Young Writers Society

Hello, everyone. I was just wondering opinions. When you write a story in first person, what is your ideas and takes on using the actual voice of the character. What I mean is using grammatical mistakes on purpose such as "me and my sister loved..." We all know it would be "my sister and I." What do you guys think of this? Another example would be in the book Precious or The Catcher In The Rye[/b]. Do you think this enriches the content or just makes the novel 'stupid' and complicated to read. I will admit, I did fine [i]The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn difficult when I was in high school because of this style.

I'm currently writing a novel with a mix of first person present tense and first person past tense. I'm trying figure out how I want the teller to speak. Of course, he is very smart and 'literate' however, I'm just not sure if I should slip in a few mistakes of his speaking.

For speaking, definitely. Nobody speaks in the Queen's English, except maybe the Queen. Otherwise it just comes off as forced - but whatever you do it really needs to be consistent to be realistic, and a little different for each character.

Even for narrative, especially if it's in first person, it might work to your advantage to throw in consistent errors. They don't even have to be errors - colloquial language and idiolects can help to define the character, too.

Blink's advice pretty much hits the nail on the head. ^^ My own two cents are:

Just write it out the way you think the character would speak. As the novel progresses, you'll find his voice changes. Sometimes it's because of character changes, but more often than not it's the author growing into a character's voice. It took me about 20k into my first-person (past-tense) novel to get an honest feel for how the character spoke. I had an idea before then, but it was only when I started spending word-count with her that I got her voice correct for her.

To get my rough idea on the speaking style, I came up with a list of traits her background would have instilled in her. Because she's a trained fighter and has killed, plus she's an empath (senses others' emotions) she's rather cold and cynical. She's also caring of those she's loyal to, and witty. Those four traits were the basis for her voice, and eventually they wove themselves together into who she was.