Accents are EXTREMELY hard to read. So our dialects. IF you really want to make a charachter which is foreign, get him/her to speak the language without contractions. Like perhaps: “I do not know where to go from here. Please can I be helped by you?” Passive voice doesn’t hurt, but it would be better not to overuse it. I always ignore books which have dialects, because I find them too difficult to read, and too long.

And thanks for talking about dialects and such - good stuff and very encouraging.

And talking to a puppet in the car is a hilarious idea! I don’t know if I could do it! I would feel sooooo silly! But I think it’s awesome.

But as I said before, I do call myself on my cell phone and talk to my voice mail, so who is really the strange one here, eh?

The creative process fascinates me. The fact that we are created in the image of God and He is the ultimate Creator of all of us creative geniuses fascinates me even more! I would love to know what He was thinking when He created the platypus and well, all of us!

I’m not a research puppy, that’s my problem. I hate doing for more than just a few details, but I’m worried about not making it accurate enough in obvious details. I have a few British friends that are very keen in their history and not looking forward to taking slack from them if things aren’t correct.

I think I will take the advice of working on the writing of it, now that I think I have basic things of the time period down, and looking up more as I go along. If I’m lucky, I might actually have it done by the time I’m 80.

I am proud of myself that my characters are developing themselves fairly nicely with the helpful things posted here. I’m glad I’m not the only one that ‘talks’ to my characters (my kids think I’m bonkers for talking to myself). I just need to start taking a recorder with me as I can never remember all the conversations and details when I get back to the comp. My best thoughts come as I’m driving or outside away from distractions. (I don’t think I even want to hear about doing character journals. I think that might blow my mind completely.)

I’ve recently been very disappointed in an historical novel (set in Ireland, 1800’s) that DIDN’T have even slightly accented voices for the characters. Part of the P.E.E. is in the escape, and the whole thing was just so hard to believe, and so far less charming than it could have been with the occasional bit of colloquialism. It really fell flat for me.

Up with accents!

~bonne

One of my characters is an uneducated “colored” (1925)
teenage girl, who will be taken under the wing of another character who teaches her proper English, thereby affecting the next generation as well.
I’ve used some dialect to set the scene, but I’m going to go back and see if I can pare it down.

The man in the Athol Dickson example cited by Randy seemed very, very formal. I get the point that his subservient forms of address do depict his respect,
but I’m not sure I’d have caught it without Randy’s pointing it out. Perhaps after reading farther into the story.

I think reading our work aloud section by section gives us a sense of how it flows. If it’s hard to pronounce aloud, it will be hard for the reader as well.

Also, remember that everyone speaks a dialect, and a reader from, say Ireland, will maybe find it disappointing if you don’t give your American hero an accented voice. And vice versa. What is foreign is a matter of perspective, huh?

I wanted to stay away from heavy dialect in my Scottish characters for two reasons: 1. laziness — it would take nearly learning a whole language to use the phonetically written Scots if I were to do it right and be consistent, which is the only way I’d attempt it. 2. Speaking for myself, wading through heavy dialect/slang is tedious — constantly stopping to translate if you’re not a proficient.

So I asked smart folks (waving at Mary DeMuth) who suggested using a subtle approach. As Randy said, you could limit use of weird spelling and depend more on grammatical anomalies and syntactic constructs (and I don’t even know what the heck that means—is that Swedish?).

I also think we can be a little hypocritical when it comes to accentuating unique pronunciation. Don’t tell my family or friends I said this, but they think we Oregonians talk normal and everyone else has an accent. The truth is, if I were to spell OUR speech the way it sounds, it would look like this: “If yer gunna head over the mountn, don’t fergit ta take sumpm fer the kids dadoo, cuz there’s nuthn wersna buncha whinin wallyer tryinda drive.” I think they suffered tragic vowel deprivation on the Oregon Trail.

There’s also the risk of prejudice: it seems like speech that strays from proper English sounds automatically dumb.

I’m shootin for words and phrases that are unique to the speaker’s culture. (’aye’ instead of yes, etc) and a wee bit of phonetics for flavor, but I’m leaving heavy dialect and hard spellings out, at least for the main characters who we have to listen to the most.

I think at the end of the day it’s balance we’re after. A constant heavy Scottish dialect is clearly too much. Camille, I really like what you say in your last paragraph about including unique cultural bits. This can include sentence structure and the other more subtle tools to create accent in voice. Like Yoda saying “Impatient you are!” He just wouldn’t be as neat a character without it, but it’s not too difficult. What I’m against is reading a novel set in Australia and no one says “G’day”.

I also think it’s worth it for a memorable character to have more than a distinct mode of speaking, but an actual accent. This doesn’t have to be written in every word, but if the ending “er” sound of words is an “ah” sound in the accent, I say write it like that. If this character’s dialogue is the only place it shows up, (and it’s an interesting character) the reader will find it worth the effort.

Another writer who does dialects really effectively (and similes that make me pee my pants) is Terry Pratchett.

And Camille is right, we all do have accents of one kind or another. For example, I’m Canadian eh?