I’ve got revisions on the brain after spending all weekend editing my latest manuscript and it’s got me obsessed with dialogue and, more specifically, how to make dialogue sound authentic in historical fiction.

The current book is set in Yorkshire and while I’ve visited the place I don’t have quite the insider knowledge that I had for both Consequences of Sin and The Serpent and The Scorpion. In both these books I have scenes in Lancashire and finding my “Lanky’ voice was easy – I just have to mimic my relatives! My aunt who lives in Great Harwood is an email away and I can always phone my mum and ask her if a piece of dialogue sounds authentic. The difficulty I find is that if I actually wrote it the way people spoke: 1) Americans would have no idea what anyone was talking about; and 2) It would look bizarre on the page – lots of ‘eh ups’ and ‘nowts’ – it would look like I was trying too hard. So I actually tone the accent down. If anyone has read Lady Chatterley’s Lover you know how ludicrous the Northern accent can start to be – especially during in a sex scene (Thank God Sean Bean managed to pull this one off [so to speak] in the movie version I saw because it’s pretty darn funny in the book). But I digress…

So I’ve been tackling the Yorkshire accent this weekend – refining dialogue so that it sounds historically as well as regionally accurate and it’s amazing how many expressions and words you start to wonder – does this sound too modern? Only to discover many of them are actually quite old (with many being ‘invented’ by the Bard himself, William Shakespeare). Nevertheless, I think it’s a fine balance between authenticity and readability. People in the past spoke more formally than us, but modern readers want to be drawn into a scene not put off by stilted language. So I’ve been hitting the delete key and rewriting like a demon. I swear the revision process is almost as hard as writing the first draft!

I know many people advocate the ‘read aloud’ test but to be honest at one o’clock in the morning, the last thing I feel like is reading out a piece of dialogue (and I can tell you my husband and the twins are not going to want to hear it either!). I’m lucky that being a visual person I see the scenes like a movie running in my head so I find myself using the ‘movie dialogue’ test. As long as I don’t start imagining Brad Pitt with a fake Irish accent or start channeling Meryl Streep in Evil Angels I figure I’m okay.

So what are your pet peeves about dialogue?
Tell it to me straight – after all, (sigh) I’m still revising…

And don’t forget to check out Clare’s own blog (although by now she must feel like GG is her own blog) at Kill Zone.