Should I write his accent phonetically? I would say not. It's too much for a whole book.
Should I just mention that yes, he does sound like a dockworker from London in the 60s living in the present day?
If you can do it in a way that isn't awkward, but most ways are going to be, because doing it that way is essentially info dumping.
And when I do use certain phonetics, such as 'y' know' or 'an'' or 'this is that and there, right,' etc, should I use the full word or the slang spelling?
I was going to say the full word, but then I have used "darlin'" when I wanted to get across that the character dropped the g. But that was one word, and again we're talking about a whole book.
If I were you I'd concentrate on sentence structure and slang - people from each non-English speaking country have a certain way of constructing their sentences that's different from the way an English speaker would say them, and the same goes for people from different regions of the same country. If I were you I'd get a whole load of recordings from the region you want his accent to be from and listen to how the sentences are structured, and mimic that. That will get the accent across without annoying people with phonetics.
Also, funny that you've done this because I've also made myself up an author LJ, I just haven't gotten around to do anything with it yet. Great minds think alike! :)
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Should I write his accent phonetically?
I would say not. It's too much for a whole book.
Should I just mention that yes, he does sound like a dockworker from London in the 60s living in the present day?
If you can do it in a way that isn't awkward, but most ways are going to be, because doing it that way is essentially info dumping.
And when I do use certain phonetics, such as 'y' know' or 'an'' or 'this is that and there, right,' etc, should I use the full word or the slang spelling?
I was going to say the full word, but then I have used "darlin'" when I wanted to get across that the character dropped the g. But that was one word, and again we're talking about a whole book.
If I were you I'd concentrate on sentence structure and slang - people from each non-English speaking country have a certain way of constructing their sentences that's different from the way an English speaker would say them, and the same goes for people from different regions of the same country. If I were you I'd get a whole load of recordings from the region you want his accent to be from and listen to how the sentences are structured, and mimic that. That will get the accent across without annoying people with phonetics.
Also, funny that you've done this because I've also made myself up an author LJ, I just haven't gotten around to do anything with it yet. Great minds think alike! :)