on rendering speech into prose, mostly.

That said, consider Kenneth Goldsmith's "Soliloquy", in which he transcribes every word he said for a week.

This renders me a monster of sorts. Thank god I am capable of ordinary, human inarticulacteness from time to time or I would be stoned by the villagers.

If my typing skills were adequate, I'd be a paragon!

i find it hard to write "he said" on a page. one thinks: is it REALLY invisible? really? ... the k goldsmith book sounds interesting; actually doing the same oneself might be a worthwhile experiment, also. does he not record the other halves of conversations with people?

ed mcbain or uh elmore leonard or uh i dunno - someone on the comics board said of comix writer x as compared to comix writer y that x writes realistic dialogue as opposed to y that writes Realistic Dialogue, or possibly "Realistic Dialogue" or "realistic dialogue"

Speech in novels : real speech :: characters in novels : real people.

Perhaps.

It's not entirely invisible, but it's far, far less visible than the diabiolical catalogue of alternatives; 'he smiled', 'she muttered', 'he giggled' YUCK YUCK YUCK.

I try to add just as many 'he said', 'she said' as necessary to make the dialogue readable, and no more, and definitely nothing else instead.

Beth's right about realism too. The occasional example of inarticulacy, if important to the character, is bearable. Too much of it and you put the darn thing down.

i mean if done too much this becomes a stylistic polyphony tic sort of thing, which is cool too, but jumps out. if done judiciously this is about as totally unobtrusive as it gets.

"Ray, why are we taking this route," she asked plaintively.

vs.

"Ray, why are we taking this route?"

The plaintive whine of her voice only drove him to avoid eye contact more studiously.

etc.

That is how you do it.

(We aim to please!)

It was too late. "Everybody grab a bucket," Tom said balefully.

"The situation is grave," Tom said cryptically.

"Whew, that sure spiced things up," he said gingerly.

OMG I have had fantasies of doing this since I was a kid.

David Foster Wallace seems to be someone who's interested in the tics of everyday speech, to the extent that he'll sometimes incorporate them into his own literary voice -- i.e., starting sentences "And but so..."

Mamet is odd, because he has this disarming way of making all of the "natural" pauses and repetition and interruptions of speech sound not natural at all but stilted -- although this is sort of mostly his directorial style, I guess, and the effect is probably to draw greater attention to the way the language is used.

I frequently invert word order e.g. "Drop me off" = "Drop off me", use intuitive contractions whenever possible (hafta, gonna, coulda), employ far more colons, semicolons, ellipses, and double-dashes than are strictly necessary, string together sentences with withs-buts-ands to well past their breaking points, and make use of awkward dialogue handles "Yeah but no // Uhh, well" but I generally dislike "real speech" rendered in prose/drama. Something about the the peppery use of apostophes "We were goin' to the river -- runnin' real fast' seems more artificial proper spelling.

Cormac McCarthy to thread.

Also, it's been hard to unlearn the rules about dangling participles, and leave people chattering as they actually do and not as my elementary grammar teachers have told me they're supposed to.

I agree with this.