Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Accents, Banter, and Lizard People?

Alright Wattpad, let's talk Banter. I already dedicated an entire chapter to helping you understand "how" to write dialogue from the technical standpoint. You need your commas, your quotations, your tags, and your spacing, all in the name of making it clear and easy to read. However, let's assume you've got all that down. Now becomes the time to figure out "what" your characters say.

This can come into two questions. The first is how do you make them sound natural? The second is how do you make what sounds natural come off grammatically correct?

Up until now, I've thrown a bunch of ideas and rules at you. Adverbs ought to be kept to a minimum. When you use special things like em dashes and parenthesis, you ought to have a good reason for using them. Always know why your writing has something a certain way, especially when you it can be detrimental to your writing.

So now you're going to write dialogue. You might be thinking that you can toss all of that away now. If you want a character talking in a drawl, you want to type it like it sounds. If they talk using a crap ton of adverbs, then you need to use your adverbs. It really doesn't matter, right? Whatever sounds natural...

And that's the kicker. Even if you do break grammar rules in the name of "realistic" sounding dialogue, you better be sure to make that dialogue sound realistic. Furthermore, and I can't stress this enough, it actually needs to have a legitimate reason for being there. I think that's the thing a lot of people forget when they start writing dialogue. If you're going to choose to write dialogue and break grammatical rules, there should be an obvious reason for doing it.

Let's put this into perspective for you. Let's say I wrote a book. It takes place on an alien world, involves an alien society, and my main character is an alien. Quick question... Is all my dialogue written in the language of the lizard people? Don't be confused, they ARE speaking the language of the lizard people. In fact, the last sentence I wrote was actually written in the language of the lizard people.

If you see someone reading this and they didn't look at you in confusion during that last sentence, they are probably a lizard person. Just relax, don't look at them. If you do, they'll eat your face. Now very carefully, turn up the air conditioning, they're vulnerable to cold. When they start to complain about it, grab a bat and hit them with it before they can react. The cold should have slowed them down enough that you had time. Congratulations, you are now part of the resistance (Editor's Note: Elementalcobalt and Wattpad are not responsible for any bat related injuries sustain while reading this book)

Sorry, where was I? That's right, lizard people. Only lizard people speak lizardeze, but the books are written in English. We accept that even though they are lizard people speaking lizardeze, that we are reading it in English because English is what we understand. It's called a suspension of disbelief. Unlike the actual lizard people, which are very much real.

The same can be applied to anything. Write a book in France, China, or Russia, and if you're English, your characters are probably speaking in English. However, do you give them an obnoxious accent? Say they talk, like, how you say, you imagine a foreigner talking? Unless, in the story, they are legitimately speaking in English with a foreign accent, the answer is NO.

It goes like this... the only point of giving someone an accent is to make that accent noticeable. If they're in a situation where that accent wouldn't be noticeable, then there is little reason to make your reader notice it! For example, if I base a book in Canada, I shouldn't need to rewrite to emulate an accent, eh? While people laugh at their own accents, in normal day to day life, they don't necessarily notice it, and just like advice I've given before, if your PoV character isn't noticing it, then it is not something that should be described.