writing in dialect – Lee Duigon

I read a lot of fantasy, and a lot of it is poop. That’s usually because it’s full of literary crimes.

Literary Crimes

The Know-It-All Elf and The Invincible Female Warrior–what would certain writers do for characters, if they didn’t have these worn-out cliches to fall back on?

Then there’s crazy dialogue. There’s only one thing worse than long passages of speech written in what the author images to be dialect. That’s long passages of speech in which the author wanders in and out of dialect.

The mystery of it all! We wouldn’t know these cliches for cliches if they weren’t crammed into books that actually got published–thousands of ’em.

See the source image

Holy cow, is this stressful! You should see what they’ve done to my blog this morning. If it looks normal at your end–well, I wish it’d look normal here.

Anyway–remember when I had to read and review all those books by “Abner Doubleday,” aka Brian Godawa? The fantasies set in the world before the Flood, which featured everyone using 21st century slang.

In Defense of Plain English

Hint to aspiring writers: Plain English is just about always suitable for whatever purpose you have in mind. There are some famous authors who love to write in dialect, and subject their readers to whole pages of blah-blah at a time. I have never enjoyed those books.