curriebelle:

vexahliaderolo:

people typing out accents in joke posts for critrole is funny but if any of you do it in fic i will strike you down myself

Ok I’m actually reblogging this twice because I just realized that if you don’t have practice at it, trying to express accents through dialogue can be really hard and it can be really tempting to just…type ‘em out, so I have five quick tips here:

1) Read your dialogue out loud. Do your best fake accent. Swear to god this is the best way to check if any dialogue works, accent or no. Eventually you’ll recognize that some accents have melodies. There’s a reason why they call Texan accents a drawl, so use long vowels, heavy words. Irish is quick, rolling and singsong – the more pitter-patter fast-pace you can make your verbs, the better.

2) Pay attention to sentence structure. People from different places will build sentences differently. E.g., people with particularly uppity-sounding English accents tend to say “I’ve not” rather than “I haven’t,” so I always use the former for Percy. The Texan accent Fjord uses is pretty easily evoked by dropping articles at the beginning of sentences (e.g., use “Can’t have you getting away” instead of “We can’t have you getting away”), and Jester’s Eastern European accent keeps her away from certain contractions (she’ll say “I do not” more than “I don’t” – not all the time b/c of improv, but you can use that to your advantage in fic). Molly’s Irish accent is a fun one: most other people will curse throughout their sentences, but Irish accents are one of the few that curse RIGHT at the beginning, and then  you can make up fun fantasy swears!! “Hells and devils, you’ve got us in a pickle, haven’t you?”

3) Keywords and word choice. Similar to the above! Pay attention to words characters like to repeat, or synonyms they prefer over others. I already noticed Molly and Fjord prefer “coin”, while Jester and Beau say “money”. And if you think about it, both those words sound better in their respective accents! While VAs are in character, they lean almost automatically towards words that sound better in that accent, I find. It’s even better if the characters have catchphrases or signature words, because dropping those into fanfic can have readers thinking in the character’s accent and you don’t have to do too much hard work to maintain the illusion after that (be careful with overusing them, though. It’s way too easy to have Vex saying “darling” every paragraph).

4) Exceptions / onomatopoeia. Some accent-evoking misspellings or not-quite-words are common enough that writing them with apostrophes won’t kick your reader out of a story. I use “ain’t”, “oi”, and “aye” a lot for Grog, and I occasionally end his -ing words with -n’ (particularly “fuckin’”) because that’s not too intrusive.  Fjord will probably drop the “ing” as well, but he’s well-spoken enough that his verbs don’t DEMAND the -n’ the way Grog’s do – but that’s my opinion! Feel it out, and remember to put apostrophes in when you drop letters o/ it’s good grammar manners.

5) Remove problem words from your dialogue. This feels kiiiiiind of like cheating but also it helps, sort of? Like I mentioned, I’ll drop the -ing when I’m writin’ Grog, but I don’t want to do that too often, so I try to write as much of his dialogue as I can without -ing words (and…it’s hard. It’s Grog challenge mode, but it’s the only way to make him sound like himself without too many apostrophes). If you come across a word that sounds SO wrong that you feel like you NEED to write it out phonetically – use a different word. Rebuild the whole phrase if you must!