Jeannie Campbell is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California. She is Head of Clinical Services for a large non-profit and has worked with families, teens, parents & kids for over 10 years. She loves her day job so much that she crossed over to diagnosing make-believe people. She's the owner/operator of The Character TherapistTM, an online therapy service for fictional characters...and their authors. You can connect with her at http://charactertherapist.com.

I’m excited to start a new five-part series on southern stereotypes. I was born in Mississippi and transplanted to California about 10 years ago. Since you can take the girl out of the South, but can’t take the South out of the girl, I feel I can still speak to southern stereotypes with some authority.

There are several clichés of Southerners that make me roll my eyes when seeing it portrayed in fiction or film. I’m sure you’re familiar with them:

Clichéd: Southerners are Ignorant, Racist, Inbred, Ridiculously Rich or Pitifully Poor, Outdoorsmen, Football Fanatics, Shoeless, and Bible-Thumpers.

Of course I take offense to most of these. Don’t get me wrong. Clichéd stereotypes have a basis in reality, but they are only a small part of the [pecan] pie. Just as within any cultural people group, there are degrees of adherence to certain defining traits. In other words, there are degrees of “southern-ness.”

For you to accurately portray the being of a “true Southerner,” you have to understand that we feel that there is an essence—a certain je ne sais quoi—about identifying as Southern, that surpasses the mere geographical technicality of where we were born. I’ll do my best to describe the general psychological roots, along with some creative ways to get these traits across on paper.

Psychological Factors

Deeply Southern

This might be redundant, but let’s review our southern geography. The Deep South is composed of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. These states formed the original Confederate States of America. The Southern states, as we know them today also include Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Arkansas.

People in the South do not consider a person from Kentucky a true southerner. Kentucky was a border state in the American Civil War, as was Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia and Missouri. You cannot have a “southerner” from Oklahoma or Kansas.

When people from the South travel around, their accent is the first thing to draw attention. “Where are you from?” is the most common question asked by non-Southerners when they encounter a displaced Southerner, so getting the effect of the Southern accent on paper cannot be underestimated. But to say that Southerners “drawl” is the biggest cliché in fiction. And there’s so many more sayings than “y’all” to indicate a Southerner is gracing your pages.

Creative: To let readers experience the accent, try playing around with lengthening and drawing out the actual words spoken in dialogue. You can also experiment with dropping the g from “-ing” words, and the front vowel from words like about (as in, “it’s ‘bout time to go”) to convey the lazy rounding that can happen in southern speech.

Creative: I encourage you to use search engines to look up southern idiosyncrasies and idioms, because they are bountiful and quite creative in their own right. “Drunker than Cooter Brown,” “slower than molasses,” “pitching a hissy fit” and “grinning like a possum” are just a few off the top of my head. Southerners aren’t about to do something, they’re fixin’ to. When you want a Dr. Pepper or a Sprite, you ask for a Coke, and then you’re asked, “What kind?” We differentiate between sweet tea (obviously superior to unsweet) and sweet milk (means we don’t want buttermilk). TV remotes are called clickers, and shopping carts are buggies. We tinkle in commodes, not toilets. Dinner is called supper. Beware, because we make a salad or jello out of just about anything and we fry everything. Sam Hill is a euphemism synonymous with cursing, such as “What in the Sam Hill are you doing?” Imagine how much fun you could have on the written page with Southern dialogue!

Deeply Patriotic

Southerners are pro-American everything. Far more domestic cars than foreign are seen in the supermarkets. We like our guns, and we support the United States Armed Forces at all costs. We stand for the national anthem and hold our hands over our hearts. We usually proudly display a flag either outside or inside our homes. Football is close to religion, and it’s usually combined with drinking beer and/or grilling meat.

Creative: When we get into the actual stereotypes in the coming months, you’ll see that patriotism can take on different intensity levels. The Redneck’s version of patriotism oftentimes skirts the edge of being racist. But not all Southerners are racist! Play around with the patriotism level. It might be a keychain celebrating America with a rhinestone flag or it might be a huge Dixie flag painted on a muscle car.

Deeply Republican

With the exception of Florida and North Carolina, the Southern states mentioned above are firmly Republican. Big time.

Whether you’re for or against, here are the seven core social values that make up the GOP platform: Sanctity of human life, protecting traditional marriage, supporting the right to keep and bear arms, safeguarding religious liberties, ensuring equal treatment for all people, freedom of speech and the press, and protecting our national symbols (like Old Glory and the Pledge of Allegiance).

Creative: There are southern people who identify as Democrats, like Oprah Winfrey, Morgan Freeman, Jimmy Carter, Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Clinton. It might be like finding a needle in a haystack, but they do exist. Statistically speaking, proceed with caution as you write!

Deeply Religious

Bible-Thumpers exist, especially in the Bible Belt, where conservative Protestantism is alive and well. The national average for church attendance is between 37-39%, but in the Bible Belt, it’s up to 24% above that. Some parochial Christians are more vocal than the majority, and they have given the rest of us a bad rap. Not every Southern Christian is narrow-minded and bigoted, but they are more likely to be Baptist than other denominations.

The values found in the church hold prominence in the South. It’s just the way it is. Public cursing is frowned upon. Elders are respected. Manners are used. Family is sacred. Neighbors and friends are valued. Bark less, wag more. God, country, church. It’s all connected.

Creative: Find plot twists to test these values. For example, have internal conflict between a Southern character who was taught to obey their parents, but have their parents ask them to do or be complicit in something wrong.

Next month, I’ll start with the positive male stereotype of the Good Ol’ Boy, followed by the positive female stereotype of the Southern Belle (and her subtype of the Steel Magnolia. Then we’ll delve into the more negative stereotypes of male Rednecks and female Trailer Trash. We’ll go “hog wild” [southern for “have a good time”].