I think it all boils down to convincingly placing your story and your characters. I've been trying to figure out why I have such a disconnect when, as you've described, someone is writing a story set in one country with the colloquialisms and language of another. And the thing is, the placement of setting is everywhere in writing, not just in describing the actual room and the items in it. It's certainly all about the language a character or an author chooses. It would be very hard to convince me a story is set in the American Deep South, for instance, if the characters are all using phrases like "bloody hell" and "jolly good" and "see you in a tick". Even more so, if the author is describing cars as having "boots" or people using "rubbers" to erase things, that's an even greater disconnect from the setting. And it can lead to all kinds of things, including assumptions about the point of the story itself: so, are these people actually in an alternate reality, brought here by dark, scary villains who are now observing their every move???
Which, if you are trying to write a romance about Jenny falling back in love with her high school sweetheart, would make things difficult. An extreme example, I know, but the point is, the narrator has become unreliable to me and thus I start reevaluating my initial assumptions about the book, because I would try to first assume the author knows what he/she is doing.
I'm finding this exploration to be fairly enjoyable right now, as I'm fiddling with a series of stories told from the POV of two central characters, one of whom is British, the other American. When I'm writing from the Brit's POV, I tend to gravitate toward words he might use, as contrasted to writing from the American's POV. But that's a choice in narrative voice, too, to give it a feel of being somewhat in that particular character's mind. I don't know if it will work, or what effect the approach is having. But it's a neat exercise.
I'll say this of the American school system: grammar has gone waaaaaaay to the back burner. The class in my high school was canceled the second year I was there, for example, and even before that, it was offered for only a quarter, not the whole year or even a semester. For whatever reason, it's been deemed unimportant enough to put funding towards, and that's disappointing when I see so many intelligent people in other fields who cannot seem to compose a grammatically correct sentence. Because people notice incorrect things so much more viscerally than correct things, so those problems stick out and follow a person.
Thank YOU for your compliments on my writing. I very much appreciate them, and you for following me over here to the original fiction side of my activities. ♥
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Which, if you are trying to write a romance about Jenny falling back in love with her high school sweetheart, would make things difficult. An extreme example, I know, but the point is, the narrator has become unreliable to me and thus I start reevaluating my initial assumptions about the book, because I would try to first assume the author knows what he/she is doing.
I'm finding this exploration to be fairly enjoyable right now, as I'm fiddling with a series of stories told from the POV of two central characters, one of whom is British, the other American. When I'm writing from the Brit's POV, I tend to gravitate toward words he might use, as contrasted to writing from the American's POV. But that's a choice in narrative voice, too, to give it a feel of being somewhat in that particular character's mind. I don't know if it will work, or what effect the approach is having. But it's a neat exercise.
I'll say this of the American school system: grammar has gone waaaaaaay to the back burner. The class in my high school was canceled the second year I was there, for example, and even before that, it was offered for only a quarter, not the whole year or even a semester. For whatever reason, it's been deemed unimportant enough to put funding towards, and that's disappointing when I see so many intelligent people in other fields who cannot seem to compose a grammatically correct sentence. Because people notice incorrect things so much more viscerally than correct things, so those problems stick out and follow a person.
Thank YOU for your compliments on my writing. I very much appreciate them, and you for following me over here to the original fiction side of my activities. ♥