Fantasy author here, as if that weren't apparent by the title question. Got a dragon who talks directly into his Rider's head, telepathically. I've seen it done in varying ways. What do you think works best? <Are you all right, daslasie?> came a voice in Kaelie’s mind. Are you all right, daslasie? came a voice in Kaelie's mind. Or some other way entirely? I don't specify that it's in her mind every time, which is why I want it to look slightly different than regular dialogue. Plus, she's the only one who can hear him (for the most part) so if there's another person around when he's talking to her it needs to be apparent that the dialogue from the dragon to her is private and not heard by the third party. Tentatively using the <> idea bc he uses some words from an old language that I want to italicize (daslasie in this example). But I don't know if I like that.
There are a couple of threads on here that already touch on this, most prominently are Telepathic Dialogue, Writing Proper Dialogue, and Italics for Thoughts?. From what I gather, the consensus is to either use italics or use normal speech tags inferring the speech is telepathic.
In the case of telepathic conversation, it's still a dialogue between distinct entities, so I would even more strongly argue for standard speech formatting. I won't go into my usual diatribe about the overuse and misuse of italics.
I find italics annoying and distracting. Your reader isn't stupid so just use standard formatting and make it clear who's a telepath.
I admire the way Dembski-Bowden punctuated telepathy in his Horus Heresy novel The First Heretic. ~~~~~ Malcador didn’t argue. He closed his eyes, raised his head to the sky, and spoke without sound. Every Word Bearer, every Ultramarine, every living being in a ten-kilometre radius heard the man’s psychic voice pulsing through their minds, such was its power. +He will not listen, my lord. Not to me+
I would also go for standard speech syntax. I am at the moment trying to write something that would look like telepathic communication. It's a he/she thing. Unfortunately he doesn't understand a "word" of what she is "saying". He is just starting to recognise what "you are cute" feels like when teleported into his brain. Fortunately they can talk to eachother the like we all do. I am not sure anything will come out of it. It gets messy an I am not sure it will do any good.
I think those little arrow things might work very well. It would certainly distinguish between actual speech, using quotation marks as usual, and telepathic speech. I like italics for some things, but italics can get tiresome to read if there is too much of it. If you save the italics for foreign words and other things, I do believe the arrows will serve your purpose. Mind you something will need to be included in the text at first, to make it clear what's happening.
When reading these sort of things, I prefer some sort of alternate punctuation, such as the angle brackets you suggested (and I've seen these used before), or the plus signs as suggested above. JD
There is dialogue that verges on this in my book, though not strictly telepathy — in this case, it is a human talking with an AI that is connected to their mind. For this, I format it like any other dialogue. I don’t think it’s hard to follow, as I establish early on that other characters can’t hear these two when they talk to each other. Italics might be fun if the telepathic thoughts become interchangeable with someone’s normal speech. That would become a commentary on when someone is thinking versus when they are conversing, and the separation between those two. But unless you want to go there, which I don’t really want to in my telepathy, I’d recommend quotes.
