Writing a novel is indeed not as easy as it would seem. If you have already read my recent blog posts, you will know I’m on the 100 days to my first draft of a novel course by the Write Practice.
Submitting around 5000 words every Friday and critiquing at least three other people’s submissions. Just reading 15 to 20,000 words of other people’s first drafts, it does highlight things about the craft of telling a story that you had not yet considered.
Of course, there’s point of view, past tense, and for myself, there is the grammar: Ending sentences with prepositions and seeing comma splices all over the place, for me does produce an irritation, but there’s also dialogue.
When reading dialogue that someone else is saying with either profound accents or under some considerable stress, and reflecting this in the text does cause the flow of reading to have a hickup. Alternatively, even stop and have to go back and reread it, as I did in one case:
“Brian, I’m sure,” said Tom. “Pwease ret me goooooo!” answered Brian.
I’m not trying to say this is horrid, but my attempt to show this would be:
With maximum command in his voice, Tom said, “Brian, I’m sure,” as he held Brian’s neck as tightly as he could. Brian then struggled to answer, with much distortion in his voice, he said, “Please let me go!”
Concerning accents: One of my characters in my novel is from the south of France and in the UK. I do know a Southern French woman and can say that her English is remarkably good. Much better than my two to three phrases of French. Her accent is still profound, as is the character in my novel but I’m not adding any difference to the English text but using the description of the way she said it as I found in this link here; Writing dialogue.
Crime Fiction: Hardboiled Detective 