Working Hard. Maybe Too Hard.

So Doug and I recently came off a 2-hour Skype session where we reviewed, debated and finalized the little corrections and changes to our manuscript based on concerns from our Beta-Readers. One such concern was the speech pattern of a one-page character, Ikiru the bartender, who was written (by me, I confess) with a, shall we say, pronounced Japanese accent. Think Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Okay, maybe not that bad, but the reader was concerned it might come off as seeming racist. Now, I had thought that a Japanese person learning English on their own as a second language might carry a thick accent. Still, we certainly don’t want to insult or demean anyone, so we tried different fixes.

I came up with the idea that he should still be Japanese, but have a Brooklyn accent. Quirky, right?

“Lyme-san! Pretty lady come. She have you picture…”

Becomes:

“Hayadooin’, Cap? A gal came lookin’ for you. Real pretty lady. High class, too…”

Doug didn’t like it.

It didn’t fit in with the Pacific Rim world we’d created. Doug suggested the character should be Chinese instead, maybe from Hong Kong, and when he spoke with the Brooklyn accent, Lyme would call him on it (“Why are you talking like that?”), he’d drop into his normal British accent.

I didn’t like it.

Hmmm, you don’t like the Brooklyn accent, so your doubling down and adding a British accent? Well played.

Then I had an epiphany; Instead of Japanese, I could re-write him as being an Italian-American from Brooklyn:

His name was Mikey. He was a Mafia prince laying low in Seattle until the heat blew over in New York. The Mob considered him an ambassador to The Syndicate. Watanabe considered him a hostage.

Doug didn’t like it. D’oh!

We stared each other down over Skype. Who would emerge victorious? Finally we both blinked and came to the same realization: We are way over-thinking this! The character remained proudly Japanese. However his lines, such as;

“Lyme-san! Pretty lady come. She have you picture…”

simply becomes;

“Captain Lyme! A real pretty lady came looking for you. She had your picture…”

Boom! Problem solved. Does he speak with an accent? That is on you the reader. Me? I was free to move on to correct the 178 missing hyphens I left out. Apparently I’m bad with hyphens. There are probably a few hyphen-related errors in this blog post.

I still like Mikey, though. I might have to figure out how to squeeze him into the sequel somehow…..