<<<Simply put, authentic tape recorder dialogue is
unreadable - what Higgins and Leonard did was to take the
vernacular and impose rhythm and sense and even a cerain
poetry on to it, and that does indeed involve strategic
rather then authentically profuse use of, er, Anglo-Saxon
oaths.>>>
I got into a discussion with this not too long ago with
another writer. It was more over phonetic dialogue than
swearing, but the same arguments pro and con apply
here.
I lamented that Mosely's one flaw with DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS
was his use of "the Scotty trick," so named because of the
bad habit STAR TREK novelists (usually not paragons of good
writing to begin with) tended to write the original series'
chief engineer phonetically, in one case ending up with a
badly rendered Yorkshire accent. (It sounded even worse once
I realized what the author'd mistaken for Aberdeen Scottish.)
Mosely has slapped so many apostrophes into DEVIL's dialogue
that I often had to reread Easy's lines to make sure I got it
right.
The gentleman I happened to be talking with said he preferred
that, but the trick is to get it to flow. Striking a balance
between readability and authenticity was the trick. I did
agree that the dialogue in THE RED DEATH was much more
readable, but, as often is the case when Texas accents are
written (the most recent James Hime novel an example),
writers tend to be too phonetic and lose the reader, or at
least give him pause.
The same point can be made about swearing. Your average
street thug has trouble stringing two sentences together into
a coherent piece of conversation. (This was a staple of
screwball comedy whenever gangsters were involved in the
plot. "I gotta preposition for yas.") A writer has to depict
this, but the reader has to be able to read through the lines
with little or no effort at all. Too many F bombs can have
the same effect as heavy handed phonetics.
Jim Winter
Northcoast Shakedown
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