Dialect

Writing the Great Yorkshire Novel

Greetings from Sequel Country, where today I’m going to be dipping my toes in the reservoir of dialogue. I call it that because see it as more of a man-made feature than an ocean: dialogue is tamed and follows rules and conventions. There may be some depths in the middle where a few dare to go, but they risk not taking the reader with them. After all the point of dialogue, like prose, is to be understood. Just like last week, when I talked about techniques such as point of view, the decisions made about how to render accents and dialect in speech in a first book naturally limit the choices that can be made in a sequel.

I mentioned last week that my novel Parallel Lines has more dialogue than a lot of novels do, because it’s the story of a relationship and the key moments in relationships tend to be when the people are talking to each other. But it’s central to the story that the characters grew up in a rural area in Yorkshire, where everyone would speak with a Yorkshire accent, mostly the local Leeds accent.

In fact, the main characters’ accents are almost a minor sub-plot in their own right, because I wanted to show how rural kids who go to university often soon modify their accent. In PL, the two main characters Roy and Ashley go to university and start to speak more correctly and use fewer Yorkshire dialect words, particularly Ashley who is from a middle-class family. Meanwhile their mutual friend Mandy stays in Leeds and keeps her accent. But there are lots of scenes in pubs, and when they’ve had a few beers, their accents tend to come back, something I’ve often noticed (in myself and others).

So I wanted to show the Yorkshire accent in my dialogue scenes. I also wrestled with how to make it easy for the reader to distinguish Roy’s voice from Ashley’s, and gave serious thought to changing the plot so that they didn’t come from the same place and go to the same school, or weren’t both the first generation in their family to go to university. In the end I settled for a subtler approach, leaving them with the same accent and dialect words, but tweaking their vocabulary in ways that reflect their class differences. For example, Ashley always uses the latinate word “perhaps”, while Roy always uses the anglo-saxon “maybe”. Ashley says “it isn’t” something where Roy, particularly pre-university, says “it’s not” something, a more typically Yorkshire construction. And so on.

I experimented a lot in different drafts with how broad to make the accents in the dialogue. I tried making the characters more or less accent-less, and using almost no dialect words or phrases, which makes the novel more accessible to the reader who doesn’t know what Yorkshire accents sound like, but was kind of bland; I also tried writing them much broader, how I remember people sounding in Yorkshire in the 1970s – and how I spoke myself before we moved away and I later started moving around for career and relationship reasons. To write a heavy accent, you either need a linguist’s ear or to have grown up around that specific accent. Even so, it can be difficult and slow for a reader to decode if they’re not familiar with the sound. An example of this is a novel I read a few years ago called Rainbow Milk, in which the first chapter is narrated, in the first person, in the voice of the father of the gay man who the narrative follows, in close third person, for the rest of the novel. The father is an immigrant from Jamaica and, not knowing how it should sound when spoken out loud, I found the dialogue often difficult to follow:

How that one black face them cyah ev’n find room fa fe take over, eeh? Tell me that! Me give them mi raasclaat for take over!

It’s a bold choice to start the novel with ten thousand words in this style, and one which I confess I don’t really understand. But when you attempt to render them accurately, Yorkshire accents (of which there are two main families, by the way, one found north and east of Leeds, and the other south and west of Leeds, which sound distinctly different to a native) can be difficult too, like in this exchange from Wuthering Heights:

“What are ye for?” he shouted. “T’ maister’s down i’ t’ fowld. Go round by th’ end o’ t’ laith, if ye went to spake to him.”

“Is there nobody inside to open the door?” I hallooed, responsively.

“There’s nobbut t’ missis; and shoo’ll not oppen ’t an ye mak’ yer flaysome dins till neeght.”

Just as difficult to decode, I’d say. The first book I ever read which portrayed Yorkshire accents was the children’s novel The Secret Garden, which has a consistent approach to this problem: some words are attempts to show accent and dialect, but not all, making the whole much more readable. For example in

‘I have been into the other gardens,’ she said.

‘There was nothin’ to prevent thee,’ he answered crustily.

the word thee is used, but “nothin’” is substituted for the Yorkshire dialect word “nowt”, an everyday word which the gardener would surely have used. This avoids overloading the reader with unfamiliar words, while giving a flavour of the accent.

I ended up doing the same kind of thing:

‘No need, I’ll pop in to Bill’s Bikes ont’ way home.’

‘I know how to do it. You adjust the wheel int’ dropouts and...’

If I’d written the second line to show how it would really have sounded, it would have been “I know ‘ow to do it. Y’adjoost t’wheel int’ dropouts…” – more realistic, but less readable. There is no perfect solution to this trade-off, and ultimately the writer must choose the best balance appropriate to the story being told and the audience it’s for.

The only thing I remember being taught about dialogue in my Creative Writing MA was the usual advice (in all the textbooks) not to use colourful dialogue tags (like “hallooed” and “answered” above) and stick with “said”. Even worse is to use adverbs (like “responsively” and “crustily”). The stock advice is to “show not tell,” so in dialogue it should be clear who’s speaking from actions described along with the speech or from the different characters’ speech patterns and vocabulary; and the manner in which they speak should be obvious from the dialogue itself. I tend to go along with this, though in editing I had to fix lots of places where I’d described the listener’s response (action) on the same line as the speaker’s dialogue, making it harder to understand who was speaking. (And I discovered how much I overuse some devices such as pauses in conversations and people lowering their voice.) But as with “show not tell” itself, these are “more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules”. And after all, the specific ways in which a writer breaks the rules in a particular book contributes a lot to the style and feel of the work. This too, I think, is a consideration when writing a sequel, in that the reader will expect some continuity of style – as well as expecting characters’ accents not to change drastically between one book and the next.

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