get gruntled

literally just saying 'he spoke with a Welsh accent'; sure, it's a bit blunt, but it gets the job done in a pinch. "He's completely drunk," he said, his southern drawl lingering on the final syllable as if to highlight the extent of the offence. Y'know, something of that ilk, but not as shit.

learning the specific vocabulary and syntax that someone with that accent might use. Sticking with the Welsh theme, because it's objectively the best accent*, there's a bunch of things that differentiate a colloquial South Walean accent, outside of our famed tendency to elongate a vowel to the point of death. The way we use prepositions (where to by is he?), the vocabulary borrowed from Welsh - saying that someone daft is twp, or something small is dwty - can easily signpost our speech as being from that specific area, without needing to type something like "'e's absolutely 'angin', man, pissed as a faaht 'e is!" Something less jarring, such as "He's absolutely hanging, he is." is just as clear. A character who says "Do you want a cuppa?" is coded or located very differently to one who says "You'll have a cup of tea, so you will."

ditto if there are specific ways that someone from a certain area might refer to a well-known concept. Regional words for mother and father, for example, or words that are class-specific; your character who calls his parents 'mater and pater' is likely inhabiting a different socioeconomic strata than your character who calls them 'mam and dad'. See if there's a colloquial way of saying 'yes' and 'no'; a lot can be signposted if your character says 'nah' rather than 'no', or 'aye' rather than 'yes'. A character saying 'couch' is inherently coded differently to one who says 'sofa'.

The reasons that writing accents phonetically is Generally Ill-Advised, In My Opinion are as follows:

quite simply, you're probably not being as clear in conveying the sounds of the accent as you think you are. Taking JK Rowling's work as the best possible example of this, her attempts at writing a Cockney accent phonetically come across like someone is chewing a mouthful of cheese curds and struggling to contain them. There's no consistency, no proper understanding of how to transcribe syllables into writing in a way that coherently conveys the accent she's trying to portray. I mean this so seriously, but what the flying fuck is: 'Well, 'e 'ad these 'ead pains and 'e was def'nitley nervous. Depressed maybe.' It's a crime, is what it is.

it's just plain hard to read. Trying to wade through sentences full of apostrophes and elision, parsing what's actually being said, gets tiresome. It asks the reader to do work that you're actively making harder for them. And that's not always a bad thing! Making readers Put Some Fucking Effort In can be very fruitful! But do you really want them to be struggling to understand every single thing that your Character B is saying for 350 pages?

which leads me onto the last point, and the most important in my mind: writing out accents like this always, always affects accents that are already in some way Othered. They're either racialised or working class, or associated with certain local regions that have negative stereotypes - think the deep South of the US, or the Welsh Valleys. They're never the 'default'. And this raises thorny questions about what the default is, what the standardised accent is, the accents that do and do not merit differentiation from the norm. You're relegating Character B to being hard to read because he's from, idk, Sunderland. You've decided that he isn't speaking 'properly', and therefore the reader needs to understand that other people think he's speaking weirdly. That, to me, is the principle issue. Because returning to JK Rowling (a sentence I hoped never to type), the only characters who speak like this in her work are working class, or they're from other countries. They're never from, you know, Surrey. Wonder why that is. And it's easy to be glib about it, but I do think it reifies class and regional boundaries in a way that's ultimately harmful.

This isn't to say that there's never a place for eye dialect in writing - Trainspotting (edit to respond to some legitimate comments in the reblogs: I bring up Trainspotting because it's written in Scots and Scottish English, not just Scots, but I agree that this isn't the best example as the Scots portions are not part of this conversation in the same way; consider Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston as a better example, and apologies for the confusion!) wouldn't be what it is without it, and there's definitely a different conversation to be had when it's your own accent and you're making a deliberate point about identity by differentiating through eye dialect - but I think that the blanket assumption of 'oh shit, my character is from Ireland, I'd better type that out phonetically!' can actually be both damaging to your writing and to your character representation, and I think that instead doing the work to really understand the vocabulary, speech patterns and unique aspects of a language or dialect always makes a work feel more authentic and lived-in.

To wit, less of this shite:

There’s mony a slip, an’ I’m no losin’ sight o’ any o’ my suspectit pairsons, juist yet awhile. (One of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels by the very English Dorothy L. Sayers, if you were wondering, and yes, that's supposed to be a Scottish accent; I'd not be bringing it up if it were a Scottish author writing in Scots)

and more of this:

"Are we straight so?"

"Aye, we're straight," said Jim.

"Straight as a rush, so we are." (Jamie O'Neill, Irish, from At Swim, Two Boys)

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knot talk

more psychotic characters written as desirable friends and love interests!!

more psychotic characters as the life of the party or the zany extrovert or the mom friend or the goofball or the glue that holds the team together!!

more psychotic characters being as much a support system for their friends as their friends are for them!!

if you don't know me, i'm ren/vacant/fish and i'm a 28 year old transmasculine black queer autistic person who's currently a full time student while trying to balance delivery apps to make money. last year i was let go from my job because they were trying to push me out anyway and since then i've been a financial wreck. between unemployment not being nearly enough, nearly 900 job applications and the only job i got was immediately so toxic i had to quit within the first four days, and trump fucking with student loans and education (which i'd been using to try and get by while i hopefully get a degree to get a better job) i'm just at my wits end. my partner currently has a disability hearing on 5/20 to see if they're eligible for aid but even that should we get approved wouldn't be enough to cover all of our expenses. if they get denied again then they're probably going to see about going to school and see if the school will accommodate their disabilities. we'll see.

to cut to the chase, we're on the verge of homelessness (again) and i can't make money delivering fast enough to try and make ends meet. the main thing that i can't lose is my car because without said car i can't make money at all so that's the most pressing issue.

my car payment is due 5/17 for $497 dollars. right now i have about $200 but between now and then i doubt i'll be able to make nearly $300 bucks so as per usual i'm turning to you all for help.

if you can spare anything at all, it would be meaningful. i'm trying to build up other sources of money (including embarrassing myself on the internet but that's probably not gonna go anywhere anytime soon if at all) including art commissions, substack subscriptions, and any other side hustle that i can find that actually works (because many Do Not). if you aren't able to, that's totally fine i know we're all suffering rn so rbs help.

links below, take care of yourselves.

thank you to everyone who's donated, i really really appreciate it.

i was thankfully able to make my car payment <3

unfortunately we're still not out of the woods. we're waiting to hear back about my partner's disability claim. if things are favorable, yay. if not then we're kind of back at square one again and they may have to try and get a job though with the market it's like oof.

the cheaper accommodations we were hoping to secure fell through. we're still probably not able to get an apartment based on my income alone (due to rental requirements for income). we may try and finesse a place but that's up in the air and i'm wary of spending money on an app fee to just get rejected.

still no word about if or when i'll get financial aid. that's cool.

if we do end up getting trapped at our current apartment to stave off homelessness, the new rental rate is 1851 alone. that wouldn't include internet, electric, our phones, etc. like literally almost 1900 for a cockroach infested apartment. i've tried arguing with them about the rate but they don't care.

donations are still super appreciated. i haven't set up a gofundme because i need money Now and i don't want to wait and deal with the site's fees.

i'm still offering commissions, doordashing/instacarting, applying to jobs with no luck, applied for other government resources to little success (they may potentially take our food stamps too so that's cool), and have been trying to find a will to live. i don't really have one these days to be honest.

next month will be a year since this bullshit started and i just feel even more helpless than before.

we may be looking at homelessness. my partner has applied for university and i have applied for a scholarship as well but information on money is still up in the air. we just need enough to squeak by this month and i’m hoping that we will be able to get some type of good news in june.

the new rental amount is $1851 for month to month. i wish i could move too. right now i have $1226 thanks to door dashing and all of you all’s generosity. this means i still need $625 to stay in the place we’re at for now and fingers crossed that financial aid for both of us drops in june and we can use that to move somewhere else cheaper.

unfortunately my current complex is shit and won’t let me pay online due to a miscommunication on their part in december and i’ve had to take out money orders instead. this adds a $10 whenever i withdraw money from the bank so overall looking at $635 that i still need to raise.

if you don’t have anything to spare i totally understand. i wish i wasn’t in this position and i hope no one else ever is. reblogs help. i also offer art commissions, and i have a substack where i write about my projects and writing. i’m also willing to beta read anything you have written and i leave lots of comments though i don’t have a specific pay structure for that. thank you again for your time.

paypal info in the first post.