: Re: First Person Voice - Same as speaking? When writing in first person, if the POV character talks with a certain dialect or type of diction (eg. "I ain't got all day! Hurry it up, will ya?")

@Kevin153

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People don't hear themselves as speaking with an accent. "Accent" is always an outside judgment--one person's experience of another person's speech. So if you try to write first person with an accent, you create POV confusion right away. Grammatically it's first person, but it sounds like a third person account.

I recommend not trying to spell words the way the character sounds (and especially not the way they sound to someone else). That always slows the reader down, and greatly increases the chance of popping readers out of their fictional trance.

Instead, write what the character would write (if they could write). Illustrate the character's education, class, roughness, and attitude not by spelling words the way they sound to others, but by the character's choice of words and grammar. There's no need to misspell words even if the character would. (You can get away with that once or twice, but a little goes a very long way.)

Now, when the narrator narrates other characters' dialogue, you have a little bit of license to write what the narrator hears. You can use a tiny bit of quirky spelling, but again, a little goes a long way. And note that the narrator will hear accents and dialects only when people speak differently than the narrator.

I recently read a story in which the first person narrator said "would of." That simple grammatical flaw (used once or twice in a 10,000 word story) gave me plenty of clues about the character's background.

A final note: It seems to me that your example doesn't show accent so much as dialect or diction. Those are similarly invisible to the person who speaks them.

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