Have a wonderful 2010.

You don’t want to overdo dialect and unusual spelling but certainly want to add them to underscore a novel’s setting. Same Kind of Different as Me bounces between two characters–a tony Houston international art dealer and an illiterate poor man from Skid Row. Hall, Moore and Vincent use the different way they speak to differentiate them in the telling of the story. It works and I didn’t keep tripping on Moore’s dialect.

But I read a novel over the weekend that was so determined to make me feel I was in a foreign country, I wanted to wave my hand and say, “I get it. Can we just tell the story now?”

They say if you want to know the political history of a place, read a history book. But if you want to know the social history and how people actually lived, read an historical novel.

Elswyth Thane’s novel Homingabout England during the early days of the blitz, noted when the weather forecast was broadcast for the last time. A piece of information like that has stayed with me for 20 years, and underscored the poignancy and horror that we, the readers, knew was coming while underscoring the setting.

What I cannot stand is reading about heroines with 21th century attitudes in historical fiction. Women in the past didn’t think about their circumstances the same way I do, and it’s wrong to imply they all did. I think that bothers me more than unreasonable use of dialect!

For the general market, however, simple is better. You certainly can, and should, choose your verbs carefully–to give them more power and punch in their delivery. Being careful to avoid overusing forms of “to be” is a good example of that–though obviously not in this sentence.

Noah Lukeman’s book A Dash of Style covers punctuation in glorious detail while discussing the affect on your story by the type of sentences you write. I also love The Flip Dictionary for vocabulary assistance.