One of the first things I had to confront when writing a regional novel that takes place in the Deep South, is how to write dialog for my southern characters. I grew up with a Southern vernacular. Mark Twain's birthplace is the small village of Florida, less than an hour from what was then, our family farm, south of Mexico. That’s near Paris—all in Missouri, in the designated folk area known as “Little Dixie.”
I also loved the dialect treatment of “Hoosier Poet,” James Whitcomb Riley, who wrote volumes of poetry about rural Indiana. And who can forget Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings? These authors were known for regional vernacular accuracy, despite a few detractors. They made a good living on the speaking circuit imitating their book characters, sometimes sharing the bill through agency bookings, to wide critical acclaim.
So let's talk dialog rules of fiction, with a nod to book marketing. I did not obtain an English Literature degree from a private university or college in the northeast, nor attend the Iowa Writer’s Workshop to learn all the rules of writing fiction. I’m sure that’s a great education, but after reading “best sellers” and Pulitzer Prize winners, I learned the rules don't always apply. We’re told, we need a certain amount of experience to know when to break them. I tend to downplay my journalism writing experience and being humble by nature, I’m open to learning from those who have gone before me in this writing process. But I also have a bs meter that’s still operating and I trust my instincts.
I know the bottom line for any agent is, "Can this novel sell?" After reading novels such as Where the Crawdads Sing, which sold millions of copies, I know my decision to stay true to the Southern dialect is on solid ground. I would have loved to have been the fly on the wall to eavesdrop on the dialect conversation between author Delia Owens and her editor, but I do think they struck a compromise, and it didn't go unnoticed. There were "spots" of dialect interjected in some sentences, but not consistent full-on speech dialect, and the effect was like entering a freshly painted room and noticing some areas were missed by the brush.
Mimi Herman's The Kudzu Queen, chose the sterile English route and I believe the book suffered because of it. In an otherwise well-written book, to me, the characters appeared as imposters because I was constantly reminded the voices didn't ring true. They acted "Southern," they participated in things Southerners would participate in, but because of the way they spoke, it was as if I was not on firm footing with these characters. They could have been from Akron, OH. They were not dropping the "g's" in their otherwise, lazy speech. Something was oddly out of place and as a reader, I had to make an extra effort to connect.
"We drop our “g’s” and that’s just the way it is."
I’ve read many of the “How to Write” books and within my library, I have Revision and Self-Editing for Publication by James Scott Bell, who generally gives good advice. “Writing phonetically is frowned upon these days,” he says. Who says? From a reader viewpoint? A sensitivity reader viewpoint? A far left viewpoint? While I understand you do not want to slow the reader down, setting it up by saying, “he spoke in a thick southern accent,” doesn’t cut it. It sounds like a rehearsed apology. We drop our “g’s” and that’s just the way it is.
The characters in my completed novel speak proper English, and those from the rural South, drop their “g’s,” so there is no question, for example, in third person point of view, who’s saying what. After going through the beta-reader process, not one reader called my attention to any problems with dialog. The age spectrum of those readers, who were mixed gender, was 28 to 76. One of the older female readers finished the 345-page book within 24 hours—no hint of a dialog slowdown there!
Dialect in dialog, particularly in a region like the South adds authenticity to the setting and color to flesh out the characters. It's imperative. I’m not some Yankee city boy who tries to imagine how Southerners talk. The area in Missouri where I was raised was settled by Southerners from Kentucky, by way of Virginia. People don’t talk with a thick accent—it's a milder version. Add more syrup and common colloquialisms and you have more of a Georgia/South Carolina/Alabama/Mississippi accent with some regional differences. The Bootheel area in southeast Missouri can be considered the upper reaches of the Mississippi Delta. That’s a thick accent.
I recently read a famous author’s debut novel, with the setting in the Bootheel. I was thinking the whole time I was reading, the town has no sense of place. The descriptions, which were light, did not describe the Bootheel I know. The characters did not shine for me like they could have with some local dialect. Also missing were the stories small town Southerners tell one another, mixed in with a conversation’s small talk. As a woman raised in the city, she doesn’t know small town Southerners—and yet, the book was eventually a best seller. Again, maybe this had to do with an editorial "dialog discussion."
"Conversation in a social setting is theater"
So, how do you know characters? By taking notice of bits and pieces, borrowed from real people—how they talk, what they do and how they think. My novel is structurally based on the "Hero’s Journey." Upon arriving in Georgia, the young protagonist from St. Louis meets "The Gatekeeper.” He’s a cotton farmer who tells the protagonist that without some survival skills, people don’t leave South Georgia. Not alive. The farmer exaggerates the accent, laying it on thick for his story telling which ends in a joking manner and everyone has a good laugh. A reader will have to slow it down to understand the farmer, just like in real life; but the way a story is told in the South is just as important as the story itself. And of course, it’s always humorous.
Here's the part that is missed in this dialog argument. Conversation in a social setting is theater. I witnessed the phenomena many times on the streets in Naples, Italy. Everyone in Napoli is a singing Caruso or an actor. Unlike the northern Italians, the southerners are gregarious, social people. Two men who haven’t seen other in a while, will yell to each other, maybe starting off with an insult. This is returned in kind, which starts a verbal one-upmanship that grows more humorous by the minute. By now, they have attracted an audience who appear to enjoy this impromptu street performance. They don’t dare enter it; they’re just spectators. But the two conversing are aware of the audience, so they now become stage actors with exaggerated gestures of their body language. It is quite entertaining to watch. I have seen the same occur among Southern states hunting parties and country store visits, hence the opportunity to include one in the Gatekeeper scene.
". . . any negative criticism about honest dialect portrayal is sadly looking for a hammer in need of a nail"
There is a young writer who teaches and writes for various periodicals about such nonsense as Southern student writers who are embarrassed to be associated with the Southern region. “To be a Southern writer is to live with variants of pain,” she says. Oh really? How does that pain differ in 2026 for writers from Topeka, KS, or Scotts Valley, CA or Perrysburg, OH?
I believe it was this same writer who claimed Mark Twain couldn’t possibly have been accurate about the vernacular dialog he wrote in his books. Seriously? The man was born in 1835 and was raised in Hannibal, where there was a slave auction on the Mississippi River. He lived and worked in the area writing about his contemporaries, knew the black and white races well and had the intellect to observe and write expressive commentary about their political and social interactions. Oh my.
I suppose it must be said that any negative criticism about honest dialect portrayal, if it doesn't slow the reading process, is sadly looking for a hammer in need of a nail.