Some people stutter, have tourettes, or talk through things they really shouldn't in polite company. Sometimes these people make it into our writing, which they should, inclusion is important.
However, they bring forward an interesting problem. How to write a stammer that is understandable.
I find a stutter can be pretty easy to write. A friend of mine had one growing up and she's worked hard to even out her speech. When presented with how I wrote my stutter, she said it was pretty much bang on. I hung up on the hard consonants, c, k and t sounds mostly. The stutter presented in longer words more than shorter, well used words. It also wasn't entirely consistent, lacking a stutter on a word he'd stuttered on a chapter ago.
With confidence that my stutter sounded sincere, I moved onto my next issue which was balancing between quantity and legibility. Somebody has to read this someday, I want the halting, hung up words to get the stutter across without bogging the reader down. I think I managed it okay, but until I have a Beta reader I won't know for sure.
In the same book I have somebody trying to talk around a mouthful of pizza (she's got table manners for days). I took a bite of pizza one day, said the line and tried to copy it down phonetically. I'm concerned that it's not really understandable. I have context cues in the paragraph to help bridge the gab, but I'm also worried that's pulling the reader out of the scene too.
I'm curious about a couple things:
1) How do you write stutters/stammers/mumbles while balancing the line of intent and legibility?
2) Would anybody be heartbroken if i posted my mumbled dialogue here to see if it can be deciphered? I know this isn't the 'SYW' arena, but this is a rather particular issue.
Tulip Mama <3
However, they bring forward an interesting problem. How to write a stammer that is understandable.
I find a stutter can be pretty easy to write. A friend of mine had one growing up and she's worked hard to even out her speech. When presented with how I wrote my stutter, she said it was pretty much bang on. I hung up on the hard consonants, c, k and t sounds mostly. The stutter presented in longer words more than shorter, well used words. It also wasn't entirely consistent, lacking a stutter on a word he'd stuttered on a chapter ago.
With confidence that my stutter sounded sincere, I moved onto my next issue which was balancing between quantity and legibility. Somebody has to read this someday, I want the halting, hung up words to get the stutter across without bogging the reader down. I think I managed it okay, but until I have a Beta reader I won't know for sure.
In the same book I have somebody trying to talk around a mouthful of pizza (she's got table manners for days). I took a bite of pizza one day, said the line and tried to copy it down phonetically. I'm concerned that it's not really understandable. I have context cues in the paragraph to help bridge the gab, but I'm also worried that's pulling the reader out of the scene too.
I'm curious about a couple things:
1) How do you write stutters/stammers/mumbles while balancing the line of intent and legibility?
2) Would anybody be heartbroken if i posted my mumbled dialogue here to see if it can be deciphered? I know this isn't the 'SYW' arena, but this is a rather particular issue.
Tulip Mama <3