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.