Looking for authentic dialogue and accents from all over North America?

From io9:

This is the culmination of Rick Aschmann’s years-long “hobby” of collecting dialects. It’s a comprehensive and detailed map of the dialects (and sub-dialects!) of English-speakers in Canada and the United States.

. . . .

Aschmann’s site is a veritable font of information on English dialects. There’s the Dialect Information Chart which tells you which vowel sounds can be found in what dialect and each dialect’s “unique features.” Like Mat-Su Valley Alaska, which has the unique feature of being “strongly like North Central” but with some “main Alaska dialect” mixed in. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, there’s a helpful parenthetical there: “See Sarah Palin.”

. . . .

The one on his site is especially useful because clicking on a place takes you to audio sample of that dialect on his curated list of audio examples of many of the dialects.

Link to the rest at io9 and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

If you would like a brief sample of an American accent from the Eastern Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin, this excerpt from the movie, Fargo should do the trick. PG spent several years during his youth in rural Minnesota and he can attest to the accuracy of both the accent and the conversational style.

From The Mail:

The bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code has revealed that he hangs upside down to help him write.

Dan Brown told the Sunday Times about his unusual technique of seeking inspiration by strapping himself into a piece of gym equipment that can be turned upside down.

Mr Brown, 48, said when he struggles with writer’s block, he suspends himself upside down in his New Hampshire home.

He said: ‘It does help. You’ve just got to relax and let go. The more you do it the more you let go. And then soon it’s just, wow,’ in an interview with the Sunday Times.

Experts say that regular sessions of inversion therapy can improve concentration and memory by increasing the amount of blood that flows to the brain.

Link to the rest at The Mail and thanks to Richard for the tip.

PG can almost hear Mamma PG saying, “Just because all the other kids are hanging upside down . . . .”

From The Independent:

People like a shed – especially if they are creative. For writers it is often a peaceful bolt-hole.

George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion from his garden shed in Hertfordshire, which was built on a turntable, which turned to face the sun; Roald Dahl wrote most of his children’s books in his Buckinghamshire “writing hut”; Virginia Woolf wrote in her shed in Sussex; Dylan Thomas wrote in a shed above his home, the Boathouse in Laugharne, Wales; Philip Pullman used to write his novels in an old wood shed in his garden in Oxford; Arthur Miller built a shed in Roxbury, Connecticut to write Death of a Salesman.

A garden shed can also serve as a more noisy recording studio – indeed Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters created early demo tracks for Dark Side of the Moon in his garden shed in Islington, while Benjamin Britten composed music including the opera Death in Venice in a shed-like building outside his house in Horham, Suffolk.

Link to the rest at The Independent

From The Guardian:

My life as a concert pianist can be frustrating, lonely, demoralising and exhausting. But is it worth it? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt.

. . . .

After the inevitable “How many hours a day do you practice?” and “Show me your hands”, the most common thing people say to me when they hear I’m a pianist is “I used to play the piano as a kid. I really regret giving it up”. I imagine authors have lost count of the number of people who have told them they “always had a book inside them”. We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity. A world where people have simply surrendered to (or been beaten into submission by) the sleepwalk of work, domesticity, mortgage repayments, junk food, junk TV, junk everything, angry ex-wives, ADHD kids and the lure of eating chicken from a bucket while emailing clients at 8pm on a weekend.

. . . .

What if you could know everything there is to know about playing the piano in under an hour (something the late, great Glenn Gould claimed, correctly I believe, was true)? The basics of how to practise and how to read music, the physical mechanics of finger movement and posture, all the tools necessary to actually play a piece – these can be written down and imparted like a flat-pack furniture how-to-build-it manual; it then is down to you to scream and howl and hammer nails through fingers in the hope of deciphering something unutterably alien until, if you’re very lucky, you end up with something halfway resembling the end product.

. . . .

What if rather than a book club you joined a writer’s club? Where every week you had to (really had to) bring three pages of your novel, novella, screenplay and read them aloud?

. . . .

I didn’t play the piano for 10 years. A decade of slow death by greed working in the City, chasing something that never existed in the first place (security, self-worth, Don Draper albeit a few inches shorter and a few women fewer). And only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven – to be a concert pianist.

Link to the rest at The Guardian and thanks to becca for the tip.

From booktrust:

I have a thin skin.

I think it comes from the fact that I suffer from depression from time to time. I had a breakdown years ago. And if the stone falls hard enough the ripples last a lifetime.

. . . .

And really, my kind of depression isn’t done justice by the word depression. The word depression makes me think of a flat tyre, something punctured and unmoving. The depression I have known is more like an intense, inner hurricane, that sometimes whisks me up into Oz or carries me far into the sea. At its worst you find yourself wishing, desperately, for any other affliction, any physical pain, because the mind is infinite, and its torments – when they happen – can be equally infinite.

. . . .

I believe one of the jobs of a writer is to feel life and then report on feelings. Fiction may be fantastical, but it is also emotional reportage. (Non-fiction = external truths. Fiction = internal ones. Discuss.)

The paradox is that while having a thin skin might make for better writing, it is not good for the process of being published. I have a new book out next week. There will be reviews. The bad ones will trouble me more than they should. Just as that one tiny hair you find in your peanut butter makes you want to throw away the whole jar.

. . . .

People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential. I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of my neck. I don’t even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.

Link to the rest at booktrust and thanks to India for the tip.

From Dean Wesley Smith:

I just finished close to a 70,000 words on a novel I was hired to do by a New York publisher.  Did it in ten days here and blogged about my days and how I did the words. The editor on the book reported that it arrived just fine.

. . . .

And numbers of people seemed stunned that I could go to work for ten days, then go to work on day #11. So for one more day, I’ll do my day here. Just to try to put one more nail in the attempt at killing a few ugly myths about how writers work.

. . . .

8:30 PM… Horrid start to the day, but alas I’m back here. A couple of the days in the novel writing I didn’t get into the office until late to write, so back at this like normal.

The day started early for me as well, getting up around 12:00, getting my three breakfast bars eaten while doing some e-mail and then heading to the WMG offices by 1:30 PM. Meetings on all sorts of business stuff, then Kris and I had lunch and I went back for more meeting from 4 until 6:00PM.

Then I went down to a local restaurant to enjoy part of a birthday celebration for a friend, then to the grocery store and back home to cook Kris dinner. We watched the news, I came up here to my office, worked on e-mail and did this. I will now work on the homework for the online workshop I am teaching called Pitches and Blurbs, then head back to the WMG Offices for a time.

I expect to be back here in my office at home by around 11:00 PM and headed for the computer. Up at WMG Publishing tonight I’ll work on putting together Fiction River: Time Streams that I am editing so I can get that turned in on time. When I get back here I’ll tell you what I end up writing on and give page counts.

(more entries coming through the evening and night…remember, I don’t go to bed until around 5 AM)

Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith

From Ruth Harris on Anne R. Allen’s Blog:

Social, cultural, and political history are powerful tools no writer should ignore.

• John Le Carré used the Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the real-life unmasking of a double agent to create a compelling setting in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.
• Isabel Allende’s The House Of The Spirits, a family saga partially inspired by the PInochet dictatorship, is set against decades of political and social upheaval in post-colonial Chile.
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn drew on his experiences in the forced-labor camps of the Soviet prison system to create world wide bestsellers in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago.

However, writers do not need vast cultural and political disruptions to write powerful fiction readers can relate to. Ordinary, everyday details add enormous power to fiction and bring your story to life.

. . . .

Characters need to be firmly anchored in a specific time and place. Even sci-fi and fantasy need social, cultural and political specifics to engage the reader. George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter draw their power from their authors’ ability to create credible details of an invented world.

If you research and then judiciously set up the specifics of time and place, you will expand and enrich your fiction. Invoking the relevant cultural, political and social details will draw your reader into recognizable settings against which your characters can act out their dilemmas, frustrations and successes.

You shouldn’t give your reader a history lesson—that’s Doris Kearns Goodwin’s job—but you do want to give your characters a relatable world in which to live. Your characters can be—and should be—shaped by the attitudes of whatever period you choose to write about.

. . . .

Are you writing about a period in which people feel positive about the future and confident about their prospects? Or are your characters coping with the Depression of the Thirties or the financial crisis or downsizing of the recent past and present? How they think and feel and what they do to deal with opportunity (or lack thereof) offers a potent way to explore and expand the inner and outer lives of the people you’re writing about.

Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog

From The New Yorker Page Turner blog:

In this week’s magazine, John McPhee writes, “In The New Yorker, ‘travelling’ is spelled with two ‘l’s.” Notice that this is a simple statement of fact; John McPhee does not lament the policy or take issue with it.

To judge by letters from readers, the doubling of consonants in such words as “traveller” and “focussed” is a subject of undying interest. If Noah Webster were alive today, he would probably have written in to complain about our orthography. Webster favored simplifying the spelling of American English, and although we follow him on most points, this is where the founding editors ofThe New Yorker departed from Webster. Quoth the style book: “When alternatives are possible, use double ‘p’ in words like ‘kidnapped,’ double ‘s’ in words like ‘focussed,’ and double ‘l’ in words like ‘marvellous’ and ‘travelled.’” No kidnapper ever focussed so marvellously on this well-travelled territory. (And no copy editor ever backspaced so assiduously to poke in the second “s” and “l” to override the autocorrect.)

The style book gives no reason for this spelling choice. What would be the point?

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

From Writer Unboxed:

No one reads more prospective novel beginnings than literary agents. They’re the ones on the front lines — sifting through inboxes and slush piles. And they’re the ones who can tell us which Chapter 1 approaches are overused and cliche, as well as which techniques just plain don’t work.

. . . .

FALSE BEGINNINGS

“I don’t like it when the main character dies at the end of Chapter 1. Why did I just spend all this time with this character? I feel cheated.”
- Cricket Freeman, The August Agency

. . . .

IN SCIENCE FICTION

“A sci-fi novel that spends the first two pages describing the strange landscape.”
- Chip MacGregor, MacGregor Literary

. . . .

EXPOSITION/DESCRIPTION

“Perhaps my biggest pet peeve with an opening chapter is when an author features too much exposition – when they go beyond what is necessary for simply ‘setting the scene.’ I want to feel as if I’m in the hands of a master storyteller, and starting a story with long, flowery, overly-descriptive sentences (kind of like this one) makes the writer seem amateurish and the story contrived. Of course, an equally jarring beginning can be nearly as off-putting, and I hesitate to read on if I’m feeling disoriented by the fifth page. I enjoy when writers can find a good balance between exposition and mystery. Too much accounting always ruins the mystery of a novel, and the unknown is what propels us to read further.”
- Peter Miller, PMA Literary and Film Management

“The [adjective] [adjective] sun rose in the [adjective] [adjective] sky, shedding its [adjective] light across the [adjective] [adjective] [adjective] land.”
- Chip MacGregor, MacGregor Literary

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

From author James Scott Bell:

I’ve been on record for a long time stating that this new digital age is like the pulp era, only with more opportunity and potentially better pay. But it requires a certain kind of writer. One like Erle Stanley Gardner (1889 – 1970).

. . . .

Gardner is best know as the creator of Perry Mason. When he hit on that character and that formula, he was set for life. But what most people don’t know is how hard he worked to get there. He was a practicing lawyer in the 1920s, and was looking for a way to make money on the side. Writing for the exploding market in detective and crime fiction seemed promising.

He set out to do it the only way he knew how––full speed ahead. His output was, as he described it later, “man killing.” One hundred thousand words a month. A month. Over a million words a year, for at least ten years. (And much of it while he was still practicing law).

He did manage to sell some stories, but not enough to please him. Then one day he realized he did not know how to plot. His stories were merely “event combinations.”

. . . .

[I]n 1933, came The Case of the Velvet Claws and the introduction of Perry Mason. There was no looking back. At one time Gardner was listed in theGuinness Book of World Records as the bestselling author who ever lived.

. . . .

So how do you self-publish fiction successfully? Learn the following lessons from Erle Stanley Gardner.

. . . .

1. Treat it like a job

For Gardner and other successful pulpsters, writing was a job, especially during the Depression. They had to eat. They didn’t have time to sit around the coffee bar ruminating about theories of literature. They actually had to produce stories, lots of them. They studied the markets (and wrote in popular genres, like detective and Western) and pounded the keys of their manual typewriters. Gardner was a two-finger typist and had to put adhesive tape on his tips because they would start to bleed. (This is one reason he later turned to dictating his stories, having them transcribed by a team of secretaries).

. . . .

2. Treat it like a craft

When Gardner kept getting rejection slips that said “plot too thin,” he knew he had to learn how to do it. After much study he said he “began to realize that a story plot was composed of component parts, just as an automobile is.” He began to build stories, not just make them up on the fly. He made a list of parts and turned those into “plot wheels” which was a way of coming up with innumerable combinations. He was able, with this system, to come up with a complete story idea in thirty seconds.

Link to the rest at The Kill Zone