I have a character who drops his H's. I am having difficulty working within inverted commas. I find myself avoiding starting a sentence with the letter H as a workaround but have now run into an obstacle. I have to start a sentence with Halt: With the inverted commas it looks like this ''alt!' said Knox. Instead of 'Halt!' Said KNox. Not sure if I have explained this let alone found a solution. It looks messy.
Is it mandatory that you show him dropping the H's? I tend to think that phonetic reproduction of accents is not a good idea.
I like to add the odd word or two regional words in someones speech to emphasis a persons place of birth or upbringing. I don't over do it with phonetics. The person in question drops his H's, he's an army sergeant from London, circa 1785.
I'd drop some H's but not every last one - people don't usually "Halt" shouted Knox " 'avent you got a fecking pass"
If sending to a publisher - let them deal with the typography. If self-pubbing - you can make it less "messy" by adding a space: ' 'alt!' Also keep in mind that you don't have to show that the Hs are dropped once you establish that and the reader understands how this character talks.
Either do as suggested above and don't drop H's when you start a quotation, or cleverly add a word or two to the beginning of the dialogue. So instead of the line being "Halt", make it, "Now then, 'alt right there!"
another option is to use a synonym like 'stop'. Also if he's using Halt as a command, it would usually be prefixed by the unit " as in "Squad 'alt " shouted Knox
I'd follow the "avoid phonetic spellings" idea. Explain the first time that he drops his Hs, then trust your reader to remember. "Halt!" the seargent ordered, though his accent made it sound more like "alt".
This seems like a good workaround. Putting my hand up as a reader who enjoys creative ways of portraying an accent in dialogue, as long as it's not wildly distracting. But hey, that's me as a reader with zero editorial experience! Just what I personally like. I disagree. I've seen this done many times in books and it's just another way of getting an accent across to the reader. When it's used sparingly (or just once in a lot of cases), it serves it's purpose of portraying the accent without distracting the reader from the actual dialogue
I disagree. Remember, the idea isn't to do it hundreds of times the way you would if you showed the dropped H phonetically, but to do it once or a very small number of times and then let the reader remember.
I'm in the avoid-the-funky-phoentics club, too. Or putting much of an emphasis on accents and dialects (unless it's to identify or signpost a character to a reader from a different POV). I've found that of all the dialogue mechanics in literature, the accent just isn't very important since, you know, we can't actually hear them.
And we only ever seem to want to spell out OTHER people's accents. We don't write phonetically when we're writing our own accents, but somehow we want to start writing phonetically when we're writing "the other". ETA: And even then, we only phonetically write selected aspects of the accent, not the whole thing. It's weird.
Good point. I would sound like a syllabic train wreck if I did that: Whaddya mean wereoutta beer-ah? Howmasupposda get drunk?"
In this particular instance, since you've managed to work the rest of the examples without the orthographic bugbears you're trying to avoid, could you contextualize the statement rather than delivering it as formatted dialogue? Knox ordered the man to halt. He didn't. Knox bellowed again. The man ran on. Don't make me shoot you, you cunt. Resigned, Knox braced the butt of his rifle into his shoulder.... No actual dialogue tags needed. ETA: Forgive the C-bomb. Clipped H's and C-bombs go hand in hand in my head. Thanks, Robert Carlyle.
Totally unforgivable ... clearly it should be "Fucking stand where you are Cunt, or I'll blow your fucking head off" Incidentally I don't know if its the same in the US forces but in the British army you don't use "Halt" for " stand still you cunt" ... it's for either bringing a group of soldiers to a stop as in " Companeeeee, halt" or for the challenge " halt, who goes there" - which translates as "don't fucking come any closer or I'll shoot you" the "stand still or i'll blow your poxy head off" command is "Stand where you are" (shouting "freeze" like you are in a 70's cop show is a totally unforgiveable sin and will lead to an officer getting mess fined or a O/r having the piss ripped out of him for weeks )
It can work, though. Stephen King uses a similar type of style in his writing and once-in-awhile so does Rick Riordan. I'm sure other authors use a different approach, but these are the two I'm most familiar with.
