Imagine having a nagging internal voice! How do you structure and or format that internal dialogue. Though my MC does talk aloud sometimes, but how to structure this? Is italics good enough? Can I use brackets to make the speech standout? This is written in 3rd person limited. Past tense of course. All comments welcome!
Well, thoughts are supposed to be italicized and without quotes (I think), so maybe you could have that be one conversation. When I was back in my fanfiction days, I wrote a robot with three brains that are supposed to work together, but became separate when she was damaged. To distinguish the three, one voice was normal, the second always started comments with ellipses, and the third was abnormally aggressive. All were written as thoughts. It's a risky maneuver, but if you don't do it too long and each voice has a distinct personality, it can work. If your MC talks out loud, then that should be his real personality, and the others should be thoughts. Or at least that seems to be the best way.
So the MC has thought-conversations with an entity inside his/her brain? Just one entity, or multiple? I'm thinking you could try using just italics to indicate the thought-communication, using paragraph breaks as you would for dialogue and setting it off with an occasional "she thought" or "the entity whispered in her head" to clue the reader in to which one is doing the thinking. If there are multiple entities "speaking," that will get confusing pretty quickly and something like brackets may be necessary. But I would suggest trying just italics and test-drive it with some beta readers.
It might be helpful to read up on multiple personalities and schizophrenia (I think that's where a person hears internal voices?) No, I guess multiple personalities would be different, because one takes over and isn't aware of the rest, So more like schizophrenia.
While the old school method is Italics, it has become more popular to just write it like the rest of the non-dialogue narration, though it looks a bit weird. Sure you can use brackets if you want. I have used italics for notes and recordings in first POV, to separate them a bit, not much different from third internal direct thought. I have seen (<>) used around psychic speech, but IDK how that would go over if the reader doesn't get it. I really don't know, play around with some concepts that highlight between character personal thought and this internal extra voice.
That Now that sounds interesting! It's only one voice though, thank goodness. The voice is very aggressive and mean in nice terms.
I have done research and have it down, they're aware of each other, but as far as conveying to the readers is my concern. It all has a purpose.
I heard rumor that some novels do brackets or various symbols to really highlight this voice. I don't want the reader to have to scan back over and wonder who's thoughts. These two are completely aware of the fact they are separate entities in the same body.
