Techniques in Appalachian Fiction: Authentic Voice and Dialect in Gap Creek

In Gap Creek, Robert Morgan's primary goal is to create an authentic Appalachian voice in the first person narrative. He states this in a supplementary section at the end of the book, but he didn't need to say it, the voice of the narration stands out as being the most important element of the book.

 

The narrator breaks a lot of the traditional rules of telling a story: she uses second person occasionally, she infodumps the step by step process of butchering a hog, tells her emotions instead of just letting us figure it out by what she does, and sometimes says what other people are thinking even though she can't possibly truly know. Despite all of these technical flaws, the narrator tells the story the way someone's Appalachian ancestor would tell it. She tells it just like my grandma would have and wouldn't have minded at all if it wasn't the proper way to do it. 

The current scholarship (which I will likely discuss in a later post) is that is very uncool to depict Appalachians as people who are ignorant, isolated, foolish, oversexed, violent, and/or alcoholic. Put plainly, writers should think Beverly Hillbillies and avoid doing that at all costs. I tend to agree with this. The challenge is to create characters that avoid stereotypes and seem authentic at the same time.

One thing that stood out to me in Gap Creek is the use of the word poke: "And for Christmas he got four oranges and a poke of peppermint candy" (2). A poke is a bag. I know this because it was one of the "hillbilly" words listed on the centerpiece of a Cracker-Barrel-ish restaurant that we took my grandma to when she was in town when I was a kid. I have never ever seen poke used in any other book or story I've ever read.

A few examples of Morgan's use of Appalachian dialect are:

• Pneumony instead of pneumonia (6).
• "He looked scared out of hisself" (5).
• "If we was to pour it down his throat he might strangle" (7).
• ". . . he woke up with the pains" (2).
• "He dropped the egg on his plate like he had touched a rotten tater" (56).
• "My hands liked to froze. . . " (4).

I think he did a fabulous job with the dialect in this novel. In the current version of my novel, I avoided this kind of dialect for the most part in favor of avoiding stereotypes. But I think I need to work on it a little more.

Next I will look at the dialect used in novels by two women who grew up and have become advocates for the environment in Appalachia: Barbara Kingsolver and Denise Giardina. I also will have another piece about narration in Cold Mountain.

If you would like to view the other posts on Gap Creek and other Appalachian novels, click on Techniques in Appalachian Fiction

Techniques in Appalachian Fiction: Narration in Gap Creek

This is a continuation of a previous post where I looked at some of the techniques used in Gap Creek. Click here to if you would like to check out the whole series: Techniques in Appalachian Fiction.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Setting in Gap Creek, Robert Morgan does some things that new writers are told to avoid at all costs.

Besides the way setting is handled, the narrator self-consciously tells the story to the reader: "I know about Masenier because I was there. I seen him die . . . I seen it all" (1). We are reminded again that the story is being told by the narrator with the lines, "Now the year I'm talking about was the year after Cold Friday, that day when the sun never did come out and it never warmed up" (2) and "The night I'm talking about was windy and late in March" (24).

If I had these lines in my manuscript, people doing a critique would no doubt tell me I can take that out. (I know this because I had similar lines and they told me to get it out - I did, but I'm not sure I should have.) The argument against the self-conscious narrator is that it doesn't need to be stated that the narrator is telling the story, definitely not three times. Instead of "The night I'm talking about was windy and late in March," it should be "The late March night was windy" to make it more concise and direct. Right? Would you argue the same thing?

But in this novel, perhaps in any Appalachian novel where the story is told from a first person point of view, this self-conscious narration is perfect. It's how my grandmother or great aunt or even my mother would tell the story. If the narrator isn't educated in the best practices of writing, shouldn't the story be told the way that narrator would realistically tell it?

I think I might put the self-conscious narration back into my manuscript. What do you think?

Techniques in Appalachian Fiction: Setting in Gap Creek

In case you haven't been here lately, I'm doing a series on writing techniques used in several Appalachian novels. If you would like to read other posts in this series, click here: Techniques in Appalachian Fiction.

This and the next set of posts will be about techniques in Gap Creek by Robert Morgan (1999).

I would highly recommend this book if you haven't read it. I sat down to read the opening two chapters and ended up getting through a third of the novel in one sitting. I want to stress how fabulous this book is because I'm going to pick it apart a little bit.

What makes the book particularly interesting to me is the author does several things that aspiring writers are told are NOT best practices. (I'm just going to touch on one here and will save the rest for my next posts.)

One of the goals of writing historical fiction is to set the reader in the time and place of the novel and to do it immediately so the reader feels grounded. At the same time, the setting should be revealed in a way that doesn't dump that information onto the reader. The setting needs to be revealed in a measured way, in a way that makes the reader not notice it's being revealed.

In Gap Creek, the narrator does not state the precise setting of the novel in the opening chapters.  It isn't until page 50 that we learn that she had been living in North Carolina and is moving just across the border to South Carolina. Up until that point, it's clear the family had been living in the mountains, but the exact location wasn't spelled out.

What's interesting to me is the narrator is so authentically in her own story that she doesn't (in the first 90 pages at least) name the year. The only clue I have so far, besides the lack of industry and public schools, is the fact that chestnut trees are in the novel. The American chestnut got a fungus that killed pretty much all of these trees in the Appalachian Mountains by about the end of the 1930s. The presence of chestnut trees combined with the fact there's no electricity in the kitchen in the novel tells me it's definitely set before the 1930s. I didn't pick up on any clues about whether it's set before the Civil War or after.

The year of the story is presented as being relative to an event in history that the narrator experienced, Cold Friday. When I looked this up to see if this was a real day or just a day named by the community the girl lived in, I found that there was a day in January 1810 that was named as Cold Friday in the New York Times. But Julie surely wouldn't have access to the New York Times, so I think the Cold Friday is a day in her life, which makes the story all the more personal.

In the "Note from the Author" in the back of the book, the author states, "you do not write living fiction by attempting to transcribe actual events onto the page. You create a sense of real characters and a real story by putting down one vivid detail, one exact phrase, at a time" (329). He goes on to explain that his most important and difficult task was perfecting the voice of the narrator. I think a lot of the violations of best writing practices that I'll discuss in the next posts are done in service of capturing the authentic voice of the narrator.

Have you read this novel?  For those of you who write novels (even science fiction or fantasy, where setting is equally important), do you think you could get away with waiting until page 50 to state the name of the place the characters live in?  Or do you always squeeze the setting into the opening chapters?


Work Cited:

Morgan, Robert. Gap Creek. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2012. Print.

Techniques in Appalachian Fiction: Dialect in Bloodroot by Amy Greene

In this series, I'm going to take a look at how dialect is rendered (or not rendered) in a handful of Appalachian novels. Today, I'm looking at Bloodroot by Amy Greene (2010). If you want to look at the other posts on this topic, click here for the whole series on Techniques in Appalachian Fiction.

This novel has a really interesting structure that's tied to point of view. Part one of the novel includes
very short chapters that oscillates between first person narration by Byrdie Lamb and Doug Cotter. Other characters come into the story after Part One, but I'm just going to look at the opening chapters for this post. I was going to look at it up to page 20, but I think there's enough there in the first two chapters (just 4 pages).

The opening lines of the first chapter set the characterization of Byrdie, who is Myra's grandmother. "Myra looks like her mama, but prettier because of her daddy mixed in. She got just the right amount of both." The phrase she got lets the reader know she doesn't have a strong formal education, but the first line lets us know that she's thoughtful. In her eyes, the dad makes Myra look prettier, which is different than what I would expect. I think this sets up Myra as a character who is thoughtful and looks at things differently than most people, which implies she is smart although her grammar isn't perfect.

Honestly, when I read the first 2-page chapter through initially, I was a little put off by the persistent problems with grammar:

• "I didn't see nothing wrong" (3)
• "I couldn't hear nothing else" (4)
• "Then I seen there was things" (4)
• "I should have knowed right then" (4)

The bad grammar threw me out of the story (maybe because I was looking for it specifically). But what drew me in was the colorful language that seems authentic to me: "that snake coiled up inside his heart" (3) and "I got tougher than a pine knot" (3).

In this opening chapter, Amy Greene does use the word reckon in the opening chapter. A professor once told me I shouldn't use reckon because it's derogatory and promotes a stereotype, but I think it's realistic - not for all characters, but maybe for one or two. For my dad, a simple, "I reckon" can mean any number of things depending on the situation and the look on his face and whether he looks you in the eye or stands up to leave as he says it. It can mean he's thoughtful - or he thinks you are wrong but doesn't really care to push it - or that you made him really upset and the conversation is over. I can't omit the words I reckon from my fiction - it's a fabulous phrase.

The sentence structure in Byrdie's section also conveys her education level (at this point I'm not sure of the year or time period for the novel). The sentences tend to be short, simple sentences. There's an occasional compound sentence with the comma missing. The language is simple. On the first page, the most complex word is "outcome."

However, by the end of this very short chapter, Byrdie tells about a dream she has that seems prophetic. "Then there was a crack and my foot went through the boards of that old bridge. It started coming apart, jagged pieces dropping and rushing away, until I was hanging on by a scrap of rotten wood, my feet dangling over the water."  The description of the dream is lovely and eloquent and makes me as a reader believe she is smart and perceptive. I can't wait to hear how she will describe the events that happen in the rest of the story.

In the second chapter, written in first person from Doug's point of view, there is no trace of any Appalachian or southern dialect. Every sentence is written with perfect grammar, and the sentences are more complex. In this brief chapter, Doug goes out to the barn to feed a horse that's in distress. He says his parents and brothers are in the house sleeping, so I have the impression he's a teenager or a young man.

The juxtaposition of Byrdie's narration with Doug's gives me the impression that huge generational differences will be presented in the story and that the syntax used in Byrdie's narration was strategic. I think it was used with the intent to expose the generational differences between these two characters, who tell the story only for the first 100 pages.

Without giving away the plot, both of these characters are connected to the supernatural. Byrdie has a prophetic dream, and her attitude toward it is that this force can't be controlled. Doug, on the other hand, decides to take action to try to calm the horse that's gone wild because Myra Lamb, Byrdie's granddaughter, is missing.

Have any of you used techniques similar to the ones Amy Greene uses in these opening chapters? Is any of this useful?


Work Cited:
Greene, Amy. Bloodroot. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. 3-6. Print.

Techniques in Appalachian Fiction: Dialect in Cold Mountain

In this little series, which you can read beginning to end if you so desire by clicking this link: Techniques in Appalachian Fiction, I am taking a look at the openings of seven novels in the genre of Appalachian Fiction to see how other authors have handled the sticky issue of rendering dialect.

Today, I'm reading the opening chapter of Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, published in 1997. 

I've seen the movie and thought I knew how Charles Frazier would open the novel and present the characters, but I was completely wrong.

The novel opens from the point of view of Inman as he looks out a window from his hospital bed during the Civil War. I will give away no more plot than that because this post isn't about plot at all. The opening chapter is narrated in what I believe is 3rd person limited (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). The narrator gets inside Inman's head but doesn't use Inman's vernacular exactly - by this I mean we don't hear Inman's voice in the narration and there's little to no use of dialect. If we were given Inman's voice, the novel would be entirely different - I think the narration would be chopped and brief and not at all lyrical. It would be more similar to the way Inman's speech is depicted.

When Inman speaks in this chapter in dialogue (which happens rarely), the dialogue is presented not in quotations but rather after an em-dash (which is very curious to me). Inman's words are always brief and to the point:

• "--Why did you never have any? Inman said," (9) referring to the other man's missing eyes.
• "--I'd not differ with you there, Inman said," (14) responding to the blind man telling Inman he needed to set aside a troubling memory.

We quickly learn that Inman walked out of school without ever returning, but he reads daily (and must read daily as if it's tied to his survival on some level). His readings of landscapes capture his imagination and connect him to memories of places that are important to him. Although he isn't educated traditionally, he is an intellectual. This allows Frazier to get away with using beautiful, fluid, even poetic descriptions in the narration as well as words that wouldn't typically be in the vocabulary of a Civil War-era Appalachian man with little education. Words like "divination" and "bulbuous" don't seem to me to be out of place in the narration.

Other soldiers call out phrases that clearly reflect a lack of education but also a lack of thoughtfulness: "Come on closer, I want them boots" (10).

A few times, a little bit of country-talk comes into the narration, like in the line, "His spirit, it seemed, had been about burned out of him" (22).

For me, Inman's character and personality comes through the use of simile in the narration. The similes are all things that Inman could have seen with his own eyes, usually simple things he would have naturally thought would be a good comparison. Some examples:

• "Periodically they were driven from behind the houses by their own cavalry, who beat them with the flats of their sabers like schoolteachers paddling truants" (11). Earlier in the piece, it was revealed that Inman had a teacher with a paddle and Inman was a truant. The voice of narration isn't Inman's, but this simile creates a tight connection between the narrator and Inman.
• "His neck hurt as if a red cord running from it to the balls of his feet were yanked quivering tight at each step" (16). I have a feeling a specifically red cord will enter into the story soon enough.

There's discussion in the narration of two generals, Lee and Longstreet, spending their time "coining fine phrases" (12) during a battle where many men lost their lives. It seems to me the coining of phrases in this opening was done with great care, and the narration lays these phrases on top of an equally tragic story.

Inman, as his name implies, is thoughtful but uses few words when speaking to others. In one scene, he "sat brooding and pining for his lost self" (23). For me, this line alone justifies the lengthy ponderings of the narrator, the almost complete lack of dialect, and the lyrical quality of the narration.

If you haven't read this novel yet, do it! It's fabulous starting with page one.


Because I'm doing this little series for college credit, I must not forget the bibliography. Note the title of the opening chapter, which is in all lower case in the book.

Frazier, Charles. "the shadow of a crow." Cold Mountain. New York: Grove Press, 1997.

New Series: Techniques in Appalachian Fiction

In an effort to breathe some life back into my blog and to force myself to set aside time to read in my genre, I signed up for an independent study course at my university. My goal for the class is to analyze and compare a few writing techniques in the very specific genre of the Appalachian novel.

I chose the following novels with publication dates spanning 26 years:

• Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina (1987)
• Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith (1993)
• Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (1994)
• Gap Creek by Robert Morgan (1999)
• Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver (2001)
• Bloodroot by Amy Greene (2010)
• Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (2013).

My initial plan was to write a blog post about at least one writing technique in the openings of each of these novels. But I think I'll do something a little different and bring you along for the ride.

In the first series of posts, I'm going to look at the opening chapter of each novel and examine how the author executed the very tricky technique of rendering dialect - both in the dialogue and in the narration. Characterization will necessarily be included in these discussions because narration and dialogue are techniques that are used to develop the characters. The tricky thing about this, which I struggle with in my writing, is developing realistic dialogue and first person narration while simultaneously not playing into or perpetuating regional stereotypes.

My family is Appalachian, all of them from as far back as I can trace. Most of them were sustenance farmers, which means they grew just enough to feed their families and kept whatever animals they needed to ensure their family's survival. Many of the men were coal miners. The families were huge with a baby born at a rate of about one per year, especially in the earliest generations, and each family lost a good percentage of the babies. I have reviewed more census records than I can count and learned that hardly anyone before my great grandparents' generation attended school or could read or write.

I want to honor my ancestors by realistically portraying fictional characters who lived in the same place. What I know of them is they were smart people despite the lack of traditional education; they survived under impossible circumstances. To portray them as anything else would be rude and disrespectful.

When I was a child in the 1970s, I spent some time in Phelps, Kentucky, with my grandparents. I remember how tickled my grandma was with all the hype about "hillbillies" (which I now realize is a a bad word, something never to say out loud). I remember going with my grandparents to a restaurant that had a sign on the table with a translation for "hillbilly" language, like a "poke" is a bag (if I remember that correctly). My grandma thought that was awesome and got a huge kick out of The Beverly Hillbillies. She thought it was so funny anyone would find Appalachians entertaining and didn't mind it at all. She didn't perceive any of it to be negative or condescending; I guess it's all a matter of perspective. I think even if she did perceive it to be rude, she would have turned the other cheek; that's just how she was.

Recently, I've read a huge amount of scholarship on the ways stereotypes have negatively impacted this region and its people. I tend to agree and choose not to contribute to the stereotypes.

One of the things I'm going to look at in my course (and in this series of posts) is whether the depiction of Appalachians in these novels changed over time and how that depiction was pulled off technically. By the end of the semester, I hope to have reached a decision about what techniques related to dialect and characterization I will use in my novels.

All of this is way too much for a short blog post, so I'll look at one novel at a time and maybe knit it together into a longer essay in the end. I might do a little profile on each of the authors too if anyone is interested.

Have any of you read any of these novels or other books from these authors? Anyone writing historical or regional fiction where dialect is an issue?



Tonja