The question is pretty much as the title says. I've got a bit of dialog where someone is crying and stumbling and nervously running their words together and seriously, how the hell do you punctuate that? To be more specific, the girl in question is saying: "[It] doesn't last." And with the bawling I presently have that written as: "Doesn'ast" Now that is definitely not correct; I've written it like it's a Klingon word with the apostrophe giving an indication where the syllables are. My problem is that it's joining two words that have skipped letters right next to each other. It sounds reasonable to say it should be: "Doesn' 'ast." With the apostrophes indicating there's skipped letters, but it looks weird as he'll to have them back on to each other, doubly so because my computer won't let them both be the same character, using a single quote mark for the second one because it's backing onto a word. So, is there a correct way to do it? And if not how would you do it? Answers on a post card to the usual address.
I'm not sure there is a correct way to do it. Your example isn't egregious or ridiculous to me. That said, I would write it normally and make it clear in prose that the words are smashed together under her sobs. My personal opinion is "doesn' 'ast" looks too awkward for me to justify its use when I could just make it clear in a tag or beat what it's supposed to sound like. I'm not saying it's wrong to use dialogue like this. I'm merely saying that the juice is not worth the squeeze for me. FWIW
I would do something like this: "Doesntlast," she blubbered. Breaking many QUOTE rules QUOTE. You know the ones. You should even consider an unusual tag to draw it out. This type of writing actually has a name: scriptio continua. I think the Dead Sea Scrolls uses it. No punctuation, no spaces. They use special characters to show the beginning of words, kind of like camel-case in programming. But in your line, the letters are jammed together for effect. It's very meta, hence modern, but what's funny is that it's as old as the hills.
Agree with Spence about writing it normally and modifying its timbre using a beat. I find that clarity in writing is hard enough without asking the reader to play Tetris with phonetically written dialogue. I try to make the dialogue as dipshit simple as possible so they'll cut me some slack if I hit them with something confusing later. Kind of like how taking the layups in basketball will open the deep threes later on. Just a preference thing for my own method. Faulkner was awesome at phonetic dialogue but I'm not Faulkner.
She already been crying a while when we get to her talking back, it's not new and it's already been done to death to get across that she's upset. And the other person she's talking to doesn't understand her mumbling and asks her to repeat herself, which she does. And so having it be written like it's normal dialog is a bit weird to me. The point of this is that it's a big revelation from her, one that she's ashamed to admit and I want to make it clear how hard it is for her to get it out. [Edit because autocorrect ruined my fucking life]
I'm just not sure your example makes it clear. I understand what you're trying to do, but I think I would be confused if I came across that in a book.
What POV are you in? If you're in the POV of the character who doesn't understand her, I'd not even try to phonetically spell the words, just say "she wailed something with way too many vowels in it," or whatever. If you're in her POV I think you'd probably be better off writing what she thinks she's saying, with an added note about her sobbing so hard she wasn't sure it came out right, or something. Regardless, I'd move away from the phonetic spelling, I think, if the words aren't even recognizable.
