Writing in First-Person

quickly becomes a pain in the ass when you’re writing characters who aren’t like you.

See, I’m working on a story. A real one, this time. And I’m writing it in first-person using three people, the three primary characters. Two of them are pretty easy to write, but the third… The third is a very bestial character. One of those “strong in the body, weak in the mind” deals. Not EXTREMELY weak – so I guess that puts him more at “rather bestial” – but he’s definitely the least intelligent of the bunch.

And that leaves me in a quandary. That, and his particular dialect – lots of dropped letters, etcetera. D’ I write iht with an emphasis on his dialect? He’s gotta be distinct from the other two (a jittery, not very confident codemonkey/metahuman and a paranoid, “lives in a house in a forest all alone” ex-scientist). I want to write in a way that makes it feel like he’s thinking the words that are on the page, but at the same time what I write has to be readable.

Dilemmas…

~ by Danielle on February 12, 2009.