LANGUAGE!
Okay, Cat and I had a bit of a discussion involving speech-as-text.
Me: "They need an excuse to act - we are still charged with keeping harmony after all."
Cat: "They need an excuse to act - we are still charged with keeping harmony, after all."
When I had it written, the character is not putting a pause between 'harmony' and 'after all'. It is all one thought. Cat considers 'after all' to be an afterthought spoken by the character, and thus the comma (separating clauses, I believe she said). The thing is, written text converted to spoken word -- I don't want someone reading it to put a 'pause' after the word 'harmony'. When I wrote it, I didn't hear a pause... but if the comma is there, when I read it I hear the character hesitating for a half-beat.
And that's just it... when I write how I hear someone speak, I want to capture how they speak, including anything stylistic to their speech. And this, I think, means that sometimes you have to throw out rules of writing to be able to capture that. Especially if you're writing it in a fashion where you can't put in 'she paused' or 'she said' or 'she hesitated'. If it's a "script" of sorts, where you read it as it is written...
So, I asked Cat, 'how would you write it then, so there's no hesitation?' The answer was 'you don't'. I find that unacceptable. There has to be a way to write in a fashion which gets exactly the kind of stress you want, or the rhythm you want.
Ideas?