To me, this sounds like either third person limited with changing POV, or close enough that thoughts without either attributions or italics are perfectly practical and, from my point of view, preferable. I realize that you don't find it preferable, and it's your book, so of course you get to make that decision. But I would be very, very surprised if it weren't completely doable.
It probably is do-able. Whichever way you write, there will always be someone that disagrees and apart from the basic full stop means stop and comma means pause at the end of a clause ... everything else can and is interpreted differently. Do you agree that not enough time is spent teaching the finer points of grammar and punctuation at school level? (From the start right through to the end.)
Definitely. Not enough time teaching the points of grammar, etc. specifically, and not enough time spent in having the student write and then correct their writing.
Oh, there absolutely are rules. Communication requires a common understanding, and much of that common understanding is rules. You can break them, but breaking them with meaning requires that you understood the commonly understood meaning in the first place.
Yes, there are rules but I prefer to think of them more as technicalities. There is a technical side to writing just like there is a technical side to building a car. You can have any car body shape, colour, pattern, engine size, gear set up, interior, tinted windows and fluffy dice that you want but if you've not connected the ignition properly, you're going nowhere!
Well, when you said I thought that you meant Apparently I was mistaken. I'll try Babelfish next time.
There are no rules, only conventions. There, I've said what you did in a sentence. People like yourself really need to desist from preaching to impressionable young writers about definitive ways of writing. It's all opinion and conjecture. There's too many second rate high school English teachers on here. Edited to Add: Just because you can't think of any specific examples as a reference point, does not mean something can't be done.
Have a read back over the thread. I see you conveniently disregarded my other point. Show me the rule book to which you so stringently adhere. As long as the writing is legible and conveys what it is the writer is trying to say, then it's legitimate. A command of the English language and of its spelling and grammar is a necessary prerequisite and goes without saying. How any one person chooses to convey thought or any other human faculty is a matter for that writer alone. As long as it's coherent, legible and most importantly, consistent, it is a matter of stylistic choice, nothing more.
No, thanks, but feel free to present quotes from my posts (not those of other people), where I demanded stringent adherance to rules. The very post that you complained about talks about understanding the rules in the context of breaking them effectively. But that requires understanding rules. It seems that you're having to search pretty hard for something that I've said that you actually disagree with. Or perhaps you've set a stringent must-be-obeyed rule that I must use the word "convention" rather than the word "rule"? Indeed. Shockingly, that even applies to people who disagree with you. And therefore, I will continue to use the word "rule." But I will try to stop responding to you.
There is a very clear and distinct difference between the two words, but then a self-appointed expert like yourself already knew that. I can't be bothered to further engage with the forum pseudo-literati either. To quote Isaac Asimov: 'Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.'
Write an ESP conversation like a normal one. Use other writing tools to make it feel as surreal as you need and to make it clear to the reader. Unless I'm mistaken, the rule is if it's dialog, it uses dialog markup.
I found myself dragged back to this thread ...but discovered something new! Your situation, having an inner voice that is different from a 'thought' requires thinking outside the box. What if you gave this inner voice a name? It could be a conventional name, if Michelle knows it ...or it could be a name she assigns to the voice? If it has a name, you could tag and handle the speeches like conventional speeches, provided the reader KNOWS that only Michelle can hear what's being said by this invisible character: “Well what the hell are we supposed to do? I already tried to escape once.” Michelle cringed at the memory. “There’s no way I can go through that again.” It took a while for Derosia's reply to come. "No, child," he said. "No, you can't. But for now you must do whatever he instructs you to do." Michelle could feel his sympathy, his regret for the difficult position he was forcing her to take. "I need time to gain my strength. It took much pain and suffering for me to be awoken from my dormant state. You cannot defeat him on your own. Allow me the time I need and I will be able to teach you things. Not everything Daniel has told you has been a lie" “What do I need to do?” "Everything he asks, child. No matter how painful, wrong, or degrading. Except you must not reveal my presence." Derosia's voice suddenly rose, boomed inside Michelle's head. "He cannot know of my awakening. I cannot stress that enough." .............. I've seen this sort of thing done before. It works, even when a third party enters the room. Just make it clear that while Michelle can hear Derosia's voice, the other person can't. She'll need to watch what she says, if she speaks to Derosia in a normal voice. If she and Derosia communicate only via thoughts, however, then you'll need to work out some way to make that clear. The only time that would be a problem is if other people are in the scene as well. Then maybe the internal conversation could be put in italics. Either that, or the third person could say 'what' all the time, thinking Michelle is talking to him ...but that might be a bit slapsticky.
I like that idea. I can think of a number of tags that work. And it would seem reasonable that a voice in one's head is not the same as internal monologue and any single way of managing it on the page is probably not a well established convention at this point.
Yes that is a great idea. I watched The Host earlier. I haven't read the book yet but I am now intrigued as to how the writer has written the conversations between Melanie and Wanderer, especially when the Seeker is in the room too. I can see this coming to my kindle very soon!
It occurs to me that there are zillions of TV shows with spy and criminal types wandering around with two-way microphones in their ears, sometimes also interacting with people who are present face-to-face. A novel that depicts the same situation would be very close to this voice-in-the-head situation. (For that matter, so would a novel depicting a conversation on a Bluetooth headset, except for the fact that you won't get shot if you get caught talking on your headset.)
I see no reason depicting a voice in one's ear should not changed based on the distance the sound is to the ear or the device the sound is coming through.
LOL. I haven't read it yet - but probably will get it just to see how she'd done it. Personally speaking, I have no characters that can do that so I've never really thought about how I would write that kind of situation.
Now, I have written both those scenarios. And I used tags for it (the tinny voice came through his earpiece ... etc)
For me the entire question was answered when I asked my 14 year old niece, "If you saw a line of text with no dialogue tags in italics what would you think was going on?" And she said, "I would think that was the character's internal monologue, dumbass."
