Sail, I have to confess....I don't understand what's going on in your drabble.

BWAH! Good morning, empress, and may I suggest one small change, for rhythmic flow?

Tep, the picture I got from Sail's was her and a guy, playing an ongoing video game, her being better at it than the guy was, her feeling the need to somehow excuse that she was better at it than he was.

The scores started diverging, she began apologising.

That was the picture in my head, anyway.

BWAH! Good morning, empress, and may I suggest one small change, for rhythmic flow?

Please.

That's what I got from Sail's drabble also, along with the idea that her trivia scores were going to make her unwelcome in the In Crowd.

Dialogue's tough. It's double-tough. Characters can't talk like people really talk (proven to me by recording every conversation around me for a couple days), and yet to be realistic they can't say exactly what they are thinking/feeling either.

"There isn't enough
to keep me busy.
Customers are few;
I'm going crizizzy.

For the scan (scansion?):

There's not enough
to keep me busy
few customers
I'm going crizzizzy.

Keeps the two-two rhythm. Why yes, I have been writing a book section dealing extensively with bembe drumming and the clave rhythms Bo Diddley made famous...

Characters can't talk like people really talk (proven to me by recording every conversation around me for a couple days)

Huh. Mine do. I read every chapter section aloud. Specifically in the Kinkaids, JP's voice is very much the voice of the man I remember, and I want it stone dead perfect, his voice. So far, so good; my friends and family who knew him are all agreed on that. My sister read a few paragraphs on London Calling, misted up, and said "That just really brings him back - I miss him."

So they can, but it's tricky.

I like that much better, Deb. Thank you.

I didn't mean voice exactly, deb. That definitely needs to be real. I meant filling the page with "um..uh...yeah, it's like, you know...I had this thing - hang on. Yeah, I had this thing that was um like this big, and I don't know, um, where it could've gone...uh, what's the word for a thing that, you know"

You can do that for a character, to make a point and draw the character, but doing it for everybody would drive readers nuts.

Although, it's possible that I am surrounded by particularly poor speakers.

Raq, it becomes a kind of verbal shorthand, somewhere in the translation.

An example, for me, of translating a memory in my head (and in my live music files): Live, at JGB gigs, N would generally do most of the speaking to the audience - believe it or not, Jerry Garcia was pathologically shy about speaking.

So you'd get N saying "Right, okay - hang on a minute, yeah? - what? Oh, right - okay, we've got one more number to do in this set, then we're off for a short break. But we (trips over tongue because drummer tosses funny comment, interrupting him) - bloody hell - right, we'll be back in just a bt."

If I have JP saying that as frontman for the Fog City Geezers in one of the Kinkaids, it'll be condensed down to something like this. First paragraph setting the scene, second is the dialogue as I translate it:

Tonight, I'd asked if the band would mind weighting the set slightly heavier toward rock than it was toward blues, mostly because I wanted to really give the new chambered Les Paul a workout, see how it did. Turned out Jack Carter, the harp player who'd joined the Geezers a couple of years ago, had a few rock runs he'd been experimenting with, so it worked out well. In fact, we caught an edge and went off on a sensational unplanned jam, nailing Berry's Roll Over, Beethoven in a series of lead-tradeoffs between all the instruments up there. As a closer to the first set, it brought down the house.

When we finished, I stepped up to the mic, and got the crowd - they were cheering and hooting - to settle down a bit. "Right," I told them. "We're going to take a short break, but don't worry, we'll be back in a few minutes."

So the extraneous stuff can be implied in the crowd noise and the picture of the crowd you paint - without a word of dialogue spoken - and the action is there in his dialogue to the audience. But it's one line, and it's in his voice.

Just dumping the extraneous in favour of the scene and the sense.