Acceptable Forms of Speech for a Novel

Hi Larissa,

Good question. I think in this day & age, a large percentage of your readers will be familiar with txt spk & emoticons. I'd say, if they are true to your characters, keep 'em. If you want, you can always put a glossary in the back for us old f*rts!

Congratulations on doing so well on your book!

cheers,
Mike

I see no problem with it. You'll maintain some realism that way that you would lose if you spelled it out.

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Heck, I don't know, but it sounds good. Just hope everyone reading it is familiar with e-speak or wants to look up a list. Yes, I have a list of e-speak words, but am not much into it. Being in admin at command level for too many years ruined me for such things, but I find it interesting just the same. Go for it, why not? Chris said anything was legitimate in this draft process, just to get the word count up. He also said any lengthy work we consider a novel, therefore IS a novel. I think your idea is good. I like it.

Need a writing buddy?

Gloria (Mokimom, Moki is my dog)

As long as you're ONLY using it during those passages and then in the messages themselves.

If you start using it in the rest of the novel? NO WAY!

I actually wrote a novel a few years back and in a few chapters, i used only IMs and tried to write only how i knew people wrote/typed during IM chats. Microsoft Word was a bitch about auto-correcting a lot of it. lol

I think it's perfectly acceptable. There are plenty of examples of novels where the author has written in a idiomatic dialect with dialgoue written phonetically to show how it sounds. A couple of lines (taken from Project Gutenburg):

"Shall you carry 'em, 'cause I'm frightened o' breakin' 'em?"

"Are you goin' a'ready?" he cried, his face full of reproach.

And in Trainspotting, the even the narration is often written in dialect.

So you're in good company :D

Sure, I think you can use electronic short forms if that fits your characters and scenes. It adds credibility. One thing you can do to aid understanding for readers who might not be familiar with the jargon is provide a standard English translation nearby in the chapter. For example, you could have your character explain the abbreviation to a newbie character, or have your character muse about the the jargon and its meanings. Many writers use this technique when inserting phases in another language, or technical jargon, or slang from another era.

I have a twelve-year old girl in my novel that speaks entirely in text-ese. Huzzah for cultural devolution!

Hey! These floors are dirty as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!

My characters email and text each other a lot, and one of them uses relatively heavy 'txt tlk' in messages, as well as not capitalizing everything. (The other makes fun of him for it and threatens to refuse to read emails from him, actually.)

I can't see any reason not to do it as long as you don't write your whole novel in it. xD

I see absolutely nothing wrong with it. I have an email exchange between my MC and her boss that has a little bit of "net speak" in it. Mostly because they are such great friends, and they tend to get carried away. That's the ONLY place I have it though. When I have the book published, I would have them change the font there obviously to make it clear that it is an email or letter.

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Nicole Humphrey
“Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.” by Jessamyn West
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