Skip to main content

Your Characters Speak Your Language by Mary Deal




One of the most difficult accomplishments in writing is to get a certain character’s dialect and accent correct.
When you include foreign characters in your story, it’s imperative that your reader know they have an accent relative to the country or locale from which they hail.
Be attentive to these nuances or all your characters will sound like you. An author who is not a linguist or grammarian may have a certain limited capability at using the English language. Without expanding your knowledge or simply using a Thesaurus, you will find yourself repeating the same words and phrases over and over.
Let’s take the example of a foreign accent. Your character’s manner of speech will be greatly affected by the way you describe that person and the nuances of the country of their birth. Say you’ve set up your character as being from France. Maybe he dresses in fine French clothes, is real dapper and has European table manners. Beyond that, have him use French phrases like mon cherie in the course of his dialogue.
Foreign phrases you attach to your character should be fairly well known to the general public. These phrases both immediately give the reader the character’s flavor of speech; it also lets the reader skim smoothly over the foreign phrase by imagining an accent, and stay in the story.
Including a phrase that not too many people have heard makes the reader pause to try to understand. That is something you do not want to happen.
When writing in English, the author must still assure that all characters have their own manner of speaking.
A cowboy has a laid-back southern drawl, as in “I ain’t into office work,  ma’am. I ride horses.” Can you hear him speak?
The African man who made it to the Olympics has an Nigerian accent that no one understands. Yet, when he’s marching with all the other athletes, carrying his country’s flag and yells his country’s motto while pumping a fist into the air, we know exactly what he means.
The Latino from south of the border speaks broken English interspersed with his home area colloquialisms and politely calls women Senora or Senorita.
These are but a few examples of unique characters who must sound different. Each would be enhanced by the way the author introduces them into the story.
The cowboy always wears boots, even with a tuxedo.
The African man plays his drums because he misses home, but doesn’t want to miss a chance at the Olympics either.
The Latino does his own cooking because he can’t get real authentic south-of-the-border cooking at a restaurant.
When you develop your characters well, many times, even their simplest conversations will appear to the reader as being spoken with some sort of accent or brogue.
Never overlook that once you set up the special characters that people your story, their dialogue must follow suit. You must set your characters apart, not only in mannerisms and such, but in their dialogues. Otherwise all your characters will sound like you, the author, and will speak the same language as you.




LINK TO AMAZON AUTHOR PAGE

           LINK TO SMASHWORDS AUTHOR PAGE


Author, Painter, Photographer
Eric Hoffer Book Award Winner
National Indie Excellence Book Awards Finalist (past)
Pushcart Prize Nominee
Global eBook Awards Nominee
2014 National Indie Excellence Book Awards Finalist
Global eBook Awards Bronze
Global eBook Awards Silver
Art Gallery: http://www.MaryDealFineArt.com
Gift Gallery: zazzle.com/IslandImageGallery*

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

On Writing Chase Scenes

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson Author of  The Frugal Editor,  the winning-est  in her award-winning HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers This article is excerpted from some editing I did for a writer of experimental fiction when I was on a Greater Los Angeles Writers Society panel writer of any genre can apply these suggestions to the chase, getaway, or high action scene in your script or manuscript before you send it to an agent or publisher or, better still, while you are writing the first draft.  Sometimes even the most fascinating, interesting and irresistible  detail can slow down the forward movement of your story. So as much as writers are told that detail is important, purge as much as you can from your action scenes and put it somewhere else or dribble it into narrative in other places in your manuscript. In the process, ask yourself if your reader really needs to know the color of the protagonist’s eyes. As important as detail is, some is better left to t

Ampersands: Pretty Is as Pretty Does

   By Carolyn Howard-Johnson Author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers   Have you noticed how ampersands turn to gibberish when they are entered into some blog services like Google's blogpsot.com? That is only the beginning of problems ampersands cause for editors, and publishers of all kinds. Many of the difficulties they cause go unnoticed except by the publishing pros we would all like to impress like agents, librarians, bookstore event directors, and the acquisition editors at Knopf!    That's why I added a new section to the second edition of the winningest book in my #HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers,  The Frugal Editor . Because ampersands seem to be so popular these days, it's especially important for editors and authors who publish books to know a little about their history, how to use them, and how gatekeepers and readers of Lynn Truss's famous zero-tolerance a

MARGARET FIELAND INTERVIEW (guest blogger)

When did you first know you were destined to be a writer? LOL, I never realized I was destined to be a writer -- I fell into it. I'd written poetry for years, collecting it in notebooks stacked in my attic when I wrote one I wanted to keep. This led me to several online sites and ultimately to discovering the Muse Online Writers Conference where I hooked up with Linda Barnett Johnson and joined her writers forums. She required everyone to write both fiction and poetry, so, with much trepidation, I started writing fiction. Then I got hooked on it, wrote a chapter book, took the ICL course and actually learned how to write it. Then in 2010, I was seized by a desire to write a sci fi novel, so I spent six weeks or so on world building, mostly, with a bit of plotting thrown in for good measure. Who would you cite as your influences? I'm a way-back sci-fi fan, and Robert A. Heinlein influenced me heavily. I took a lot away from his writing, notably the value of surpris