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@rose-colored-fancy

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give them an accent, since they probably do have one, but if they get a POV, they can mention how all the others have accents to them. And people from different regions of the same place can always have regional accents.

I usually just describe accents like “They had a (region) accent.” That’s it. Just mention it once and it’s fine. I’m not a fan of writing it phonetically, I find it distracting and hard to read.

All very true, and sound points. However, I have found that if a book points out too many characteristics of a person, it gets old and redundant (and accents are one of those possible characteristics). I’ve also found that if every character has an accent that is described in the book then the quality of having an accent becomes less useful to develop character voice. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I use accents to help develop character voice, and thus I really only want some of the characters to be defined by a cultural accent. For instance, most characters in my series will be French or Norman in origin, but I don’t plan on describing their accents at all. However, the character with the Arabian/Muslim Egyptian accent I do want to describe since it sets her apart from the majority of the other characters. Did that make any sense? Really what I’m trying to get is that offhandedly mentioning that a character has an accent but not at all describing it bugs me in books. This is really a personal thing I guess, because you are right, everyone has an accent, I guess I just want to focus on the accents that are most unique to the majority of the characters and ignore the lesser accents.

And yes, I agree, I don’t like describing it phonetically either, but that’s really what I was asking about because just saying they had a regional accent is the epitome of telling instead of showing (not that that is necessarily bad), because readers probably have no idea what that accent sounds like.

OSP has some great vids, thanks for sharing that one.

Will that work for you? The manuscript is technically already done, but my other beta-reader won’t be able to do it until then.

Yep, works great for me. I’m really looking forward to reading it, you are very well studied in the art of story and writing, and I can’t wait to see that knowledge in action. 🙂