To celebrate the release of her newest YA book, Double Negative, the kind and talented C. Lee McKenzie is here with a quick lesson on characterization through dialect.
Congratulations, Lee! Take it away!
Congratulations, Lee! Take it away!
Literary
Dialect: Quick Characterization
Literary
Dialect is one quick way authors can characterize the people in their stories.
But what is dialect in general? Most simply it’s
a way of speaking that marks regional, cultural, ethnic and social differences.
So dialect and literary dialect involves:
Accents. Word choice.
Grammar.
And
there are different ways to write literary dialect
1)
Use
standard spelling and describe the character’s speech.
“So what do you say?” Dad’s question comes out in slow Texan.
Double Negative, C. Lee McKenzie
2)
Use regional word choice.
“I’ve got to ret up the house,” Marge said.
He scratched his head and looked around. “What are you doing to the
house?”
3)
Omit words to mark dialect.
(Two characters: native speaker and
Vietnamese immigrant.)
“Good morning, Tuan.”
I smile and smooth my hair in his mirror like I’m
in no hurry to go anyplace. His eyes don’t blink. He’s kind of snaky
that way.
Not good,”
he grumbles.
He jerks his door closed behind him
and stomps outside. I follow and watch while he swipes gray paint over the
red-and-black stucco art.
“Las Vegas!” He spits into the gutter. “Hoodlums
do this. All time.”
Sliding
on the Edge, C. Lee McKenzie
4) Use non-standard grammar.
“There
you go again, thinking I’m stupid. I
heard all that scratching your pencil did and I seen those pages full of
writing.”
The
Princess of Las Pulgas, C. Lee McKenzie
5) Use respelling
Gonna,
hafta, readin’,
writin’
I’ve saved Respelling until last because
there’s some controversy over its use.
First, Respelling one group’s
language may reveal more about authors and their assumptions and biases than
about the characters they’re creating.
Second, I find too much of it
distracting, so I use it very little.
Hutchison Mc Queen is a sixteen-year-old
smart kid who screws up regularly. He’s a member of Larkston High’s
loser clique, the boy who’s on his way to nowhere—unless juvenile hall counts as a
destination. He squeaks through classes with his talent for eavesdropping and
memorizing what he hears. When that doesn’t work, he goes to Fat Nyla, the one
some mean girls are out to get and a person who’s
in on his secret—he
can barely read. And then Maggie happens. For twenty-five years she’s
saved boys from their own bad choices. But she may not have time to save Hutch.
Alzheimer’s disease is steadily stealing her keen mind.
Title:
Double Negative
Author:
C. Lee McKenzie
Genre:
Contemporary/Realistic Fiction
Category:
Young Adult
C.
Lee McKenzie is a native Californian who grew up in a lot of different
places; then landed in the Santa Cruz Mountains where she lives with her
family and miscellaneous pets. She writes most of the time, gardens and
hikes and does yoga a lot, and then travels whenever she can.
She takes on modern issues that today's teens face in their daily lives. Her first young adult novel, Sliding on the Edge, which dealt with cutting and suicide was published in 2009. Her second, titled The Princess of Las Pulgas, dealing with a family who loses everything and must rebuild their lives came out in 2010. Her short story, Premeditated Cat, appears in the anthology, The First Time, and her Into the Sea of Dew is part of a collection, Two and Twenty Dark Tales. In 2012, her first middle grade novel, Alligators Overhead, came out.
Don't forget to enter the giveaway!
