“… The danger … is that writers work so hard to nail the dialect that they think they’ve created a character and a scene. But you can wind up with a lot of dialect and no good dialogue.
“Thinking about it — it’s very easy to write a guy with a thick lower class accent and think you’ve created a character, when all you’ve done is create a stereotype. I can’t tell you how many thug characters I’ve read who come off as cartoons; I wonder if that’s partly because they’re written entirely in Thug….”