A new start!

[erastes]

And by that I mean that (as most of you will already know, so no need for further comment!) I've closed my underlucius fandom journal and will now be here on a permanent basis.

It's scary.

Am writing a short story and my first completely (or so I thought) unlikeable, unredeemable character. However, I'm not as clever as I thought I was as when I read it out to my mother she said "oh - poor man, I feel really sorry for him." *headdesk*

However: Have a quandry. It's a character study. He's thinking the entire story and he sounds more intelligent than you'd give him credit for. Hmm. need to try and address that, but what I was wondering... Do untutored people sound like that in their own heads? Do you think in dialect? *ponders*

Comments

[rwday.livejournal.com]

Even if the character might speak/think in a dialect, I'm not sure you'd want to write the whole story that way. It's hard enough reading the dialect bits in Gone with the Wind or Secret Garden, since so much of this story is interior, it would be almost unrelieved and quite difficult for you to write and most readers to read.

Besides, I don't think it's so much the dialect that's the problem as the vocabulary. Illiterate people are going to generally have a vocabularly limited to words necessary to function in daily life. Even those with poor educations (I'm thinking of my stepdaughter here - she barely scraped through high school and never reads anything) have limited ability to describe things fully and tend to use three small words when I'd use one larger one.

I had a similar problem with David who, like your character, was not stupid but had no real formal education and I had to be continually looking out that I didn't use concepts or references he'd have no way of knowing. It's tough.

I stand by the idea that it would be easier for you to give the character some level of education and slip that fact into his backstory than to rewrite the entire piece to make him sound less articulate. Though you'd probably learn a lot as a writer from doing that. Good luck, either way!

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Yes, and that's the problem. I want him to have these over blown ideas about his importance in the world... and I want to write it beautifully and HE'S SPOILING IT with his grubby hands.

*kicks him*