Free Fiction Writer's Workshop by Josip Novakovich

way). Diction and syntax are manipulated to create these patterns. Here the dialect rises out of words, that is, sound and meaning, rather than mere sound. It works for that very reason. Kelman trusts the language. It is, after all, the language as he knows it. When writing dialect, that is your charge: Trust the language as you know it.
    Environment means something. People who aren't heard, for instance, tend to speak louder, or to shut up entirely. But you should write to discover or uncover the environment and the tensions within it. Don't assume that the lower-middle-class family in which both parents work and are frazzled by debt is the spot where a child's voice might go unheard. Write to create a convincing circumstance and you might find that children go unheard in Martha's Vineyard just as they do in Tupelo. The idea is this: Don't get sociological when shaping a character's voice. Don't make presumptions as a writer about the way these environments work. There is nothing more icily calculated than a character whose words are used by the writer to take a poke at a social problem. Characters should speak, but only when they must, rather than when the writer needs them too. Write dialogue to discover character rather than to reflect a set of givens. In fact, push yourself to work against the givens and your dialogue will crank you into discovering entire stories as well as fully voiced characters.
    I'm warning you about a pitfall here. These problems often come up when writers assume that accent, diction and use of slang define a character in some holistic fashion. They assume that writing dialect can bring them closer to the characters who speak in dialect. These writers often stumble forward, sacrificing character for a particular voice. The character's voice, and the presumptions behind it—quite often about race and class—becomes a mask, a scrim, between the character and the writer and, in the long run, the readers and the story in front of them.
    There is no quicker way to fail, no quicker way to sell yourself short than to write unconvincing dialect. Your best intentions become mawkish charades. Readers are challenged not to live in your story, to get at the heart of what you have to say, but to "check" the loose strands of accent and spelling. It's one thing if you've spoken patois since childhood or if you grew up speaking the clunky street talk of
    Brooklyn, but it's quite another when you assume to have mastery over the music and meaning of a dialect simply because you've heard it here and there. Here's a good watchword for dialect: Do not use the language unless you live the language.
    CURSING
    Kelman's book, like many others I read, is about full up with the word "fuck." You may think this word should never appear in print. That is your right. If so, I suggest you never print it. But whether you like this word or hate it, whether it's ugly or beautiful to you, it's a word that tends to leak its way into a lot of dialogue these days. Frankly, its frequency in our culture probably has a lot to do with the ocean of language we swim around in every day. Its history seems ancient to me. It was once used to shock, to shake up the status quo, to make people listen. Now, its life cycle in the lexicon is almost complete, as it represents little more than a lazy adjective, a dim frequency of anger. For some it remains a potent verb, an accented adjective, particularly when crossing lines of culture. Whether you banish the word from your stories or not, I think there's a way to think about cursing in general that can speak to dialogue writing in particular.
    "Swearing," as we called it in my family, appealed to me as a boy in the distant way that adulthood seems glamorous to a child. It marked time. Soon I would be twelve, or fifteen, or eighteen and be able to use whatever sort of language I wanted. I listened with glee to the way adults put curses together. I looked forward to driving a car too and to getting my