Welcome, Sara Hantz!

Sara is the author of There’s Something About Nik, reviewed here yesterday. Look for its release on February 13

Thanks so much Sascha for having me as a guest on your awesome blog. I’d like to post today on the setting and dialogue in ‘There’s Something About Nik’ as they’re both things people have been asking me about.

When I first decided to write ‘There’s Something About Nik’ I wanted to place him as far out of his comfort zone as I possibly could. This was why I chose to set his story in the US and not somewhere closer to where he came from, like the UK. I did this because not only did I want him to experience life as a commoner, which would be strange enough, but also to have him surrounded by people who had totally different customs and ways of behaving from people in his country. Who, even though they spoke English, used language very differently from the way he’d learned it. I wanted to make it as weird an experience as possible.

I’ve been asked about the formal dialogue I used for Nik. This was deliberate on my part because I wanted to emphasize the huge cultural difference between him and Amber. English was his second language, and although he’d been learning it from a very early age, that didn’t prepare him for the English that was spoken in the US. I wanted him to misunderstand things and get himself in a fix. To show the humor in his situation. While writing, I had to be careful not to let his formal way of talking spill over into the rest of the book. It helped by saying all the dialogue out loud as I wrote it.

Thanks, again for inviting me over. I’m happy to answer any questions you have. I can be reached here https://www.facebook.com/theressomethingaboutnik/

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