Is it tacky to use ebonics in fiction...

Is it tacky to use ebonics in fiction? Specially if he uh WHITE MALE!!!! Will a publisher immediately write the book off?

Post zamples of bonics.

>Will a publisher immediately write the book off?

Ask Twain, Faulkner, McCarthy, Pynchon, and Foster-Wallace

Unless you're writing about a southern plantation in the 1850s, it's probably tacky.

But what if 90% of the black people you talk to on a daily basis talk the way you write it?

Are you kidding me? You're a fucking white male.

most written english is very different from how its spoken, even by middle class white people.

it really depends on the strength of the entire work. Great writers can do whatever they want

Yeah so I would give more structure and grammatical correctness to the spoken word but throw in something they would say within the character, giving that character that racial characteristic.

Depends on if it makes sense in the context of the work.

you dont talk to enough black people to measure in tenths and the ones you do speak with are the same ones every time.

#swerve

Post ebonics passages. Warden b cri, etc. I'm curious if there's an accepted ebonics threshold.

I'm going to write a book in bogan slang and you CANNOT stop me

This is all an assumption. I speak to roughly 8 black people a day and 3-4 new black people every 2-4 days and I've been doing this for the last 10 months so I've spoken to a large number of black people and the number of black people who say things like "did me dirty" "jawn" "out of pocket" "scheme" and "nigga" far out number the amount of white people. The phrases often used by white people are "Oh boy" "Jesus christ" "Crap" or "Oh Crap" "Fuck" "Man" used as "Fuck Man" "Sorry Man" and other variations and "Damn".

sounds fuckin tits

>straya
>real bogans
Get some West Auckland in ya lad

fuck up cunt

australians are subhuman

>"I got de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb!"

>ARE YOU LYING TA ME NIGGA BOY?

These are both from The Sound and the Fury. But in all seriousness Dilsey is the best character in that book.

The ONLY true blue place in Australia is Queensland. The rest is LITERALLY a Seppo colony.

that is racist against abbos

absolutely delusional honestly

But what about modern lit? How much of that would fly in today's PC climate?

Context (or maybe relevance is more precise) and balance are everything.

I'm not saying it would be something every author could do, but I bet it could be done well.

ebonics is cancer and has to die out
the only reasonable use for it is in only few cases where it was used historically by degenerates and should never be used in fiction if it can be avoided

...

None of whose work would stand a chance at publication in the current climate

Philly?

>realise

It's tacky if you use it post Civil Rights era but some authors have done some interesting things with ebonics in Reconstruction era novels. Albion Tourgee in Bricks without Straw used ebonics for both his poor white and black characters to show that both groups were capable of sharing complex thoughts about their horrible situations post-war, they just did not have the education to speak in a "dignified" way. By juxtaposing the real, emotionally stirring conflicts of the uneducated blacks with the usually petty concerns of the landed white elite, Albion creates a realistic sounding novel while not trivializing the plight of poor blacks and whites in the South post CIvil war, thus using ebonics in an empowering manner.

lmfao my nigga u in philly.

but really you are my african american friend.

Jawn is a philly word

It depends on how you use it, how often you use it and when you use it. If you put in one or two passages of it in a point past what you'd send to an agent in a query it's ok. If the whole thing is full of it and you're white it probably won't fly these days. Even something like A Confederacy of Dunces wouldn't be published now (though it nearly wasn't in the first place, albeit for presumably different reasons).