How do you use dialogue and dialect to reveal character?
In my previous post on The Searcher, I looked at how Tana French pulls us into the book in her first chapter. Now I’m going to step just a little further into the novel and examine how she uses dialogue, focusing on chapter three as our example.
At this point in the book, we have a couple key story questions: Why is Trey, a young local kid, sneaking around Cal’s house? And what happened in Cal’s past life in the Chicago PD to make him want to move to a remote Irish village? We are still in pursuit of the usual question at the heart of a mystery novel: who committed the murder? As readers, we’ve now modulated that question into two others: who is going to be murdered, and when is it going to happen?
French puts us on alert at the beginning of chapter three when she has Cal recall a conversation he had with the bartender at the local pub about the gun license he’d applied for, and which he’s used as the reason he walks to and from the pub, not wanting to risk a DUI:
“Sure, they oughtn’t to give you a gun anyway,” Barty the barman told him, when he pointed this out.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re American. Ye’re all mental with the guns, over there. Shooting them off at the drop of a hat. Blowing some fella away because he bought the last packet of Twinkies in the shop. The rest of us wouldn’t be safe.”
“What would you know about Twinkies?” Mart demanded, from the corner where he and his two buddies were ensconced with their pints. Mart feels a responsibility, as Cal’s neighbor, to defend him against a certain amount of the ribbing he gets. “It’s far from Twinkies you were reared.”
“Didn’t I spend two year on the cranes in New York? I’ve et Twinkies. Horrible fuckin’ yokes.”
“And did anyone shoot you?”
“They did not. They’d better sense.”
“Should’ve done,” one of Mart’s buddies said. “Then we might have a barman who could put a dacent head on a pint.”
First, I want to draw your attention to how few dialogue tags French uses, even in a conversation that expands to multiple speakers. We can easily understand from context how the conversation shifts from Barty and Cal to Barty and Mart, after Mart’s initial intervention. Note, too, that French takes the opportunity with Mart’s dialogue tag to stitch in a character observation—that he feels obliged to defend Cal.
Second, let’s talk about dialect and accent. This is a topic I’ve tackled often with authors who want to give their work a historical or regional flavor. The key is to be restrained, particularly when it comes to changing the spellings of words, and to lean more on word choice and syntax—the order of the words in a sentence.
For example, Barty’s use of “sure” as a sentence-opener, his verb construction “oughtn’t to”, and his use of the words “packet” (rather than the American “pack”) and “yokes” (an Irishism for ‘things’) all give his speech an Irish flavor. An Americanized version of his initial dialogue line might read, “Well, they shouldn’t give you a gun anyway.” These are all word-choice examples.
A great example of syntax is Mart’s line, “It’s far from Twinkies you were reared.” All of the words in this sentence are in common usage by Americans, but they would never be arranged in this order in casual conversation.
I’ve bolded the words that are given a non-standard spelling that is supposed to cue the sound of the Irish accent: ye’re, et, and dacent. Note how sparsely they are sprinkled through the passage. Note too that they all involve tiny vowel substitutions: you’re > ye’re, eat > et, decent > dacent. In a set of 898 characters, French has altered precisely six, all of them vowels.
Be aware that using non-standard spellings and speech takes you into tricky territory in which you need to be alert to the power dynamics operating between your characters and between you and your characters. Enforcing standard pronunciation and spellings can be a tool of oppression and cultural erasure; noting non-standard speech for certain characters can mark them as “other” in ways you must be alert to and use deliberately. (The organization Writing the Other regularly offers a class on how to use dialect effectively and wisely.) This scene is filtered through the point of view of Cal, an American, and so it makes sense that he hears “dacent” when Mart’s buddy says “decent”. Mart, if he were transcribing this bit of dialogue, would hear the word as “decent” because that’s how he himself pronounces the word.
It’s the undercurrents that feature in the next passage I want to examine. After the recalled dialogue above, we get some additional detail about the pub itself and what’s going on the night Cal enters it: “Seán Óg’s is, by its own standards, buzzing tonight. Mart and a couple of his buddies are in their corner, playing cards with two unprepossessing young guys in tracksuits whom they’ve acquired somehow.” We learn that Mart’s group plays for money, and we readers peg that table as a potential source of conflict as the evening unfolds.
A middle-aged woman, whom Cal has slowly come to understand is a sex worker, is in a banquette, and a group in the corner is listening to a man playing the tin whistle. Cal plans to sit at the bar and relax, enjoying the music and his lack of responsibility. Readers might be on alert, but Cal is not: “After twenty-five years of maintaining an intricate mental database of everyone he met on the job, Cal enjoys the lackadaisical feeling of not bothering to remember whether Sonny is the one with the big laugh or the one with the cauliflower ear.”
But his attention is drawn to an argument between a group down the bar from him:
“There’s no dog could do that,” the guy at the end of the bar is saying stubbornly. He’s little and round, with a little round head perched on top, and he tends to wind up on the wrong end of jokes; generally he seems OK with this, but this time he’s turning red in the face with vehemence and outrage. “Did you even look at them cuts? It wasn’t teeth that done that.”
“Then what d’you think done it?” demands the big bald slab of a guy nearest to Cal.
“The fairies?”
“Feck off. I’m only saying, it was no animal.”
“Not them fecking aliens again,” says the third guy, raising his eyes from his pint. He’s a long gloomy streak with his cap pulled down close over his face. Cal has heard him say a total of about five sentences.
Again, we see French using word choice and syntax to give flavor to the dialogue. But what I want to draw your attention to here is the absolute mastery of French’s descriptions of these speakers. They are filtered through Cal’s knowledge: he doesn’t remember the name of the little, round guy, but he knows he’s often the butt of jokes just as he knows the “third guy” rarely speaks. Notice, too, how vivid and distinct the physical descriptions are: “big bald slab of a guy” and “long gloomy streak”.
Cal is drawn into the conversation, and there is an undercurrent of tension now, both because of the topic and because they are challenging Cal, testing his knowledge and thus his right to be sitting in this pub, living in this place:
“Come here,” he says, shifting his bulk around on the bar stool to face Cal. “Listen to this. Night before last, something kilt one of Bobby’s sheep. Took out its throat, its tongue, its eyes and its arse; left the rest.”
“Sliced out,” Bobby says.
Senan ignores this. “What would you say done it, hah?”
“Not my area,” Cal says.
But, when pressed, Cal passes the test, relying on the hunting knowledge his grandfather passed down to him. The mystery of what happened to the animal is left behind when the table French wanted us to peg as trouble at the beginning of the chapter does finally erupt: one of the young guys, named Donie, is accused of cheating, challenges Mart to a fistfight, and is thrown out of the bar by Barty, who asks Cal to help. Cal goes back into cop mode briefly, asking questions of Barty and then insisting on accompanying Mart home to make sure Donie hasn’t turned up there to continue the fight.
The chapter concludes with one last chunk of dialogue, this time between Cal and his daughter Alyssa, who lives in Seattle. In this conversation, it’s the in-between spaces, not the words themselves, that are important:
“How’s work?” Alyssa works for a nonprofit in Seattle, something to do with at-risk teenagers. Cal missed the ins and outs of it when she first told him she was applying for the job—she applied for a lot of jobs, and work and Donna were taking up most of his mind around then—and it’s gotten too late to ask.
“Work’s good. We got our grant—big relief—so that should keep the show on the road for another while.”
At each turn of the conversation, Cal feels his insufficiency, feels the distance between them. French underlines this sense in a passage of introspection: “When Cal hangs up he has the same empty feeling he always gets after talking to Alyssa these days, a sense that somehow, in spite of having been on the phone for all that time, they haven’t had a conversation at all; the whole thing was made of air and tumbleweed, nothing solid there.” The subtext, the unspoken thoughts, carry more meaning than anything that has been said during the conversation. This is a form of earned telling: French shows us a snippet of conversation along with Cal’s commentary to tell us what it really means beneath the surface.
Takeaways
What have we learned from this analysis of French’s dialogue that you can apply to your own work?
Look for places you can either strip off or enrich dialogue tags (e.g., “he says”). In many cases, context cues can tell readers who is speaking. When you do include them, take the opportunity to add a snippet of character or setting description or a bit of introspection.
If you are trying to give dialogue a historical or regional flavor, rely mostly on word choice and syntax. Use non-standard spellings sparingly, and be alert to the power dynamics involved in those choices.
Use subtext—the difference between the surface meaning of dialogue and the feelings underneath—as a way to show the stakes of a conversation or the tension in the relationship between the speakers.