Spikkin right - by Bill Kirton

I have no shame. If I thought being photographed standing naked behind a pile of my books would create a sudden boost in sales, I’d willingly disrobe. My aesthetic sense, however, is sufficiently developed to persuade me that it would have the opposite effect. We’re judged by how we look, what we wear and, more importantly for the sake of this post, by how we speak.

(As an aside, I should add that writers are also judged by their books. After reading a passage from my first book where my detective sits at traffic lights watching schoolgirls cross the road and reflecting on how they look, my wife said ‘Oh. So you fancy schoolgirls then, do you?’)

As a writer of both novels and plays, it’s the speaking bit of the equation that interests me. Without wishing to offend anyone, I’d suggest that if you have a character saying ‘The proliferation of epistolary exegesis in your analysis anticipates the deplorable development of arcane terminology which is merely adventitious’, he won’t be carrying a hod on a building site. Nor will he be sharing a pint with someone who says ‘Oi, wanker! Shift your arse.’ But, again, that’s self-evident. (Also, I know which one I’d rather spend time with.)

No, the real problems arise when you want to convey accents. If someone has a strong regional accent of any sort, that’s part of who they are. Take the accent away from them and they cease to be the same person. The trouble for the writer is that he/she needs to convey the accent in such a way that the reader doesn’t have to stop to ask ‘WTF’s that all about?’

I encountered this with that same first book. It’s set where I live, in Aberdeen. I come originally from Plymouth, which is at the opposite corner of the UK, so you can imagine the disparity between the accents I heard when I was growing up and those I hear nowadays. In a pub in Plymouth (and I know because I lived in one) you’ll hear ‘Wobbe gwain ev?’ The same question in an Aberdeen pub might be ‘Fitchy win’in?’ (The apostrophe in the middle of the final word is meant to represent a glottal stop. If anyone has a better way of representing one, please let me know.) Anyway, both these expressions are asking you what you want to drink. In ‘correct’ English, the first is ‘What are you going to have?’ and the second is ‘What are you wanting?’

So when, naturally enough, I made some of my fictional local coppers speak with an

Aberdeen accent, my editor in London put me straight right away. ‘Fa ye spikkin till?’ (To whom are you speaking?) and ‘Fa’s 'e loon?’ (Who is that boy?) would mean nothing at all to anyone south of Stonehaven and her suggestion was that I should restrict myself to letting the characters say ‘Aye’ to indicate that they were Scots. In the end, there had to be a compromise. I rewrote their conversations in a way that retained some aspects of their accents but didn’t baffle the reader. As I did so, though, I was aware that I was taking away some of their ‘truth’.

The annoying thing then was that, in an otherwise very enthusiastic review of my second book, the local paper wrote ‘Some of the Scots dialogue is a little suspect and inconsistent’.

Now rearrange these words to form a sentence I say and write far too often: ‘Other Hell is people’.