Showing posts with label colloquialisms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label colloquialisms. Show all posts

Friday, May 15, 2015

Enriching Your Writing—Colloquiums






The use of slang, colloquiums, and clichés can add flavor to your writing, so long as those devices aren’t over used. It can also characterize your setting and add to your characters—without getting into a bunch of backstory. The use of slang and colloquial phrases are usually confined to character speech (or inner thoughts) and not to the whole manuscript.



Not every character will speak in the same manner (and wouldn’t it be boring if they did). The big city girl comes to the country for a job or another purpose. She uses proper English in her speech but hearing the way others speak can add conflict in her perception of the people or another character she comes into contact with. She might perceive them as uneducated and this could cause her to make judgments or underestimate the other character(s). That can work both ways, of course.



There are those who don’t agree with using slang, colloquiums, or clichés and that’s fine, but even some of the classic literary giants, if you will recall, used them.



A blue collar worker may have a different vernacular then a college teacher or stockbroker. A street-smart punk isn’t going to speak in perfect English and if the author, critique partner, or editor tries to force that on the character it will make the character flat
and unrealistic. Someone from the Deep South isn’t going to use his or her words or even the same sentence structure as someone from, fill in the blank____ Maine, California, Upper Midwest, Western states, Pennsylvania Dutch country, does.



Those differences can be used to give flavor to our characters and settings.



An author who does this well, in my opinion, is Carolyn Brown. She writes about people from Texas and Oklahoma in small town and ranch country. She gives richness to her stories with the use of colloquial phrases and regional slang. Her writing pops with location, setting, and realistic people. I laugh because it captures that area so well. Even if you’re not from or never visited the area it works. She doesn’t waste time defining the phrases or words she uses but the context in which they’re used is self-explanatory.



If you write Regencies, you automatically use syntax of the era as well as the slang. It gives the feeling of place and time. Military suspense, thrillers, or romance use slang or jargon because the military has its own terminology as does law enforcement. Someone writing sci-fi or paranormal will create his or her own world jargon and slang.



I think it’s perfectly legitimate to use colloquial speech and clichés in your writing to add texture to your story so long as the terms fit and aren’t use merely as a form of laziness.

  • Do you use, colloquiums, and clichés in your writing?
  • How do you decide when and how to use them?

Monday, May 20, 2013

MONDAY MUSINGS—I WANT THAT SPARKLE!






One of the good things about editing, especially when it’s a story you wrote several years before, is you can read it with a critical eye. There are parts that blow me away because they’re good (wow, I wrote that!) and then there are other parts that have me cringing over word choices or the over abundance of adverbs, backstory, or passive verbs.

I've done more reading than writing the past couple of years and while I can read a book critically, I usually don’t. I’m a beta reader. I read those stories and proposals with a different eye. When I pick up a book to read it’s for story’s entertainment value. Kind of like movies—some are good, some are just okay and they entertain, some movies are fabulous in their storyline and execution. Do I see flaws, sure, but unless they’re really bad and the story has huge holes in it (at which point I don’t read any further ‘cause you've lost my interest), I tend to gloss over all the little nits and concentrate on the adventure, solving the crime, falling in love, or kicking ass.  But, when a story is done very well, I do take note of how an author handles certain components in the story. I’ll mark it and then go back late and analyze the why and how. 

Recently, I've read several stories with a good plot but what made the story outstanding to me was how the characters (even the villains) just sparkled. They were so real and the dialog was excellent as were the reactions and interactions between those characters. Their dialog and reactions add excitement and fun to the story without a lot of narrative. It takes skill to do that.  A few authors who have a knack of writing good characters like that are Carolyn Brown, Julie Ann Walker, Lori Foster, Olivia Cunning, Karen Foley, and Susan Sey, to name but a few. Carolyn writes some fabulous characters that use regional phrases and colloquialisms—I love the richness and the humor of her stories.

As I read over my stories one of the things I’m paying attention to is how I've written my characters and their dialog. I want them to sparkle, too. I want the layers touching on the senses that put the reader on the spot and in the action. Right there on the center-line  They hear the grunts, smell the sweat, feel the

excitement, and hear the whistle of the ball in their ears and the smack it makes when it’s caught. I don’t want them to just be spectators in the nosebleed section.

I've got some work to do and that’s a fact. But, I’m not groaning over it all. Instead there is a sizzle of excitement as I look at better ways to put my reader on the spot.