Switching language rules during a book - advice

[onewhitewhisker]

hi all, hoping for some advice please. I am getting ready to submit a novel to agents. There's husband (English) and wife (American) characters who met in the USA but live in the UK. Most of the action is set in the UK over a few months but there's a few flashback scenes set in the USA. There's also wife's brother, who is visiting from the USA.

My question is - should I write the whole book using UK spelling, or switch to USA spelling when the two American characters are speaking? Sounds like overthinking I know. but there's a fair bit of dialogue and I had a comment on my previous draft that the American characters didn't sound distinctly American enough. So I have been working on their vocabulary and phrasing, but the American spelling also seems to help cue in to making them 'sound' American. But what I really don't want is for an agent to not get that this is deliberate and think I'm just sloppy and inconsistent. Anyone had any experience of handling this themselves or thoughts on what an agent's view would be? Thank you!

If I were aiming for the UK market then I would write using English spelling. It annoys me when I read color in a book. Also it would be really annoying if they switched. You can't tell when someone speaks how they are spelling the word!

I agree you need to have the US characters saying gotten and sidewalk and oriented and talking about public schools and malls.

Disclaimer - I am not an agent. I am a text editor tho.

I’m an editor. You need to be 100% consistent with spelling throughout the book. Colour doesn’t sound much different from color so the spelling doesn’t really help. Vocabulary choice, grammatical features and phonetic spelling in dialogue are how people usually get it across.

I've never seen this done in a book, and think it would jar and be actually distracting.

Thank you everyone. That's really helpful. Will stick with UK spelling throughout.