: Re: My story is written in English, but is set in my home country. What language should I use for the dialogue? I'm an amateur writer from the Philippines. I am writing a novelette for an

You have read books like this, or at least are familiar with books like this:

Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is set in Spain, and it is indicated, repeatedly, that the dialogue is in Spanish, in fact in a particular dialect of Spanish. The main character's accent is even discussed. But the dialogue is written entirely in English.

Romeo and Juliet is set in Italy. I doubt Shakespeare even knew a word of Italian. He certainly used none in the play.

And of course, there are translated novels - they are translated in their entirety, the dialogue is not kept in the source language.

Think of it like this: your audience speaks English. Perhaps only English. In such a case, anything in any language other than English is incomprehensible noise. If the alphabet you use is not the Latin one, it's not even noise - it's squashed spiders on the page, that make no sound in the reader's mind. Why would you want to fill pages upon pages with "noise" that means nothing to your reader?

You're confused because what the characters actually say is not in English. But that doesn't matter at all; your goal is not to transport to the readers what the characters "actually say", untouched. The characters don't "really" exist anyway. Your goal is to make your reader share the experience of saying and hearing those words. The experience includes understanding.

The only exception I know of to the above rule is Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace. That work was written in Russian and French, no translations provided (though those are always added in modern editions). The reason it was written like this is that the audience Tolstoy was writing for was all bilingual. Everyone who could possibly read the novel in the author's time spoke both Russian and French. Thus, the book might appear like an exception, but it supports the aforementioned logic.

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: Re: My story is written in English, but is set in my home country. What language should I use for the dialogue? I'm an amateur writer from the Philippines. I am writing a novelette for an

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: Help! My Character is too much for her story! A while ago, I started writing a short story for a competition. It was supposed to be about four girls in a shared student apartment. The plan

: Tool for editing dialogue of each character I would like to edit all of the dialogue of a specific character in my book. Then I want to repeat this for other characters. I think this would

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: Too eloquent characters Here's a critique I've received more than once: "your character talks like a character from a book. He's too eloquent, nobody really talks like that, unless they grew

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