As I worked to develop some of my minor characters, I decided to give one a stutter. Then I had to figure out how to write a stutter. Fortunately for me, I have a lot of resources to tap into for my research– one of my biggest resources has been my father who had a stutter for all his life.

But before we beginning talking specifically about stuttering, there are one very important rules for writing any dialogue that we need to remember:

Don’t go overboard with phonetics

It is a basic rule for respecting your reader’s tolerance level. You should never write speech exactly as it is pronounced if you are writing a character with an accent or a stutter because it will kill your reader’s brain. One blogger I stumbled across enthusiastically declared, “I r-r-recom-m-mend you wr-write st-st-stuttering like th-this,” and then proceeded to write the entire article in that…