Young Writers Society

How do you show them in stories? I myself have a slight lisp, and I can't even describe it. Help would be nice. ^.^; I don't see them much in stories, and when they are, the characters are ridiculous and seem sterotypical to me.

Hmm, my best advice is not to make the character itself ridiculous or stereotypical. Give it a personality that isn't supposed to be laughed at because of the lisp. Also have it try to correct its lisp to make it more realistic. I have a slight lisp/stutter/verbal dyslexia that I always try to correct. It can get frustrating after a while, especially if you think that people wont take you as seriously once they hear your lisp/stutter/etc. So having the character get frustrated over their lisp might make the reader take them seriously.

Saint's story Ahoy Insanity has a girl with a lisp.

A lot of people do it like this: "I-I-I just n-n-need..." Kind of? I think writing someone with a lisp for a long period of time would be frustraiting to the reader and the writer, though, haha.

Suzanne wrote:I think writing someone with a lisp for a long period of time would be frustrating to the reader and the writer, though, haha.

You could mention a few times in the beginning that the character has a lisp, and then reiterate later on. Just saying that they've got a lisp may make the reader actually hear it in their head. Like with accents; saying that someone has an certain accent while dropping a hint of said accent in their dialogue can make the reader hear that accent (it can also make their dialogue legible XD). For example, in Ella Enchanted one character was described as smacking her lips after making an 'mm' sound. It was never actually put into the dialogue, but I always heard the smack in my head when she talked.

Thanks for the advice! ^.^ I'll definitley use it. A minor but important character in a story I'm writing has a lisp, and I needed help with it.

"I-I-I just n-n-need..."

ooh, but that's stuttering Lisps are when you put the "th" sound in for the "s" sound in speech. Which makes it ironic that the word "lisp" itself contains an "s", haha.

I don't know if you'd want to directly include that in dialogue (as in writing "th" instead of "s") because it's like trying to write in an accent. Say I wanted to write in a Mexican accent: I wouldn't spell all the words differently, but I might avoid words that are difficult to say for a non-native-English speaker, or I might qualify in the dialogue tags that a certain word was said more slowly, or just differently. For example, my Spanish friends say "yolk" instead of "joke" because it's hard for them to make the "j" sound. But if I were writing it in a story, I wouldn't put the word "yolk" in for "joke", I'd just show the effects of it in other peoples' reactions to their speech and in their description.

While I know that accents and speech impediments are not the same thing, I think that they can generally be discussed the same way in terms of literature. Hope that helps a bit!

Wow, I just wrote a whole blog entry on lips. :P Here it is, if it's any help at all (to get in the mind of someone with a lisp, you know): http://www.youngwriterssociety.com/weblog_entry.php?POST_ENTRY_URL=19474

Basically, lisps are just...hard. Very hard. To deal with, to listen to, everything. Show the awkwardness, how people notice but ignore it/torment them about it. Mention is as you would mention an accent, but try not to write it out, like 'ssshe went to the st-store.' That's just...odd.

Good luck!

~JFW1415