#but the narrator for the second three books doesn't do accents for ANY of the main cast except for the characters who are english

[skepticalcatfrog]

Okay, I need to know. Anyone else who has listened to the Secret Shanghai audiobooks (because that's how I'm reading them), does it bother you when the narrator doesn't do the accents that characters are supposed to have?

[narastories]

So I know we're slipping into Saturday in this timezone, but I nevertheless have a question!

What's your relationship to dialog? Because I have had a variety of opinions from writers: some love it, some hate it. Do you like writing it? Is it easier to write than the rest or harder? Do you have opinions on dialog tags? On written accents and language quirks?

Sorry if this is all vague, the gist of it is: tell me about your approach to dialog. I'm asking because I really liked the dialog in your latest FPA fic.

Good luck with your current project and thank you!

Thanks for asking, I'm still happy to answer this on a Saturday lol

Also, I'm really flattered that you liked the dialog in my fic <3

This is such an interesting topic and I think I have lots of opinions! I would say there was definitely a time when I would have said dialog was my least favorite, but I think it has changed. I'm still struggling with it sometimes, especially if I need a character to give a certain piece of information to another character for plot reasons and I don't want them to sound dry. That still feels pretty hard.

But sometimes it's actually the dialog that comes to me first from a scene and then I make sure to write it down immediately. I think it also makes it a bit easier to see if it flows naturally if you only have the dialog next to each other and nothing else. Also maybe my brain hacked itself into daydreaming up some dialog because I found it hard lool

I also really like banter-heavy scenes in media (you know, the FPA has plenty of good lines for example), and that both motivates and inspires me to try to get the dialog right. It can also be fun once you learn how a particular character talks. (Although I do tend to second-guess myself every once in a while.)

Writing in first POV also indirectly helped I think because when you write the narration you are already closer in tone to how that character speaks, if that makes sense?

Writing different English accents specifically is very hard for me I think, because I never got a lot of exposure to them irl. And because of previous fandoms I know how it looks when someone does it really well (looking at you @geekinthefuschiahair sorry to tag you in a random discussion but this question made me think of how you writing Jamie's Scottish accent always filled me with awe and humility lol)

With the punctuation of dialog and the different language quirks around that I'm not picky. I don't know if you agree as a fellow European but I feel like since we get exposed to a lot of languages in our lives minor things like how someone signals the start of dialog just don't seem like a big deal? What I mean for example is that I ordered three books of the Dresden Files series and it took me actual DAYS to notice that one was the UK edition and had single quotes instead of double quotes around dialog lool I just opened both and went "yeah, looks about right" lmao

It's funny because I know that people can be extremely picky about that.

But if you read books in different languages growing up I think it's not that difficult to adjust to punctuation.

Actually, I think when I translated my first fic to English and put it on AO3 I used the Hungarian way of doing the dialog with EM dashes (I can sense some people shuddering right now) because I didn't know any better. I edited it since ofc lol Then because I got into Outlander and because I lived in the UK for a while I tried using single quotes, but then I had a lot of American fandom friends and decided to spare their eyes lol

So that is to say, I'm not picky about that. As long as you tell me who is speaking, I'm fine. Which is more of a pet peeve of mine. As a writer, you obviously know who is talking. And then sometimes you think oh I don't want to overuse a character's name or "he said/she said'. But I think that's a myth and you can't overuse that stuff. It's repetitive but I think when you read your eyes just glide over those phrases and it doesn't take you out of the scene. But if you have to stop and try to figure out who's saying what that is a lot more tedious in my opinion.

Alright, well I clearly had a lot to say about that so thank you for those excellent questions! xx