Annie Proulx's dialogue

I've just finished That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx. The novel is set in the Texas/Oklahoma panhandles in present day, and Proulx does two things that I think are wonderful and one thing I find off-putting. Let me talk about one of the things I like in this post, and I'll discuss the others later.

Proulx is a marvel in her ability to write dialogue that sounds like dialect without resorting to phonetic spelling. Here, taken at random, is an example (actually it's taken from page 132):

"Jesus... That's a little harsh, weld a man's gates. Could be he don't have no money. I hear their place is for sale. Anyway, when I was out there it was hot enough to loosen the bristles on a wild hog and Mrs. Wilcox gave me a glass a cold buttermilk. Best thing I ever drank. So I don't want to give them trouble."

I take it back on the phonetic spelling. She does use "a" for "of" and "awl" for "oil" and "Amarilla" for "Amarillo," but she uses it so lightly it does not become a distraction--or did not for me. One more example, a woman talking about another character on page 179:

"He was. Vain as a peacock. Wrote poetry too. Horse poetry and stuff about sunsets. Made your skin crawl to listen to him recite. He had a voice like a woman. They say a horse kicked him the Adam's apple when he was a boy. Some say the kick was lower down."

Japanese dialogue in English

Writing dialogue in fiction is...an art?...a talent?...a skill? All of the above? It is tricky because it should sound like speech, but it cannot be an exact reproduction of speech. Real speech is full of verbal tics, dropped thoughts, repetition, and extra words. If you've ever read an exact transcript of ordinary people speaking you know how boring it can be.

Adding to the challenge is that ideally every character should have his/her own way of expressing himself/herself. His own vocabulary, turn of phrase, level of usage, and more. In a way, Japanese writers have it easy because there are words that only men use and words that only women use. Also by verb endings and other grammatical markers, it is clear whether a superior is talking to a social inferior, a man to a woman, an adult to a child, and more. It means that Japanese fiction does not (usually) need a lot of "he said/she said" to make it clear who is speaking and the relationship between the characters.

Another challenge I had in Getting Oriented—beside trying to give each character his/her own voice—was to distinguish the times when the main character was speaking in English and when he was speaking in Japanese or being spoken to in Japanese. I didn't want to clutter the pages with words few readers would understand, so I've put all of the "Japanese" dialogue into italics. And to make that dialog sound different, I tried (not always successfully) to first construct the sentences in Japanese and then translate them into English. I think—I hope—this gives the Japanese dialogue a different feeling than the English exchanges.