Young Writers Society

This question has been on my mind for some time now, and when school was still in, it slipped my mind to ask my teacher. My question is, though, can a character speak differently than what would be considered proper english?

I guess what I mean to ask is, can they talk with common slang, such as "Do you wanna come with me?" vs. "Do you want to come with me?" I've seen it done in published books [only one coming to mind is Of Mice and Men] where it's not really proper words [words used are ain't, ect]. I'm asking because most times, people don't use complete sentences or even sentence structure when they're speaking, it doesn't really come to mind. I'm just confused on how to go about it, I suppose.

~ Wolfy

Of course characters can use improper English! If you want natural sounding dialogue, they have to.

In fact, one great way to show different social ranks is how good their English is. The upper classes would use more proper English, while the lowest class would hardly use any at all, and there'd be a lot more slang. Also, nobles who were raised living a sort of "double life", either with soldiers or with merchants, would probably have the widest vocabulary of all; they'd speak in less-proper English among the lower classes (having grown up doing so) and proper English around their true social circle (again, having grown up doing so).

This article provides a bit more detail on the topic, and how to write good dialogue. The above is just a quick answer to your question. ^^

Of course. If it fits with the setting of your story, your characters can speak however you want them to. I know in the Dragon Riders or Pern series all the characters say "hellu" instead of "hello"... or was it "hallu"? Oh well. My point is, if you want your characters to have a distinctive accent in their dialogue then there's nothing stopping you from making it so. After all, in fantasy stories you're already creating a world that's foreign to your readers, so why should the people of that world speak the same way as us?

But if you plan on doing this, you need to remember something very important, and that is to make easy to read dialogue that won't interrupt the flow of your story. If your reader has to stop and figure out what your character is trying to say, then you've pretty much failed as a writer. You need to be able to immerse your readers into the world you've crafted, and anything that breaks that immersion is a great big "NO" in bright, neon-light letters.

As for me, I took the easy road and just made all my characters speak as normal people of the real world would. Dialogue is one of the areas I know I still need improvement in, (I'm more of a world crafter and lore creator than anything else) so I try to keep it simple for my readers. But if you think you can pull off something like that, then by all means go ahead.

Ugh, thank you both so much! This helped alot from both of you, and I really like that thread that you posted, Rosey.It all helped clear up my confusion.

~ Wolfy

Write as normally as you can, until you get the point where Microsoft Word is pissing you off too much to go on with the slang. Then cancel the grammar in settings. (;