Becoming an Impressionist

My 14-year-old son is a wizard at impressions. He's a middle class, west coast caucasian, but he can don a British, Indian, and southern accent as easily as he puts on his boxers. He can also perfectly mimic people of various lifestyles that are not ethnically or geographically specific. As for me, I can pick up my old Chicago accent when I go back to the midwest, and a twang might appear when I head down south, and I can meow well enough to alert my pets that a new feline might be prowling about. But I can't just come up with whatever accent I want. Similarly, I have a hard time writing any extensive amount of dialogue in a vernacular different from my own.

I have read that it's best not to try to have too much slang or unusual jargon in a book, as it becomes tedious for the reader and also risks the author's credibility should a mistake be made. An example of this sort of thing can be found in Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. It's a simplistic story, in some ways, about an African American woman surviving several marriages and living in various cultural environments. But it takes effort for someone like me to read it.

The dialogue throughout the book reads like this. "You better git dat kivver offa dat youngun and dat quick!" or "But dem last lick burnt me lak fire." or "Ah reckon Ah done over-layed mah leavin' time, but Ah figgured you needed somebody tuh help yuh shut up de place."

I assume Hurston was a wizard at the southern African American vernacular of the 1930's; I have no reason to believe she wasn't, although there were times she would spell out a word like 'them' and times it would be 'dem' and I wondered whether this was character-specific and intentional or a writerly mistake. The fact was, the dialogue was fun to read only if reading aloud, and I was so focused on that that I couldn't really discern among several of the characters through their speech. In that way, the vernacular was a distraction. (On the other hand, she certainly had talent for switching between dialogue like that and narrative that was more generic, such as, "So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise.")

My novel includes characters of color, an Irish national, a teenager who prefers not to speak much, and a young woman of Athabaskan descent. I am white, middle-aged, and of European descent, and it's been a challenge to demonstrate their individual speech habits accurately without becoming tedious. While eavesdropping, which I discussed in my last blog, is helpful, it seems there is no surefire way you can integrate a multitude of languages and dialects and accents naturally into your own thoughts and words. Unless you're my 14-year-old son.