Quote:
Originally Posted by Keryl Raist
I'd say no, that a scream, in an appropriate setting, is not undignified. It's not expressing raw emotion that is undignified; it's doing it in a way that doesn't sound right for the moment. If you do not attempt onomatopoeia, you can't get the sound wrong.
<snippage>
So, as a writer I'd say, skip the sound of screaming, and just tell me he screamed, add as many adjectives as you like, but don't try to spell it out. The chances of having it bite you are just too high.
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I'm with you on this. Comics, great, scream-dialogue is well-suited, but I don't like it spelt out in a novel, for the myriad stated reasons. What "sounds" right to one person's ear simply shan't to the next in line. In this instance, that next-in-line is the all-important reader.
I'm not overly wild about
dialect in dialogue, either. (I know, nobody asked, but it's a similar topic.) I mean, it's like the woefully overused "och, aye, lassie!," which is pretty much guaranteed to make me run like hell from a book. Or "Southern," which, depending upon the writer, and how s/he feels about the area/character in question, ranges from genteel to moron-sounding. (You can tell a lot about how someone feels about that character or area of the country by the characterization of the dialect--just watch TV sometime, to see how writers view Texans, for example...)
I find that I personally respond much better if the narrator "hears" the dialect and describes it for me, in his/her first encounter with the speaker or area (even if it's spelled out phonetically, for the "hearer" initially) and then the author allows me to hear it in my head, from her writing, from that point forward. I get grossly overtired of dialogue in dialect carried out through a book. It's a difficult thing for a writer to do well, and it's
pitifully easy for them to do badly. It seems like almost every time I stumble across it (typically in a novel I've already started, unfortunately), it's in the latter category, not the first. When my teeth start grinding, each time character X appears...well, that thar ain't good, as they say.
I'm not opposed to the occasional expletive or "och!" or whatever, but really, we're smart readers. We don't need it hammered into our heads, over and over and over.
Hitch