Writing for an American fandom and sounding like a native is hard. Here and there posts about how to sound like an American have popped up but the past couple of times I've commented in those posts about how to speak like an American or New Yorker I've been jumped on by people who argue that they use different words than I suggested and that they say phrases that I consider non- American all the time. I'll admit that it's quite possible for an American to say "bloody stupid" but it's not typical and isn't, in my opinion, something that should be written in stories that are set in America.
One problem is America is huge. People speak differently depending on where they live and how old they are and when the story is set. The speech patterns that Hollywood and television and books tend to use are often an attempt at a generic, non-geographic version of American English, but a lot of times it is hard to pin down exactly what that is.
I've beta-ed for several non-Americans in many different fandoms and I'm glad to do it because nothing throws me out of a story faster than the mental image of Dean Winchester wearing a dress (jumper). Since writing fiction has been fighting me of late, I thought I'd try to put some of my thoughts on this topic to paper (or worddoc) to attempt to organize them. So here goes:
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