Applejack's Accent · 1:10am Jun 12th, 2013
I'm currently writing the first draft for my Applejack fanfic entitled "Ponies in the Attic".
Since it stars Applejack and her two siblings, I had to first sit down with myself and outline how I was going to represent AJ's southern drawl. I agreed with myself that the best practice would be to not worry about phonetically spelling out her accent at all. Well, almost no worry. Since the writings of my two Outlaw Mares stories, I've gotten a small vocabulary going of western words that fit AJ's speaking style, like the words reckon and y'all, so I don't have to spell every odd twang in her voice.
The only thing I've done thus far was drop that last 'g' in any of her -ing words. Everything else is spelled correctly, but reads so that as long as the reader knows the character, they'll mentally add the accent themselves. At least, this is my plan...
I'm always terribly inconsistent with the accents of the Apple family, or accents in general, even within the same story
I guess that's what editing is for.
I think you've got the right idea, though. I've come to the same conclusion that it's better to leave the accent to the reader for the most part and focus on getting the voice right.