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Dialogue question. Help.

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Arcadia Divine

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One of the characters in my WIP has an incredibly deep and soothing voice with a weird accent or impediment. Basically he has to strain a little to say the vowels e and i and in doing so he elongates those vowels and sometimes even the words.

This brings me to my question, how would I write this both inside and outside dialogue? It would seem silly to put a few extra e's and i's in those words. Outside dialogue I think I have it covered but the dialogue itself has me stumped.
 

jjdebenedictis

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In his own head, he's not going to pronounce things differently to anyone else. The speech impediment is something he'd have to consciously do when he speaks, but it won't affect how he thinks.

As for showing his impediment, if he has a bit of anxiety about how he speaks, then you can have him thinking about that fact when he talks to someone new. That way you don't have to alter how you write it on the page.

You might also be able to play around with how you break up sentences too. For example, by putting dialogue tags preferentially after the words he would extend.

"So, you see," he said, "the wife feels--" He took a breath. "--this wasn't fair."

I dunno. On second thought, that probably would just be annoying. If this sort of structure was used right after the reader learns why he speaks that way, and then you became more subtle with using it, it might work.
 

Arcadia Divine

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This has been stumping me for a long time. My main concern is how to show it right away without annoying the reader. I could break the sentences up, but that could get annoying after awhile. I'm leaning more towards breaking up the sentences, but I don't want that to be all. I want to change it around and add variety. Does anybody else have any alternate ways to do this?
 

Layla Nahar

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I think you could do this by stating something in the narrative about his way of speaking, something along the lines of the following:

Ted raised an eyebrow. "Well, you'll need a lot of luck."

He had some kind of accent, pronouncing 'luck' so that it rhymed with 'book'. Margot wondered where he was from.
 

Bufty

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You are making a mountain out of a molehill.

Write the dialogue in plain English.

Surely what the character says is more important than destroying his dialogue with silly phonetics.

Is it really important that I know anything other than that in the opinion of the listener he has a deep and soothing voice?

Let me know this once -I will remember.

And keep in mind when thinking of going into too much detail about this (or anything else of a similar nature), that what you consider to be the wonderful description of deep and soothing (or whatever you are trying to convey) may not be every reader's idea of a deep and soothing voice (or whatever).
 
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brianjanuary

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When you introduce the character, have your MC reflect on the speech mannerism, then write his speeches as normal dialogue. The reader will get what's going on and fill in the gap for you.

If it's really important to the story, you can have another character comment on the speech pattern later in the work.
 

Fallen

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Stephen King, for his Stuttering Bill chraracter, had Bill repeat a line of dialogue in his head to focus himself. (And it had to be good because I haven't read It for ten years and still remember it:) )

'He thrusts his fists against the post and still insists he sees the ghost.'

Bill would use it whenever he felt himself slipping into stuttering, e.g. (just roughly);

'Buh-Buh-Buh--' He thrust his fist. '--But the clown nuh-nuh--' Against the post. '--never cuh-cuh--' Still insists.... 'Came.'

Coming to terms with language employs tricks like this: Never Eat Shredded Wheat: North East South West. Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants = because, etc. I love watching my kids learn like this, and loved seeing it with stuttering Bill. Highlighed vulnerability and inner struggle beautifully.
 
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lolchemist

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I remember reading Huckleberry Finn as a junior high student and being annoyed as heck because the phonetic spelling Mark Twain used to show the reader how certain characters spoke was just so unbearable! I'd totally advise you to just write your dialogue in plain English if you can help it. Most of your readers will be intelligent enough to remember that that particular character speaks differently after you've mentioned it a few times.
 

BethS

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One of the characters in my WIP has an incredibly deep and soothing voice with a weird accent or impediment. Basically he has to strain a little to say the vowels e and i and in doing so he elongates those vowels and sometimes even the words.

I think you're making things unnecessarily difficult for yourself. What's the point in him having this speech quirk? Is it somehow crucial to the plot?

If not, consider doing away with it. And if it's vital to keep, don't try to duplicate it in dialogue. Just mention that he does it.
 

VoireyLinger

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I would caution against working to get the drawl just right on the page. The reader doesn't need to hear the impediment or accent just exactly like you hear it for them to understand it's there. The more heavy-handed you are in writing it, the harder your reader will have to work to understand.

You can establish early on that he seemed to have difficulty speaking, that he put an odd emphasis on his vowels or some words were drawn out as if he were stuck. In his POV, when he's anxious, he might but extra focus on pronouncing words that give him difficulties while another character might notice his unusual way of speaking becomes more pronounced when he's nervous.
 

skylark

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I'd come at it from a slightly different direction. If he has a speech impediment which is particularly noticeable for certain sounds, he might well avoid words which have those sounds, at least somewhat. So his speech might be slightly stylised in terms of what words he uses - which is dead easy to represent on the page.
 

Bufty

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Many, many years ago a teacher used to stretch certain vowel combinations with such exaggerated and extended emphasis it had us cruel boys struggling to stop laughing - and then competing to imitate it later.

The Industrial Revolution came out as The Industrial Revolewetion.

Explain that once and it would be enough for the rest of the dialogue, but it's not nearly as effective in written form as it was in real life.
 

Jonathan Dalar

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Use the littlest clues to key your readers to his accent. They'll get it. They're not dumb.

Any more, and you'll start hitting them in the head with the book, and who wants to read a story where you get clobbered in the face every time you try to pronounce some unpronounceable accent?
 

Fallen

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Many, many years ago a teacher used to stretch certain vowel combinations with such exaggerated and extended emphasis it had us cruel boys struggling to stop laughing - and then competing to imitate it later.

The Industrial Revolution came out as The Industrial Revolewetion.

:roll: Reminds me of the Life of Brian sketch: Roderic -- wodewic

Small examples, sure. But not throughout the whole novel.
 

Midian

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Count me in the just show it in the beginning a time or two and then we'll get it. You don't need to write every bit of dialogue like that. Trust your reader to understand.

And definitely when you're just in his head he shouldn't have an accent at all.
 

Justin SR

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I think you can write phonetic dialogue and make it work really well. J.K. Rowling does it with Hagrid and Fleur. Stephen King did it a bunch. I like it because it reminds you to read things a certain way.

As long as that character's speech doesn't dominate the book. I've read a few things where phonetic spelling drove me nuts... ahem, Trainspotting, ahem.
 

Architectus

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Just tell us that he speaks that way, and if we want, we will read him that way. Once in a while, have a character mention it or something. It's not important really.
 

Lady Ice

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I really hate it when people just throw in an accent or a quirk. If this quirk is important and noticeable, write it into the dialogue.Chances are you'll find that it isn't important after all.

Of course, if you merely want to say that the Frenchman has a strong French accent, that's fine to just state this in a sentence. Alternatively, you could say things like "He'd lived in England for twenty years and still couldn't shake off his French accent", that indicate a certain way of speaking but don't give a stage direction.
 

DragonSlayer

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In my books if somebody has a weird way of speaking I have my characters mention it and just write the dialogue as normal. I wouldn't want to bog my readers down with trying to figure out dialoque. Unless they have a mouthful of food and try to speak. Like Ron in Harry Potter.

DragonSlayer
 

flapperphilosopher

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Something to remember, too, is that readers aren't going to hear the voices the way you do. When I'm reading, I don't even consider what the characters actual speaking voices are like at all. In my mind they all have my accent and, I suppose, my mental voice. The more I try and explain that the harder it is, haha, so, I suppose, read a good chunk of dialogue and then think about if you 'heard' it or not. Probably not really. I'm not even sure what my character's voices sound like, even when I can see and hear the scenes perfectly in my head. They all have 'mental voice'. They talk differently, using different words and syntax etc., but I wouldn't recognize their voices alone. I know their accents, which aren't mine, and since they're English and I'm Canadian they say stuff like "I'll not" rather than "I won't", etc., but I don't even think about their accents when I read. And that's my own characters!

I'd say, if the way a person talks matters, mention it once, in the context of why it matters, but remember characters will remember the implications of the way they talk rather than hear it. In The Sun Also Rises, by Hemingway, a couple characters are American, a couple are English, and one is Scottish. A few words and a bit of grammar differ between them, but just barely and only if you're paying attention. I could tell you who belongs to which country, but when Brett (English) and Jake (American) are talking, I don't even think about it.

It's possible all this is just me, and everyone else hears way more variety when they read (if so, I'm jealous), but I think most of us have pretty generic voices in our heads. So don't worry too much over making sure we hear the one you want us to, because we won't, haha.

(I hope this makes some sense-- I feel kind of discombombulated after a long day at the, er, retail store (can't wait till grad school!). If not, just ignore me, haha).
 
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