"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.

That's a killer example, Deb. The way I look at it, turning the messiness of actual speech into realistic dialogue is a bit like pruning a bush to achieve a "natural" shape. You remove the bits that are throwing the plant out of balance or sucking the vitality from it, but what you're left with is something that really does seem as if it could have just grown that way without any help.

Signed,
Wants to kill the yard guy who trimmed my viburnum so that it looks like a meatball.

Anne, exactly. That whole trim-natural growth analogy, that's just dead on.

A meatball? You mean, he tried to turn it into topiary?

Because topiary is Satan's Personal Handicraft.

Not so much topiary as buzzing it down with a hedge trimmer so that it looked like a green blob on a post. (still mildly bitter - got no beautiful viburnum berries last year as a result)

Yep, I agree, deb. But that's why I think it's very tricky to write dialogue. You have to have the skill to trim the viburnum, but not make it into a meatball.

I just found a great (albeit grim) overview of publishing finances from the publisher's point of view here: [link]