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Ah, this is an entry very applicable to LotR fanfic, Dialect, and I heartily agree with it. Here -- the first line:
"First a warning: Do not attempt dialects with which you are not intimately familiar and for which you have not, in some way, paid your dues."
As a person with a distinct accent, I cringe when I hear my native accent butchered in movies or on TV, and I find it annoying as hell when people write it phonetically. There's a comic strip that does this on a regular basis, and it has always annoyed me to no end because I learned to read by sight, not phonetics, and if a word's look is messed with, my eye comes to a screeching halt -- which is one of the very problems Stern brings up.
Dialect in LotR, hobbit-fic in particular, makes me very reluctant to write Sam, and Sam sometimes suffers in stories because of a lack of understanding or sensitivity about dialect. I sense, but haven't grasped fully, the differences in speech patterns between Gondor and Rohan. That doesn't mean I never have written story with men from Gondor or Rohan or Sam in it, nor am I going to suggest writers leave out any character they want to write -- quite the opposite. My view on fanfic has always been that fanfic is fun -- jump in and do it -- have fun, learn, make friends, write -- and have FUN. Just do be aware that dialect is a powerful tool of characterization, so become aware of it, learn about it, use it well.
Okay, one personal mini-rant -- Pippin was not Scottish!!! If any one of the hobbits was going to have an accent, it would have been Merry: people from Buckland had "strange words" and such that had come from Bree. And there could be a long bit inserted here about the use of dialect in RPS. But . . . that is a post for someone else to explore fully. *smile*
*
The following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
( Dialect )
"First a warning: Do not attempt dialects with which you are not intimately familiar and for which you have not, in some way, paid your dues."
As a person with a distinct accent, I cringe when I hear my native accent butchered in movies or on TV, and I find it annoying as hell when people write it phonetically. There's a comic strip that does this on a regular basis, and it has always annoyed me to no end because I learned to read by sight, not phonetics, and if a word's look is messed with, my eye comes to a screeching halt -- which is one of the very problems Stern brings up.
Dialect in LotR, hobbit-fic in particular, makes me very reluctant to write Sam, and Sam sometimes suffers in stories because of a lack of understanding or sensitivity about dialect. I sense, but haven't grasped fully, the differences in speech patterns between Gondor and Rohan. That doesn't mean I never have written story with men from Gondor or Rohan or Sam in it, nor am I going to suggest writers leave out any character they want to write -- quite the opposite. My view on fanfic has always been that fanfic is fun -- jump in and do it -- have fun, learn, make friends, write -- and have FUN. Just do be aware that dialect is a powerful tool of characterization, so become aware of it, learn about it, use it well.
Okay, one personal mini-rant -- Pippin was not Scottish!!! If any one of the hobbits was going to have an accent, it would have been Merry: people from Buckland had "strange words" and such that had come from Bree. And there could be a long bit inserted here about the use of dialect in RPS. But . . . that is a post for someone else to explore fully. *smile*
*
The following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
( Dialect )