Novel Progress - Beginning Revisions

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Well, after a couple of emails between my mentor and I, I have started my revisions in earnest. Right now the majority of them are dialogue related. Which is interesting since I thought dialogue was my strongest capability in a story.

The cardinal sin I committed while writing the dialogue was that I had made the characters sound much to alike. More than likely this was due to letting my own diction seep through as I wrote the draft. Understandable, considering the speed I was trying to keep in order to finish the thing.

So now after having basked in the afterglow of accomplishment, I now start the task of making my characters sound different from one another. I guess for starters some contractions would be nice, according to some of my critique partners.

Picky, picky. Ah well, as long as I don’t all make them sound alike when I relax their speech then that would be good. I could just give them all cockney accents, even though they are nowhere near the British Isles.

It would be hilarious though, wouldn’t it?

I’d like to know what your thoughts are on accents and dialects. Can they be used effectively without making them look like caricatures? And can you use accents or dialects from our own world in Fantasy or Science Fiction worlds without having the reader stop and go “Why is there an Irish guy in the middle of that group of dwarves?”.