My husband came home from fishing the other evening to find
me all hot and bothered,
pacing in circles and waving my arms.
He chuckled, but kept a healthy distance. What was going on?
“Needs fixed,” I sputtered. I paced some more. “I hate,
hate, hate it when writers don’t use the proper ‘to be’ before a transitive
verb.”
We agreed the first person from whom we’d heard that
peculiar construct was a Hoosier. Not like Wisconsin doesn’t have weirdeties,
but, as my brother who's lived in Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, and is a world traveler says, the national evening newscasts are the final word: Midwestern
accents and sentence structure are correct, if boring and homogenized.
My hissy fit had actually started a couple of hours earlier
when I ran across the first such usage in a novel I was proofreading. I sighed
and passed over it, then…came the second one. I perused the publisher’s
particular style guide and, finding nothing, pounded out a message to get
permission to correct.
“Hmm,” the publisher, who I respect highly, wrote back. From Pennsylvania. “I never
realized that I do that too. Ignore it.”
The third usage had me flying around the internet on my
editorial broomstick looking for examples I could call them all out on, proving
this speechifyin’ was just plumb wrong. As wrong as the actual published book I
happened to be reading for quasi-pleasure where ever’one said “plum crazy” and
the like ’bout three times a chapter. Needless to say I was already
cross-eyed with fury at authors. Who. Don’t. Bother. To learn the rules before
breaking them. I learned from one article on the 'net that dialect is different
from regionalisms which generally refer to geography.
I found an internet site that explained the usage which
drops “to be” first started in Pennsylvania where the chocolate needs stirred and made a narrow swath across the
middle states to Montana where the fence wants repaired. The usage supposedly puts an immediacy in the action
and removes future tense.
It’s still WRONG. It will always be wrong. And it MIXES TENSES. I would recommend
joining the American Dialect Society, but their word of the year in 2015 was
the singular “they.” The world is just going to heck in a hand basket. Isn't lazy writing one of the seven deadly sins? I can
feel the monumental lean of language drift dragging us all down with it.
Two adult beverages and a piece of pie later, I was calm
enough to sort through my feelings on the matter. Of course in dialog fiction
writers can and should use a gentle indication of character uniqueness which
will often include local dialect after a fashion—at least to establish scene
and time frame. Particularly if he's a pirate or a Quaker or she's a non-native speaker of whatever language. But there’s that trust factor with your editor. In my first
published book my editor, a preacher’s wife from Ohio, absolutely refused to
believe we have three-day funerals in Wisconsin. Another rep from Michigan didn't think a three-point turn—which I thought was on every state’s driving test, but I’m
totally not going there—on a fire road would not pass the universal reader comprehension test.
But how much is too much, and when do we standardize our
stories so our international audience will be able to feel comfortable reading our
work no matter when and where it’s set? Regarding dialect, authors who read widely in many genres and types of media will capture a
natural rhythm and pattern of language. Y’all authors who listen to television
shows will hear how local shows, perhaps local cable or local news, compare to
nationally syndicated shows, or even nationally syndicated shows with multiple
hosts from different parts of the country. It’s okay to show how some folks may
drop word endin’s or a consonant when looking for a pahking spot. Gently.
Within reason. Not constantly to distraction. If one character from Ohio has a lawn needs mowed,
by golly, let him mention it—maybe once. If a Hoosier has some warshing ta do…let
him get on wid it. In conversation. Not in text. If it’s repeated in narration from more than one perspective, then we have an AUTHOR INTRUSION ALERT. Are you
awake now? AUTHOR INTRUSION ALERTS are never a good thing in fiction unless it’s
a running gag—like Death narrating The Book Thief.
If the regionalism or local custom is not critical to the
story, don’t use it, even if it means obeying your cussed editor. On the other
hand, if your story takes place in the Great North Woods, in which fire roads
or lanes are cut between great timber stands in rural areas where roads are few
and far between and your character is fleeing criminals while driving these
back roads, lost as all git-out, and you have to stop and 'splain a fire road to
non-native Wisconsin readers, it would slow the action, doncha know? THE CURE: You
the Author can establish a way to make sure the reader understands this concept
before your chase scene, you betcha, without demeaning native folks who can’t
imagine anyone else not knowing about
the need to get firefighters to the middle of a dense forest to fight fires.
The moral of the story is Go Gently with Colloquial
Language, use regionalisms to establish quirk, setting, time frame, but don’t impale it into your story-telling technique.
This article first appeared on Author Culture in 2016.
