I just finished a book set in a part of Colorado with which I’m very familiar. The author’s bio says she spent most of her life “in the eastern United States” and now lives in-state, although it doesn’t specify where. At any rate, she obviously wants to convey to her readers a sense of Western regionalism, as well as a specific recreational subculture. (I’m being deliberately vague, because I actually enjoyed the book much more than I expected to — I picked it up mostly because of the setting, and I found it at the thrift store so it was cheap, and it was autographed so I figured I could re-sell it if it sucked.)

So I have two pet peeves, and these are characteristic not just of this one novel but of a lot of writing I’ve seen that tries to convey a regional or cultural flavor:

1) Awkward phrases, similes, and metaphors designed to be down-home and folksy but that bear no resemblance to how people actually talk. I grew up in Colorado, and I have family all over the American West, including Montana and Alaska. Neither I nor anyone I have EVER MET says things like “skittish as an antelope that’s caught a whiff of cougar” or “fierce as a starvin’ grizzly standin’ over a fresh carcass.” Other than a few regional differences in vocabulary — people here say “pop” instead of “soda,” for example (every time I mention soda, my Colorado-to-the-bone brother corrects me: “You mean you’re getting a pop. Don’t teach my kids to say soda”) — we use the same words and expressions as everyone else.

“Well, golly, gee, that sunset’s as beautiful as a spit-polished pair of brand-new rattlesnake cowboy boots.”

I think this trend for bad faux-regional dialogue may be even more prevalent when authors who obviously haven’t spent much time in the South try to write about Southerners. “Well, butter my grits and call me Bubba.” But I’ve never seen an author do this to, say, a character living in New York; I’ve never read about a New Yorker whose “thoughts were as chaotic as Friday rush-hour traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway” — and thank goodness I haven’t; it’s clumsy and heavy-handed and seems designed to impress readers with how well the author knows a city, region, or culture with which he or she really isn’t familiar enough to discuss with any depth and complexity.

This isn’t to say that writers should only set their work in places with which they’re intimately familiar. Of course not. But I think a writer’s responsibility is to become intimately familiar with any place in which he or she chooses to set a story (or in which the story chooses to set itself). When I lived in Savannah, I read every novel I came across that took place there. It was quickly obvious which authors had done their research — whether that consisted of living there, interviewing locals, delving beyond the tourist attractions during visits, and/or reading up on local history — and which had spent a week in some posh hotel on one of the squares and never ventured further than River Street.

Quiz for anyone writing about Savannah: Where was this photo taken?

2) When you’re writing about a subculture with its own acronyms and jargon, it’s tricky to find a way to introduce that information to readers. I recognize that. You don’t want to be heavy-handed and pedantic. “She tapped out Morse code for ‘SOS,’ which stands for ‘save our ship.’” Introducing it in dialogue — having one character tell another something they both know, for the sake of communicating it to the reader — is even worse. Certain crime shows on TV do this all the time. A says to B, “There’s no GSR on his hands.” B responds to A, “If he had killed her, there would have been GUN SHOT RESIDUE on his hands, because whenever a bullet is fired, invisible specks of powder fly out and coat the shooter’s hands and clothes.” And, in the case of a certain TV franchise that’s especially bad about this, the dialogue would be accompanied by a close-up, cheesy CGI shot of the bullet powder splattering all over the shooter’s hands.

This book I just read had a variation that wasn’t quite as painful but still was cringe-worthy. “As she drove up the street, she saw the FEMA trailer in her yard and reminded herself that the acronym stood for Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

By all means, write about FEMA. Write about GSR. Write about finite element analysis. And tell me what you mean, because I want to learn and I want to follow the action. Just please, please, try to do it in a way that isn’t clumsy, that doesn’t distract me from the story.

*Except for the GSR conversation, which happens so frequently on so many shows that it’s probably in the common domain, all these examples are mine. I didn’t want to violate copyright by directly quoting anyone, so I’ve come up with my own versions to illustrate the dialogue and expositionary concepts.