: Re: How to have a character speak pidgin without inducing cringes? The character Lee in Steinbeck's East of Eden is a Chinese-American who speaks in pidgin — until he explains to his boss, in

@Bryan361

The skill is to make the reader believe they are hearing an authentic voice without using one. Firstly, if you transcribe recordings of actual speech, it is disjointed, ungrammatical and incomplete. (If you don't believe me, try recording and exactly transcribing a conversation with a mate.) Totally realistic speech in a novel or play doesn't work. For example, I tried a perfectly natural repetition in a play and the audience didn't like it. Even Pinter wasn't using realistic speech.
Secondly, Steinbeck, like Hemingway, is a master of dialogue. In 'The Moon is Down' he creates characters by the way they speak, even though in real life none of characters would speak English. He creates the impressions of the way the characters would speak, not something realistic. I read 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' thirty years ago and I can still hear one of the characters speak, and he was Spanish so English wasn't the language he would have used.
In 'Stone Cold', a novel about homeless people, nobody actually swears. (The target audience is school kids and swear words make a book hard to teach.) However, the characters use certain words in such a way as to make them sound like swear words.

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