Ii have finished the first draft of my novel and have entered the editing phase. Yay me!
One of the things I have to finalize is how to format telepathic dialogue and internal thoughts. This is essential as there are scenes that have regular dialog, telepathic dialog, and internal thoughts.
i would like your thoughts on how you would do it.
Right now, I am handling it this way
Regular Dialog - use the normal dialog convention - simple
Internal thoughts - italic with no quote punctuation
Telepathic conversation - Use single quote marks AND italicize
I am hoping that that will be enough visual differentiation for the reader to prevent confusion.
It will do the job, but be a pain to read (as any excessive use of italics). You’ll also likely need to establish a replacement for the stuff that usually gets italicized, like emphasis and titles.
Internal thoughts are often not punctuated at all, especially if there’s only one viewpoint character at a time:
He thought the idea was idiotic, but no one had asked him so he kept it to himself.
Internal thoughts are often not phrased as “dialogue” per se. Characters don’t necessarily think in internal monologue.
As far as internal dialog goes, I have made a rule-of-thumb to replace said with thought (past tense), and punctuate normally. I will often leave a breadcrumb or two for the reader to sense the internal nature of the words. I’ve seen many writers do things like “…Martha did not say.” or “…John muttered under his breath.” and similar ways of expressing the notion that something was recorded as dialog but clawed back as not being perceived by the other parties in the conversation.
I do not italicize internal dialog.
The best advice I can offer is this, would you format two characters talking using HAM radios via your third means above? HAM radio operators often speak to voices in the ether on the other side of this planet and sometimes even to voices in the void of space beyond. How about a telephone call? Both are telepathy without the mentalism. For some reason the prefix Tele- has gained a myth that it is inherently ESP type stuff. It only means “from a distance”, there is no requirement for some sort of advanced mind-power. “Tele-control” and “Tele-sense” are terms used in technology to describe remote control and remote reading of sensors.
Over twenty years of hobby writing I have formatted telepathy in different ways, perhaps my example will be educational. In my PERN fanfic days (don’t judge me too harshly) I would setoff the dragon speech with a slash and apostrophe similar to the way a block comment is rendered in PHP. A gross example might be:
As the green dragon beat upwards into the morning sky they exclaimed, /* “Thread!” */
Horrible, I know. I had a reason for it but the reason was invalid. This was the biggest complaint from the one person I shared my fanfic with. I had only ever listened to the books at that point (this was pre-kindle) so I didn’t know how Anne’s publisher did it.
If we were to follow your method, it would look like this:
As the green dragon beat upwards into the morning sky they exclaimed, ‘Thread!’
I do not see how that would be an improvement over:
As the green dragon beat upwards into the morning sky they exclaimed, “Thread!”
And here is why, well written dialog can often go unattributed and the reader will still know who said it. My experience with italics is that it ‘trips’ my eye. Like hitting a palm tree while surfing. I’ve seen advice online that it works the way you propose, but I personally don’t like it.
Sidebar: In the professionally recorded PERN audiobooks, dragonspeech is rendered with high reverb.
Now I’ll get into the weeds. Is your telepathy two (or more) minds communicating using a means that the normies around them cannot perceive easily? Is it two-way? Is it full- or half-duplex? Or is it just a voice in the head of the character, whom they must address their internal thoughts or (worse still) their outside voice?
After my first reader tore me a new one, what I started doing was to segregate dragon speech to a paragraph all on its own, without dialog attribution of any kind, leaving it to the surrounding paragraphs to help the reader know that the isolated dialog was the dragon’s. My example above would look like this:
The green dragon beat upwards into the morning sky.
“Thread!”
“Easy my friend, we have time yet,” S’ner said to green Lilatte.
And I was consistent in this formatting, so that even when an event required a dragon to interrupt or interject it still had the hard break for the reader to see something had happened.
My reader was much happier with that.
If I were to address this today, I’d probably format as usual and just make sure the hints for the reader were there. Conversational hints are usually more effective than jarring formatting choices. I read a manuscript once where each of the ‘voices’ of the story used a distinct font. So the Omnipresent Narrator was printed in Arial, the Main-character was printed in Copperplate, the Love Interest was printed in Helvetica, and the BBEM was printed in Luminari. I think the only thing worse would have been if the BBEG’s minions had their lines printed in Wingdings or something equally absurd rather than Courier. My eyes hated that attempt by an otherwise brilliant writer to ‘help’ the reader ‘see’ who was talking.
If your Telepathy is just a ‘super powers’ based alternative to a cell phone or tactical radio, there is little value in building complex formatting when other clues outside of dialog will probably hold up better and be received easier by your readers. That way you only need to address the changes between methods after introducing the unusual methods .
That does make things easy to fluff up. Here’s where dialog attribution really helps.
“Did I leave the oven on?” John asked Martha.
Martha thought, “What sort of fool have I gotten involved with?”
“John, quit being a scardy cat!” The voice in John’s head said. “You are ruining your one and only chance with her. Back to the plan like we practiced.”
Each of the three sentences above offers a different method of dialog. External, Internal, and Telepathic, now let me render this the way you proposed in your post:
“Did I leave the oven on?” John asked Martha.
Martha thought, What sort of fool have I gotten involved with?
‘John, quit being a scardy cat! You are ruining your one and only chance with her. Back to the plan like we practiced.’
Which would you rather read?
@November_Sierra seems to agree with my personal view here, and for similar reasons.
@kewms brings up another alternative without italics too.
Hope this helps firm up in your mind how you want to format things for your story.
I recommend you use character styles for any non-regular dialogue (or even for that one too if you want to set it apart from non-dialogue parts of the text).
For writing I would use anything that makes the different types of dialogue/thoughts both clearly distinguishable from each other and readable. Long parts of italics on screens, for example, are not good to read. A coloured Highlight Box is a better way to handle this.
Compile allows you to alter the looks of all these styles however you want. And you can play around with different approaches—without having to edit the manuscript—until you find the best solution. Which could be a clearly different font for, say, telepathic conversation. Or no different font and no italics because in the end you find an unsteady typeface more distracting than helpful for the reader.
PS: You can set keyboard shortcuts for each of these dialogue types, very helpful both when writing and editing.
One thing nobody has asked, nor has @MG_Martin made clear is what the compile target is, PDF, DOCX, ePub…
I agree with @Dain that keeping it simple is best, particularly for e-readers, as the reader has control of how it will appear. That said, for the “telepathic” communication, if the OP really wants a visual distinction, then using a monospaced font rather than a proportional font will convey the “tele-” nature of it, and, as ePub is essentially HTML, the distinction will be preserved no matter what theme and customisation the reader imposes, given the limitations provided by their device.
When I had to do something similar, I simply used the character name at start of line followed by the “speech” in italics. Thus:
“We need to talk in private,” said Anne.
Bob: What’s the problem?
Anne: No problem. Just demonstrating something.
Anne winked at him and smiled.
“No idea what that was all about,” said Bob.
Regular internal thoughts I usually do in italics. But it depends whether I’m in close with the character or narrating something wider.
@MG_Martin: as far as 2, up to you. italics or no italics. both works. if you put quotes marks around thoughts, that would mark you as an amatuer.
as far as 3. goes, I have often seen telepathic speech representeed using angle brackets, like so: < dialogue >. I would take away the spaces on either side of the brackets, but that messes with the code here and makes the word “dialogue” invisible.
