Grist

The Journal for Writers

The Shattered Novel: Rules of Fragmented Fiction by Samantha Edmonds

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I tried to write a novel once. And I found myself despairing: how is it possible to string paragraphs into pages into chapters into novels? How to make something as unruly as a story fit into a linear narrative? Then, my first year of grad school, several things happened: a friend recommended Reader’s Block by David Markson; a professor assigned Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill; a classmate mentioned Speedboat by Reneta Adler. That’s when I realized: The novel is falling to pieces!

In other words, paragraphs are out. Fragments are in.

These three novels are exemplary of fiction that has shattered during construction. They don’t follow a linear narrative, but instead consist of scene-scraps and thought-splinters patched haphazardly together to tell a story. Reader’s Block describes itself as “nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.”[i] The narrator in Department of Speculation call her memories “tiny particles that swarm together and apart.”[ii] Jen Frain, the protagonist in Speedboat, admits she has “lost [her] sense of the whole.”[iii] Forget everything you think you know about novels. The fragmented form doesn’t care how something should be written.

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Think these novels are too cool for rules? They’re not. The best fragmented novels—no matter how abstract—must use at least these three characteristics to be successful:

1)lSeeming randomness (which is actually patterned). At first glance, disconnected sections in the fragmented form appear without meaning. But these seemingly unrelated fragments aren’t the madness they seem; Guy Trebay, in his afterword to Speedboat, writes, “Although at times it can seem these miniatures are deployed…arbitrarily and in no special order, like the things one sees in dreams, they are in truth organized in subtle and inevitable patterns.”[iv]

For example, in one section of Speedboat a white girl brings a date of another ethnicity to a friend’s wedding: “[The Argentinian boyfriend] was very rich, with more profound good manners than any Anglo-Saxon I have met, but he had not troubled much with haircuts. After we had all swum awhile outside, the bride’s mother asked me in confidential tones whether I thought she ought to drain the pool.”[v] There’s a white space, and then the next section begins, “‘Well, you know, you can’t win them all,’ the old bartender said. ‘In fact, you can’t win any of them.’”[vi] There’s a tickle in the brain reading these sections together; they’re seemingly unrelated—the bartender is anonymous and has never been mentioned before—but then the reader understands that for all the Argentinian’s good qualities, his long hair and non-whiteness will forever be that by which he is judged. Understanding that, the bartender’s, “You can’t win them all,” suddenly takes on monumental weight. In other words, there’s nothing the Argentinian can do.

Department of Speculation is similarly patterned. The narrator, after recently learning about her husband’s infidelity, says, “Lately I’ve been having this recurring dream: In it, my husband breaks up with me at a party, saying, I’ll tell you later. Don’t pester me. But when I tell him this, he grows peevish. ‘We’re married, remember? Nobody’s breaking up with anybody.’” A moment of white space, then: “‘I love autumn,’ [the daughter] says. ‘Look at the beautiful autumn leaves. It feels like autumn today. Is autumn your favorite time of year?’ She stops walking and tugs on my sleeve. ‘Mummy! You are not noticing. I am using a new word. I say autumn now instead of fall.’”[vii] The narrator’s daughter is using a new word to talk about something old, familiar. Rather like the way people say “divorce” once they’re married, instead of “breaking up.” Offill doesn’t have to spell that out, however, because the patterns of her sections do it for her.

Despite their random appearance, these fragments are carefully ordered to evoke something strange and true in the associative habit of human thoughts—these patterns are vital in fragmented fiction. Lesser fragmented novels, random but without underlying patterns, wouldn’t be as successful.

2) Plot. In each successful fragmented novel, there must still be a plot, and the more familiar, the better. Of the three novels under discussion, Jenny Offill writes the clearest plot (a wife discovers her husband cheating), and I believe it’s for that reason I find this novel the most successful. One of the notable differences in the reading experience of Department of Speculation versus Reader’s Block, for example, is the extended moments grounded in scene in Offill’s novel. The scenes are straightforward, recognizable—even clichéd—as scenes in an infidelity novel: a confrontation with the “other woman,” marriage counselling, emphasis on the daughter, memories of their past. The story doesn’t attempt to do anything game-changing regarding the standard relationship plot; it’s already attempting to experiment in other areas (like form).

When I met Jenny Offill at the University of Cincinnati in 2015, I menionted her novel reminded me of Reader’s Block without the abstraction, and she said she was a fan of Markson. She added that, to her, the most notable difference between the novels was that, in hers, she only wrote two or three “random” abstract sections before returning to the plot, whereas Markson tended, at times, to write pages and pages of story-less lines and quotes before returning to a scene. For that reason, Department of Speculation is more accessible. The novel earns the ability to emphasize random asides and abstract fragments because in the scenes where there is plot, it’s astonishingly simple. By contrast, Reader’s Block is obscure, almost plot-less, making it the hardest to follow or experience as a story.

Without plots that are at once easily described and instantly recognizable, would the fragmented novel succeed? Could one write a science fiction novel this way, for example? An epic fantasy quest, in worlds not immediately our own? If not impossible, it would be extremely difficult—and may not be met with as much success. “Easy plots” give fragmented fiction the space to experiment in other ways.

3) Metafictionality.

A graduate student sits in a coffee shop writing an essay.

Defiantly adding “metafictionality” to her Microsoft Word dictionary, regardless of if it’s a word.

What David Shields said: “I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself unselfconsciously as a novel, since it’s not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now.”

Recognizing this as the best explanation for what seems—to the grad student—to be the biggest source of success in a fragmented novel.

The novels are aware of themselves as constructs, and doesn’t try to hide that—rather, they embrace it, display it.

Relish in it.

The narrator in Department of Speculation is a writer and writing teacher. Reader in Reader’s Block is writing a novel. Jen Frain in Speedboat is a journalist.

Metafictionality in fragmentary fiction offers commentary on what it means to be a novel, and what it means to try to write one truthfully today.

Example: in Department of Speculation, Offill gets to have her cake and eat it too in the wife’s confrontation scene with the other woman. The chapter begins, “She would not have let one of her students write the scene this way. Not with the pouring rain and the wife’s broken umbrella and the girl with her long black coat,” then proceeds to give criticism of the scene: “To begin with, she’d suggest taking out the first scene….she would ask for more details of the girl’s appearance…she’d point out that what’s interesting is actually the lead-up scene.” She then writes the scene exactly as she said she shouldn’t—in the street, in the rain, with the wife kicking a mailbox.[viii] Readers know she knows this scene is cliché, which makes it not cliché—or at the very least, enjoyable as cliché. The metafictional nod to the reader, the tongue in cheek, brings us pleasure where, in other circumstances, presented sincerely, many readers would groan.

If Jenny Offill gives valuable insight into what it means for a novel to be a novel today—everything has been done a hundred times, the only way to make something feel new is to say you know it’s not new and then do it anyway (by pointing out your work’s weaknesses, do they become strengths?)—then David Markson is attempting to capture the reality of writing such a novel. Reader’s Block is more metafictional than both Department of Speculation and Speedboat. The novel’s opening lines, “Someone nodded hello to me on the street yesterday. / To me, or to him? / Someone nodded hello to Reader on the street yesterday,” imply that while he decides in the third line to write in the third person, this is a novel about Markson himself. Indeed, he admits as much on the next page: “Granted, Reader is essentially the I in instances such as that.”[ix]

The Markson novel is the only of the three books to question what it is.

“A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak, minus much of the novel?”[x]

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To me, the most exciting thing about the fragmented novel is that it gets at something “true” about living and writing that paragraphs can’t reach. We need fragmented fiction because life simply isn’t like a paragraph. It’s shattered, patterned, associative, all scraps and half-things and bright splinters—and, like these novels, so much the better for being broken.

[i] David Markson, Reader’s Block, (Urbana-Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2014): p. 193.

[ii] Jenny Offill, Department of Speculation, (New York: Vintage Books, 2014): p.3.

[iii] Renata Adler, Speedboat, (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2013): p. 10.

[iv] Guy Trebay, “Afterward,” Speedboat by Renata Adler, (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2013), p. 173.

[v] Adler, Speedboat, p. 40.

[vi] Adler, Speedboat, p. 40.

[vii] Offill, Department of Speculation, p. 50.

[viii] Offill, Department of Speculation, pp. 129-31.

[ix] Markson, Reader’s Block, p. 9-10.

[x] Markson, Reader’s Block, p. 61.

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Samantha Edmonds’ fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Day One, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, Indiana Review, Monkeybicycle, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Her nonfiction has been published in Bustle, Elite Daily, Ravishly, and more. She currently lives in Knoxville, where she’s an MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee. Visit her online at www.samanthaedmonds.com

Death, Art, and Writing | by Ryan Masters

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The first working artist I ever met was a funeral director named Dan Mason. I worked as Dan’s apprentice at Diuguid Funeral Home for 6 months, and besides some tedious truths about the way people die in the Bible Belt, the only things I learned were the few things Dan taught me about the disciplines of an artist. There are hundreds of reasons a person shouldn’t be a writer, especially not a serious one, and many of these reasons are sound. So when I find myself drinking too much or seriously contemplating a life selling insurance, I remember what I learned from Dan, principles I work by as I endure the poverty and obscurity of my current condition.

Dan had a thick head and a quick, Southern tongue. When I came to work for him my head was a big, soft cloud, full of empty abstractions. I thought I knew something about life and about writing, and that all I lacked to become a serious writer was a little experience. A job that surrounded me with the gravitas of mourning, I thought, would really teach me the difference between books and literature. I aspired to life’s higher experiences.

But Dan had long ago shaken off the pretense of the profound. He had been a funeral director as long as I had been alive. Life, Death, Art—he capitalized none of them. They were “university words,” to him, and he suggested I go back there if they interested me so much. He left truth and the afterlife to Reverend Pillow and the other dreary Baptist preachers of our town.

Dan simply worked. Whatever was needed to move a family through their grief, he set his mind to doing these things well. Most of these things were boringly ordinary. He was careful to fold the sheets and tidy up after removing the deceased from its place of death. He always wore his suit jacket in the presence of the bereaved family. He used an incredibly difficult stitch to close the incision used to fish out the carotid artery during embalming, a stitch that, if done properly, made the spot disappear into an elderly body’s natural wrinkles.

His work was important not because of anything special about death, but simply because it was difficult and required a commitment that not many were willing to take seriously. For Dan, embalming was high science, cosmetizing a lost art. Through years of death-disfigured faces he had learned how to make any dead face imitate its living form. His proudest work was of a man whose jaw had disintegrated from oral cancer, whose face he had taken two days to restore with clay compound, cosmetics, wire, and whatever else he could find in the embalming room. He did this to replace the widow’s hideous last memories of her lover’s cancer-ridden face—its shocking absurdity of colors, its haunting disfigurement—with a face that hearkened back to a time when the man was healthy and alive. He even labored over the creases of the man’s new lip, used sand paper to give his clay chin a natural coarseness.

Some object to this function of art. Shouldn’t art reveal the truth, rather than conceal it? We are about confronting hard truths in their raw form: Death, Life, Decay, those sacred, capitalized words.

But think of that. The disordered image of a cancerous death restored to the delicate order of the living form. The mortician serves the memory of the bereaved the same way the literary writer serves the imagination of the reader. The writer takes words and characters that have gone cold dead from everyday use and gives them the aura of life. In the end the work is only an imitation of life, but what does that matter if the imagination experiences that work as living?

Finally, Dan knew the funeral was ultimately about the difficulty of being the living witness of a dead body. Especially if that body was beloved. This is why he obsessed over open caskets and said to hell with all the memorial jewelry the corporate office was pushing. He knew that the central issue of his art was the lost body, and that his job was to fix that body in a narrative that allowed it to be grieved by the bodies that had to go on living.

I first learned this truth in the context of fiction writing. It was from Flannery O’Connor, who wrote: “The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality.” The hard reality of the dead body has this in common with the realities of well-made fiction: it brings us into deeper contact with that all-consuming mystery of human life, namely that it matters and that it ends.

I remember the night the family of a teenager who hanged himself came in for their first viewing of the body. We didn’t have time to embalm, so Dan improvised. He set the features, which is industry parlance meaning to fix the eyes and mouth in positions of repose. He applied a little cosmetic, just to take the blue out of the lips and cheeks, and then tilted the head in such a way to hide the marks of the rope. Then he had us cover the boy with three long sheets that would obscure the metal table the boy’s body lay upon. Then he covered the boy in a thick blanket that he fished out of somewhere. That poor family was about to come into deep contact with reality. And though their boy was, in sheer cold fact, dead, Dan didn’t want the family to leave thinking he no longer mattered.

Dan and I never did really get along. I was a novice in the world of funeral directing, and I had no respect or patience for his craft at the time. It took me a while to grow up and to realize the vast difference between a man like that and a boy like myself. I was like one of those who are swept up into the romance of novel-writing each November. It was all very exciting, and then it began. I lasted 6 months.

When I moved on and set myself to the daily, hourly, grind of writing, I finally started to understand something about what was required to do good work: dedication, in lower-case.

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Ryan Masters is an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction student at Washington University in St. Louis. His recent essay, “Unless a Kernal of Wheat Falls,” was published in Image and appears in the Notables section of this year’s Best American Essays series.

Dorothea Lasky, I Wouldn’t Be a Poet Without You: How Black Life Influenced My Poetics | by Katie Condon

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Dorothea Lasky’s second poetry collection, Black Life, was assigned as a part of a creative writing course I took in college, and because I had gotten away with it for 19 years so far, I didn’t bother glancing at the book before class. Plus, I had recently heard the T.S. Eliot quote that says something like: all poets have their best ideas before age 18 and spend the rest of their lives writing after them. Since I took that quote seriously, I figured if I could remember everything I thought of a year ago and write it down, POETRY would be happy to publish me in no time. Like every other late teen, I thought I had nothing left to learn.

You can see where this is going—when a classmate read the following lines from a late poem in Black Life called “It’s a lonely world” I was knocked down by a surprise I imagine is similar to being told you’re expecting twins at fifty-five:

                        Hi everybody
It’s Dorothea, Dorothea Lasky
I have done something very wrong and
I am so very sorry about it
“You have done a very bad,
Very bad job” my old boss says
In his Honda
As I take his dick in my mouth—

“Poems can have dicks in them?!” I thought.

“Not only, young Katie, can you put dicks in poems, but you can do so without having to make symbols of them. Fuck allusion,” is what, I imagine now, Black Life laughed back to me.

I hadn’t even read her book yet, and already Lasky was teaching me valuable lessons in being honest and direct. What I appreciated most about the collection when I decided to neglect all other assigned reading to pour over Black Life ad infinitum was its complete lack of self-concsiousness—how Lasky not only titled a poem “Mike, I had an affair,” but followed it with the lines “You know I am a great woman / I am a great woman” without the slightest implication of irony or apology. Although I was not new to the writing game, I hadn’t been hanging around the ring long enough to have rid myself of the paralyzing fear of revealing anything about myself in my writing because WHAT IF SOMEONE ACTUALLY READ IT. Fortunately for me, the bravado and sincerity Lasky hemmed Black Life with were contagious, and soon I was testing the boundaries of my own timidity: What happens if I write about drugs and sex? What chaos will ensue if I address the dude I’m so angry with, like Lasky did with Mike? To my disbelief, nothing happened. I didn’t get kicked out of school. I wasn’t struck by a reckless tractor-trailer sent by God. The only difference I noticed after trying out Lasky’s aesthetic tools was that a few roots had stretched themselves out from the little writing-seed I’d planted years ago, and anchored themselves into the ground of fierce, femme, confessional poetry.

Although I’ve picked up Black Life for reassurance and support frequently over the past seven years, I noticed after reading it closely this fall how much more I’d learned from the book than I’d realized. In addition to speaking honestly about my own life (and putting dicks in poems), my poetics also learned from Lasky how important it is to balance authority and bravado with vulnerability and inclusiveness. For every poem of Lasky’s that asserts “If I am standing in front of you / right now, you are listening to the voice of one of the greatest poets of your time” there is also a poem that positions itself as “I just feel so bad” does, which follows in full:

I just feel so bad
I don’t know
How to overcome it
Skinner says that it is my
Way that makes me function
In this world
I like to think
About things that are nice
And pretty
I like to plant purple flowers in my mind
That dazzle the starscape
There is no one for me to talk to
Except you dear reader
When there is no one else
To love, there is only you
To pour my love into
The snow
Echoes out the landscape
I have no home
No bread
I am destitute
But inside me
Is a little voice
That must speak
It gets louder when you listen

In this poem, and in others throughout Black Life, the speaker risks sentimentality and casts herself in an unflattering light with eagerness and ease. When Lasky confides in her readers that she, the poet who parades with a god-like authority in the surrounding pages, feels “destitute,” she engages in a generosity that is often mistaken for humility—she tells us that we have agency in her poems, even the ones that strut. In this way, Lasky taught me that alienating your readers, like my teenaged poetry unintentionally did in fear of being too revealing, is not a sign of poetic genius, or even minor talent. Poetry, rather, is an intimate exchange, like a kiss, between the poet and reader. Faux humility might convince someone to lean into you for a poem or two, in the same way exaggerated confidence can. It is only generous and sincere vulnerability, however, that allows a reader to trust your voice for the length of a book, or career.

I don’t owe all of my poetic principles to Lasky’s second book, but I owe it a hell of a lot: the first time I read Black Life, Lasky gave me permission to never ask for permission again; every time I’ve read it since, she’s reminded me of the exchange, of the delicate equilibrium a poet must strike to empower the reader at the same time she causes them to tremble.

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Katie Condon is a Poetry Editor at Grist. If you would like to see first hand how her poetry has been influenced by Dorothea Lasky, head to http://www.katiecondonpoetry.com. To get your own copy of Black Life, visit wwww.wavepoetry.com

What Meditation Did For Me During My MFA | by Nancy Zigler

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nancy_zigler_photoThe first day of class, my pedagogy professor told us to close our eyes. She asked that we sit tall, anchor our feet to the ground, straighten our shoulders, and take a deep breath. “Now thank your heart,” she said. “It’s been beating every day since you were born.” I had to strain to hear the last line she uttered; its softness prickled my arms with goosebumps. Until then, I hadn’t known that before you learn to write, you must first learn how to breathe.

Once a week, we’d breathe deeply and meditate a few minutes during class. In these sessions, I was struck by the memory of Texas sunsets; I was homesick and missed skies that made me believe in God. I missed my tía, who had died in Mexico City. There was a knot of loneliness in my stomach, two golden eyes of a boy who had betrayed me. In the version of reality I was living, I hadn’t known that I was hurting. Yet more than once after meditating, I was left raw and in tears from the experience. Leaning into negative emotion by letting it wash over me went against my basic instincts, but I anchored my feet to the ground and summoned the part of me that clinged. I told myself, this is what it feels like to hurt. This is what it feels like to breathe. This is bearable.

It wasn’t the type of learning I had been expecting from an MFA program, but over the next year, meditation became a routine in my class of budding writers and teachers. In these sessions, I learned things about myself that had lain dormant.

For instance, my body told me that it was damn tired. I’d go home after class and fall asleep at two in the afternoon, only to wake up the next day a grain lighter. “When’s the last time I touched silk?” I scribbled in my journal one sun-streaked afternoon, never failing to be surprised at what I’d forgotten.

Each day we carry the weight of our histories on our backs, and as time passes, this weight drags itself in our daily lives, clouding our minds. In the academic setting, the luxury of sitting in silence felt unacceptable. There were papers to write, students to teach, food to be consumed—each moment spent in meditation felt stolen from the little sleep I afforded myself. But sleep and rest, I learned, are not the same.

Before the MFA, I wrote fabulist stories. After my first round of workshop, I was a hop and a skip away from dropping off of a convenient cliff. I folded into myself because I had lost that one glimmer in my life, my private space on the page. Every workshop, tossing my loves into a den of tigers left me riddled with self-doubt. The possibilities of what I couldn’t do were too big and frightening.

In my personal life, the scaffolding that had held me together was crumbling spectacularly. I was lost, falling into the black hole of the realization that I wasn’t the person I once thought I was. Pretty soon, I stopped writing altogether.

But I was still meditating. Each time I opened my eyes after the ting of a bell, the world came back to me in high-definition. I felt more compassionate, kinder, and less angry. There was a day I picked a butternut squash from a vine in my garden and felt genuine remorse for hacking her up with a knife. Maybe I’m out of my fucking mind, I thought, after I pulled her out of the oven, but something had stirred in me, a wall had fallen—I had felt, if only for a flash, interconnectedness.

Most of my peers were publishing like steamrollers, whereas I still couldn’t remember to brush my hair in the morning. My pedagogy professor reminded me that publishing had nothing to do with the quality of the work, that marketing and writing are two different things. When each challenge came my way, she questioned me gently. I was greatly humbled by how wrong I was about, well, most things.

The blind spots in my life didn’t disappear while writing fiction. Instead, they made me create two-dimensional characters I hated who reflected my every misstep. To write well, I had to listen from a more honest place, to face monsters behind curtains I was too afraid to pull back. I’m against the portrait of an artist as an unstable being: to forge imaginary worlds and even unlikable characters, you need strength and a staggering amount of love. Becoming more interested in what was happening in the present moment changed what the present moment meant for me in my stories.

Two years later, I was invited by my professor to give a lecture at Smith College about the importance of quiet to the writing practice. As much as I wanted to go, I still didn’t have a thesis. The time bomb was ticking, and I had spent the last two years learning the pedagogy of being human.

But I went off to Massachusetts anyway. A peer and I sat in a classroom with twenty other strangers and led a session. We meditated. We smiled at each other. I hadn’t written fiction close to my heart—close to the Chicana, the poor suburbanite, the geek in me—well, ever. Taking a deep breath, I picked up a pencil and began to write. You only have to look once at a dog’s eyes to tell how long they’ve lived.

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Nancy Zigler is a recent MFA graduate from the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently an Education Specialist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and a past fiction editor of Callaloo and Hot Metal Bridge magazine. She enjoys writing doomed love stories and about her love-hate relationship with Texas. Nancy likes teaching, painting, Pluto, and trekking across desolate cities in search of good pizza. She blogs here. 

Say What?: Writing in Regional Accents | by Alex Bledsoe

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dscf1827-2I had a creative writing teacher at the University of Tennessee at Martin who was once asked, “When is it okay to write in vernacular speech?” By that, the questioner meant a phonetic representation of how words sound, as opposed to how they normally appear in print. For example: “He pahked the cah in the yahd,” said the man from Boston.

The professor responded, “First, ask yourself one question: ‘Am I William Faulkner?’ If the answer is ‘no,’ then you shouldn’t write in vernacular.”

While that’s certainly a useful guideline, it doesn’t address the real issue: how do you recreate regional accents and speech patterns, especially in cases when it comes down to the distinctive pronunciation of certain words, without confusing your reader?

Faulkner wasn’t the first to do vernacular, of course. Mark Twain littered Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn with it: “‘tain’t a dream,” “Blest if the old Nonesuch ain’t a heppin’ us out agin,” and so forth. Anthony Burgess made up a whole new urban vernacular for A Clockwork Orange, which required a glossary to explain.

All of these approaches have their purpose, and defenders. But for readers, having to pause and sound out a word, especially if it’s a common word spelled in a strange way, can take you right out of the story.

Of my eleven published novels, six of them are set in the American South, specifically my home state of Tennessee. So the dialogue in my novels isn’t just the way my characters speak, it’s the way I speak. Even though I’ve lived in Wisconsin for 13 years, I have it on good authority that my accent has not diminished. Certainly my inner voice still speaks with a drawl. And since the way people speak is a crucial element of atmosphere, of setting, and of characterization, I’m actually proud of that. (And one reason I haven’t written anything set in Wisconsin is that I’m not sure I can nail the very specific accent. Uff da, ya know?)

I’ve tried doing the phonetic thing. One of my great frustrations as a writer is my inability to really capture the way “I don’t know” is said in my home town. It’s one single, harsh, burp-like sound: “Iowntno.” But written like that, it looks so weird that anyone reading it would go, “Wait, what?”

Writers of vernacular like Faulkner come alive when read aloud by someone who understands the cadences and rhythms of their characters’ speech. Even Absalom, Absalom! flows better as an oral presentation than it does as dense, rambling text. If I were teaching Faulkner, I think I’d have my students listen to the audio versions for that very reason. So I asked Stefan Rudnicki, who reads all my books for Blackstone Audio, whether phonetic dialect was helpful to him. He said, “I find that usually less is more. The suggestion of a cadence, dropped consonants, or perhaps a special way of structuring a sentence will be more useful than detailed phonetic parsing. In more extreme cases, a repeated favorite word or phrase can help (‘for sure!’). It all has to be in the context of the full character, with his/her unique history, quirks and objectives foremost.”

I tend to agree (and not just because Stefan does such a great job reading my stuff). As a reader, I find changed spellings both jarring and tedious. Having read Tom Sawyer aloud to my children, I can say it’s trickier than you’d think. The irony that the strange looking word does, in fact, mimic the sound you’re trying to create doesn’t speed up the process.

So when I write my Tennessee characters, you won’t see strange spellings of common words to recreate the actual sounds of an accent. Instead, like Stefan says, I try to create it through word choice, rhythm and speech patterns. If I do it correctly, then you’ll hear that voice in your head, but you won’t notice because you’ll be too engrossed in the story.

—–

Alex Bledsoe grew up in west Tennessee an hour north of Graceland (the home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (the birthplace of Tina Turner). He’s been a reporter, editor, photographer and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. He now lives in a Wisconsin town famous for trolls, writes before six in the morning and tries to teach his three kids to act like they’ve been to town before. Bledsoe is also the author of the Eddie LaCrosse novels and the Memphis Vampires series.