AmberSolis
Virgin
- Joined
- Jan 13, 2023
- Posts
- 111
When writing dialog for a character with a strong regional accent (New Jersey, Georgia, Louisiana, and the Texas twang) the author faces a tricky problem: how to convey that, without writing sentences that make your grammar and spell checkers go paranoid, and even worse: make your reader struggle to comprehend what the character is saying. That runs the risk of pushing the reader right out of your story. Foreign accents can be even tougher, if you try and spell it out phonetically, Again: readers get tired and go look for another story. And if you have a deeper meaning in the dialog, a contextual or subtextual message? Forget it. The reader is spending too much time trying to figure out what the character says to catch any underlying story.
There is a pretty good way to deal with this: When you introduce a character with a regional/foreign accent, if the context of the story has not indicated where they are from, you word it like this (for one example):
I'm introducing a charactrer that has a heavy British accent:
""Actually though, she does," Cheryl said. She's from London, England, and she still had the lovely English accent despite having lived in the US for the last 15 years. The way she pronounced the word "actually," it sounded like "ekshewally." And like a lot of Brits, that word was often employed as a means to either begin a conversation, or join in a conversation already underway."
All taken care of. You have established this character's accent in your reader's mind. You have given an example of how she really sounds. After that, you have (literally!) programmed your reader's mind to fill in the accent throughout the rest of the story. If it's a long story (like 140K words or more) you'll want to re-establish the character's accent a few times. But for a short story, introduce them, give one example of dialect/accent, and after that just write that character's dialog normally. You can re-establish the accent as needed with occasional misunderstandings due to the accent, and that is then reinforced in the reader's mind.
Don't make it difficult for the reader to stay in the story! If you do, it doesn't matter how good of a writer you are, the readers will most likely go and look for something else.
There is a pretty good way to deal with this: When you introduce a character with a regional/foreign accent, if the context of the story has not indicated where they are from, you word it like this (for one example):
I'm introducing a charactrer that has a heavy British accent:
""Actually though, she does," Cheryl said. She's from London, England, and she still had the lovely English accent despite having lived in the US for the last 15 years. The way she pronounced the word "actually," it sounded like "ekshewally." And like a lot of Brits, that word was often employed as a means to either begin a conversation, or join in a conversation already underway."
All taken care of. You have established this character's accent in your reader's mind. You have given an example of how she really sounds. After that, you have (literally!) programmed your reader's mind to fill in the accent throughout the rest of the story. If it's a long story (like 140K words or more) you'll want to re-establish the character's accent a few times. But for a short story, introduce them, give one example of dialect/accent, and after that just write that character's dialog normally. You can re-establish the accent as needed with occasional misunderstandings due to the accent, and that is then reinforced in the reader's mind.
Don't make it difficult for the reader to stay in the story! If you do, it doesn't matter how good of a writer you are, the readers will most likely go and look for something else.
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