvy', that you would probably never be able to finish either of Twain's 'Adventures' because... hoo boy... Tom and Huck? They say the word 'Powerful' likes it's going out of style. It is almost literally every third sentence.
And that's fine, people are allowed to not like certain styles of writing, whether they are classic or not. I can't stand Dickens because that dude spends like a full page describing a snow covered park bench.
The thing is, whether you find that annoying or not, that really what verbal tic's sound like. I've known plenty of people who end sentences with one or two words over and over and over again. One of my oldest friends ended almost every goddamn sentence with the phrase 'type of thing' for years before he finally broke himself of the tic. Plus, most dialect have 'tic' words; for Stateside America? The word 'Like' is one of the more well known things, but if you look at the midwest, noises like 'oofda' or 'dontcha know' are parodies a lot but are actually real tics that real people say, which makes the parodies, the purposefully mocking ones I mean, kind of annoying to me.
Now, I have an accent myself, and I dislike it. Not for a good reason, just because I got mocked relentlessly for it growing up. But that aside, I love accents. I love the way they lend speech a certain color, the way you can hear words turn and twist in ways unique to that person and know that what you're hearing is the place they grew up, the family that raised them, their ancestry and their history. I can hear the bayous and feel the humid warmth of Louisiana when I write Summer, I can taste the city air of Los Angeles and hear the scream and chatter of throngs of people when I write Tempest and Crank. I can feel the hard concrete and the rumble of a thousand gridlocks cars when I write Gilda's inner city snarl.
It's one of the reasons I love writing. I write like that for me, I suppose... in the end I have to take advice from another of my favorite writers: Neil Gaiman.
Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that — but you are the only you.
This is how I write, and as I'm sure there are some who do not like it, I will say to them: That is perfectly fine. Whomever reads what I write and dislikes it is well within their right. But whether something feels wrong, or the words taste overwritten in their mouth, I don't think I'll change how I write as it stands because I love these small things too much to leave them behind.
Cheers,
I-A-M
Haha, I still love it. It is weird, having grown up in Mexico to see the Mexican language of your childhood here. Some words change, but they are perfectly understandable to me, despite the oddity of the first impression. (Plus I love the dialect additions to personality).
Regarding phonetic, I had several long discussions about that with Leone Ross. Her being Jamaican, it was a natural process for her to use the phonetic and structural sounds and writing to make it legit.... if entirely incomprehensible at times if you were not from there. However, she pointed out to me that the thing about languages and depicting them phonetically, is that if you're not local (to the lingo/jargon/language) it can really, REALLY, mess up the credibility of your characters.
That sort of landed on me and made me treat the accents with a little bit of respect, using slightly different techniques to imply nationality, rather than influencing the whole way they talked.
Either way, I enjoy your characterization, and language—used properly—can add a whole new dimension to the writing that others might never get to experience otherwise.
4979202
Heh, I still maintain that Stateside Mexican really isnt Mexican, no more than Mexican is Argentinian.
4979203
It isn't! That's why it's recognizable for me, but still odd! People in Mexico speak "Mexican" Spanish, no one there would say they speak Mexican :P
Thanks for the... hm. Whatever this was. But I enjoyed reading it. :)
Though "and know that what you're hearing is the place they grew up, the family that raised them, their ancestry and their history" does make me wonder somewhat what you might think literally talking with me, as my own accent is either not that or that in some way I don't understand.