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Transcript
- I once spent three hours trying to make a character from Ohio sound like they were from Kentucky, and all I managed was a linguistic car crash that sounded less like a dialect and more like a bad impression of a cowboy. Let’s look closer at why we do this to ourselves. Here is the thing about writing dialogue that nobody tells you in the beginner workshops: your eyes are lying to you. Your eyes want consistency. They want rules. But ears? Ears are messy. Ears deal in rhythm, in texture, in the way a vowel gets stretched out because someone is tired, or clipped short because they’re in a hurry. When I first started writing fiction after leaving graphic design, I thought regional dialect was just a vocabulary swap. I’d read a list of Southern words—y’all, fixin’ to, reckon—and I’d sprinkle them into my sentences like confetti. I thought if I used enough of those words, the reader would hear the accent. And it didn’t work. It never works. It just makes the character sound like a caricature, like they’re performing for a tourist board rather than living in their own skin. You have to listen to the music of the place, not just the dictionary. What’s the texture of that sound? Is it flat and open, like the plains? Or is it tight and nasal, like the mountains? You have to feel where the air moves in their throat. Let me tell you about a mistake I made early on. I wrote a scene with two friends talking in a diner in Maine. One character said, 'Ah ain't goin' nowhere near that water.' I thought I was being brilliant. I was spelling out the accent phonetically. I wanted the reader to hear it. But when I read it back, it looked like a ransom note. It was exhausting to read. It broke the flow of the story completely. The reader stops reading the story and starts decoding the text. They stop seeing the characters and start looking at the letters. That is the enemy of empathy. We don’t need to see every dropped ‘g’ or every elongated ‘o’ written out in strange ways. We need to trust our readers. Trust them to catch the vibe through syntax, through word choice, through the rhythm of the sentence. If you write, 'I reckon I’ll stay here a while,' the reader knows exactly where that person is from without you having to butcher the spelling. Spelling out an accent is lazy. It’s telling instead of showing. And as we know, showing is where the magic hides, even if it feels harder than just typing out what you think sounds funny. So how do we actually do it? How do we capture the soul of a region without turning our characters into stereotypes? We focus on syntax. This is the structure of the sentence. The order of the words. In some places, people speak in long, winding sentences, connecting ideas with conjunctions, letting the thought breathe. In others, speech is abrupt. Direct. Subject-verb-object. No fluff. I remember spending a week in New Orleans, just sitting in a café, listening. Not to what they were saying, but how they were saying it. The pauses were different. The emphasis landed on different syllables. A sentence might end with a downward inflection that signals finality, whereas in other parts of the country, an upward inflection keeps the conversation open, inviting response. When you write dialogue, try reading it aloud. Say it in the voice of the character. If it feels stiff, if it feels like you’re reciting a poem instead of speaking, then it’s wrong. It doesn’t matter if the grammar is perfect. Real people don’t speak in perfect grammar. Real people trail off. They repeat themselves. They interrupt. They use fragments. Embrace the fragmentation. Let the sentence break. That’s where the humanity lives. It’s okay to be unfinished. In fact, it’s necessary. We also have to talk about power. Who gets to decide what a region sounds like? And who gets mocked for it? When we write dialogue, we are stepping into someone else’s life. We are borrowing their voice. There is a responsibility there. If you are writing outside your own experience, you have to be humble. You have to listen. Really listen. Not just to the words, but to the history behind them. Some dialects are tied to class, to race, to migration patterns. If you reduce a complex cultural identity to a few quirky slang terms, you’re doing violence to the truth. You’re flattening a rich, deep landscape into a postcard. I’ve seen writers take a Scottish character and give him a brogue so thick he sounds like a cartoon villain. It’s offensive, really. It strips away the dignity of the speaker. Instead, aim for authenticity. Aim for specificity. Maybe your character doesn’t say 'ken' instead of 'know.' Maybe they just pause before answering, giving weight to their silence. Maybe they use a specific metaphor drawn from the local landscape—the sea, the forest, the city grid. These details ground the character in a real world. They make them feel lived-in. They make them feel like a person you might meet on the street, not a prop in your plot. This brings me to research. And I don’t mean Googling lists of slang. I mean immersion. If you’re writing a character from Texas, go to Texas. Sit in a barbershop. Listen to the mechanics at the garage. Listen to the teachers at the school. Record conversations, if you can get permission. Take notes on the cadence. Notice how they greet each other. Do they hug? Do they nod? Do they shake hands? These physical cues inform the speech. Speech is bodily. It comes from the diaphragm, the chest, the face. If you want to write authentic dialogue, you have to understand the body of the speaker. What is their posture? Are they leaning forward, eager to connect? Or leaning back, guarded? Their physical stance affects their voice. A tense person speaks tighter. A relaxed person speaks looser. Try to map that onto your page. Use line breaks to show breath. Use punctuation to show hesitation. Don’t overdo it. Just let the structure suggest the feeling. It’s subtle. It’s quiet. But it works. Because readers are smart. They feel the rhythm before they analyze the words. They sense the mood before they understand the meaning. Trust that instinct. Let the subtext carry the weight. You don’t need to explain everything. Sometimes, the most powerful thing a character can do is say nothing at all. Finally, let’s talk about perfectionism. This is the big one. We want our dialogue to be clever. We want it to be witty. We want it to move the plot forward efficiently. But real conversation is inefficient. It’s circular. It’s full of small talk that leads nowhere. It’s full of misunderstandings. It’s full of awkward silences. If you cut all of that out, you kill the realism. You create a robotic exchange of information. Allow your characters to be boring. Allow them to be redundant. Let them talk past each other. This doesn’t mean you should include every single word ever spoken. Editing is still crucial. You still need to trim the fat. But don’t trim the soul. Keep the quirks. Keep the idiosyncrasies. Keep the things that make the character unique. Because that’s what makes them memorable. That’s what makes them human. And isn’t that why we write? To capture the messy, beautiful, imperfect reality of being alive? So, go forth and listen. Listen to the world around you. Listen to the people you love. Listen to the strangers on the bus. Pay attention to the texture of their voices. And then, put it on the page. Not perfectly. Just truly. Let’s look closer. See what you find. It might surprise you. It did me. Thank you for listening, for thinking, for creating. Until next time, keep making messes. I’m Sydney Allison. Be gentle with yourself.