Last summer, about a year after my first novel The Glorious Heresies was published, I led a workshop for aspiring writers. In the session, we referred to my experience writing Heresies – lessons I’d learned or techniques I found useful. One of the attendees had read the book in preparation for the session and had an issue with my take on dialogue. He believed my characters’ speech, and each narrative voice I employed, was far too complex. He maintained that a writer writing a working-class story should not use sophisticated words or inventive phrasing, even in third person. He was adamant my vernacular wasn’t the vernacular: a working-class story should be told through simple prose and working-class characters should have a limited vocabulary, or else they are not authentic.

I was finishing the last round of edits of The Blood Miracles at the time, and so was (very sensibly) sensitive to criticism. I went back through the text, looking for phrases unsuited to its characters. Its protagonist, Ryan, is a 20-year-old drug dealer from a council estate who did not finish second-level education. He swears habitually and doesn’t make time to read. On that basis he sounds like the kind of young man most likely to communicate in grunts, but then, he has managed to make a comfortable living selling drugs, something that’s next to impossible if you can only express yourself through expectorating and blasphemy. Wait, I told myself. Cop on. The more I thought about it, the more indignant I became. Why shouldn’t Ryan be eloquent? Is eloquence not actually a necessity for disadvantaged dealers who don’t want to end up doing 10-year stretches, or quietly decomposing in some remote patch of Irish forestry?

This is reality, not literary wishful thinking. Yet there apparently remains a falsehood that working-class people are not inclined towards eloquence, or that eloquence is taught only in university, or that profanity precludes eloquence, or that if you can put a complicated sentence together you’re somehow a class traitor. When I was a kid – a bookish kid, quelle surprise – my cousins thought me a pain in the hoop because I knew how volcanoes worked and that Helsinki was the capital of Finland. Using logic in an argument was an insult to my opponent. Reading a book instead of trying to knock down wasps’ nests with hurleys was a terribly affected way to spend my time. Disheartened, I made up for it by kicking my cousins in the shins.

The Blood Miracles by Lisa McInerney review – an addictive read Read more

Where we picked up this crab mentality twaddle is a mystery, because it didn’t at all correspond with our lives. The adults around us rarely ceased their verbal jousting. Our aunts were adept in scathing Hiberno, keeping us in check with a mixture of pointed English and laden insults as Gaeilge. Our grandfather, who was a heavy-drinking tradesman with eight children and a council house, read the broadsheets every morning, engaged daily in rapid-fire badinage with his friends in the pub and delighted in coining hilariously sniffy putdowns. One of the caustic cousins, now grown up and working in haulage, is a brilliant raconteur, happiest exchanging tall tales in the pub, just as our grandfather used to be.

Yet I’m sometimes asked if it’s terribly difficult writing dialogue for working-class characters because working-class people, particularly men, don’t converse. It’s galling the number of people who buy into this idea of class determining articulacy, a Blytonesque estimation that patois is intrinsically moronic and that the working classes communicate in dropped syllables, slang and scratching. That we are thick-tongued as Wuthering Heights’ Joseph, or stubbornly simple as Animal Farm’s Boxer, or as proud of our savagery as Lionel Asbo himself. I’ve seen people who should be angered by this theory subscribe to it instead, and how frustrating it is watching people react defensively to others’ knowledge – to the very idea of knowledge – without recognising their own.

It is a foul and dangerous trick to insinuate that authentic working-class people are not articulate

I have relatives who sneer that third-level education is a waste of time and the fount of all notions above one’s station, but who have been awarded A1s in higher level leaving certificate subjects that they found personally interesting. I know others who give mocking nicknames to privately educated mates, yet manage to engage them in late-night, in-depth political analysis. And oh, look at the mess we’re all in, politically, reputedly due to voters hitting the roof at the mere idea of authoritative experts. It should not be a radical act to want to learn or want to teach. Yet there are factions that attempt to make it so: privileged sociopaths who would like us to condemn experts and delegitimise education. So self-expression is redefined as a liberty taken by a pampered elite. Liberal is redefined as the folly of irresponsible celebrities. Idiocy is redefined as common sense. Submission is redefined as revolution.

It is a foul and dangerous trick to insinuate that authentic working-class people are not articulate.

So the idea that working-class characters, and, specific to The Blood Miracles, working-class drug dealers, must be verbally hesitant is daft, and says far more about those who believe it than those incorrectly labelled profane oafs. It’s not all that likely you’ll meet a successful drug dealer happy to blow his own cover, but associates and detectives both can assure you that they are very rarely thick as two short planks. How far can an ambitious black marketeer get if he doesn’t know how to obfuscate meaning, how to make sense of legalese, how to manipulate would-be challengers, how to avoid incriminating himself, when to talk, when to shut up? Not very, and excusing his thick tongue with social class isn’t going to help him. The writer of these stories must understand that not only are such characters entitled to their articulacy, they must be defined by it.

Beyond that, policing of language in any creative circumstance – sorting words into categories of suitability – is an unpleasant, controlling act. A writer must be careful in choosing the correct dialogue for her characters, of course, but that care shouldn’t go so far as to enact an artificial silence. Expressiveness or fluency or originality must not be curtailed by a writer’s fearful compliance with archaic ideas about their characters’, or their own, pedigree. Lucky, then, that contemporary Irish literature brims with electrifying examples, from the daedal prose in Colin Barrett’s stories of small town discontentment to the buoyant but spiky garrulousness of some of Kevin Barry’s most indelible characters.

This is especially important to me because I have no background in academic creative writing, having never completed a degree, let alone a writing MA. For a long time I was anxious that that put me at a disadvantage – that I was missing a literary vocabulary, one I could not catch up with or ever fully understand – and so in a sense this lesson on articulacy is one that’s taken me some time to learn. Language is not class-segregated. It is not a tool issued by nobility for use only when strictly necessary. Any character can be written in a complex style as well as in the crude vernacular. And the crude vernacular can be as beautiful, expressive and important as classic texts and experimental prose.