Dialect is used often in writing, and often used badly. This is because dialects are often poorly executed, and poorly utilized. I myself am hardly an expert on them, and am not a subtle enough author to use them well. That said, I still want to offer a few cautionary points to think about if you do want to use a dialect in a story.
First, it is important to consider why you want to use a dialect. Often, authors use it because they want their character to have a distinctive voice. This is a bad reason to use dialect, because it is often poorly executed and disconnected from the character. Besides, there are much better ways to give a character a distinct voice without using something as heavy handed as a dialect. Dialects actually affect a character’s history. It tells us much more about our character’s family, their childhood, their education, and where they live and work, then just “how they sound.” If the dialect is disconnected from the rest of the character’s history, it no longer makes any sense for it to be there. Read more…
This is another post that will be mostly review, but I want to cover it anyway. The setting is the time and place that a story takes place in. Setting is often regarded as one of the least important aspects of a story, being upstaged by plot, character, and theme. It is seen as the backdrop, not really important. It is assumed that a great character can perform in limbo, and still create a marvelous story.
Most of this is true, but that does not mean that setting can’t be an excellent tool for writers. In fact, I would say that setting is growing in importance at about the same speed as genre fiction is gaining in popularity, because genre relies heavily on setting to establish the world the writer is crafting. However, don’t confuse world building with setting—the two are certainly related but still quite different things for reasons which I will touch on here, and most likely develop further later. Read more…
This is going to be another continuing topic, although I don’t know how frequent it will be. The focus here is not “literature” in general, but “Literature”. It may not seem like a large difference, but in academic circles especially, trying to decide what books possess a certain kind of quality which makes them deserve that capital “L” is a fairly hot topic. In these posts, I will look at attempts I have seen people have made to separate out Literature from other writing, and I want to start with one of the more widespread divisions, the distinction between mainstream literature and genre literature.
Some people might disagree with me on this, but I think that this distinction is based on content and setting more than anything else. Mainstream works are those which take place in the real world that we inhabit. They contain characters that we could conceivably meet, and who abide by the same basic rules of existence that we do. Genre fiction, in many of its forms, breaks this rule by creating characters and worlds which do not abide by the rules of our world. This content might break physical or technological laws (like magic, advanced artificial intelligence and faster than light travel) as well as social rules, (like the sexual stereotypes in romance novels). Not all genres break all of these rules, but they do break some rule. The result is characters that could not exist in our world, by the very nature of their existence. Read more…
