Fomatting Help - Avoiding Confusion

[erulisse]

I desperately need some help here to keep an o-fic story from bogging down in he said/she said details.

I have a storyteller who is telling the story of A and his quest to achieve a mate. The storyteller is an interactive character - she not only tells the story but also interacts with her audience and her storytelling aids (drums, rattles, etc).

When she is telling the story, I have each paragraph beginning with " which would be the norm for someone speaking multiple paragraphs. This sets her words aside from her actions in the real world. BUT...

Within the actual story, she has characters. And those characters move, think, speak, etc. They also get set aside with " or ' marks (depending on auditory or thought dialog). It starts to become an overabundance of quotation marks and I think it looks bad and it is confusing to the reader.

What I'm wondering is this -- Is there a better way to demarcate the distinction between the storyteller's real-time interaction with her audience vs her tale? Would it be better to switch type faces or to indent rather than different " and ' and perhaps other markings? It's getting confusing and rather annoying and it is a longer story - probably tapping out at 8000--9000 words. If it was a short little think thing, no problem. But by the time the reader is bouncing back and forth for that long, well....as an author I am aiming for simplicity, and as a reader I long for clarity.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to have had a problem similar to this and LC is the only place I can think of where I have such a large variety of authors to get help from. So...Pande, Surgical, Spiced, Oshun, Randy O, Aearwen and others - I'd really appreciate your help on this.

- Erulisse (one L)

[aearwen]

I'm wondering if you want to set the interaction sections apart from the narrative sections with some sort of marking. Another option to use in conjunction with that would be to put the interactive sections in first person and the story narrative in third person - sticking tightly to your storyteller POV.

If it were me, that's how I'd handle it.

[mollyapple]

Ooh that's a good idea about 1st person vs 3rd person

From my experience for both fic and non-fic writing, I have to assume lowest common denominator and make it painfully easy for the reader-- that's my biggest struggle with science writing for sure. So in that vein I would say relying on quotation marks alone is never going to cut it, but indenting DOES sound good to me. That's so visually clear that even if skim reading you know who is talking

[erulisse]

Hmmm, these both sound quite viable. Let's see if anyone else chimes in on this and what their ideas might be. I'll have to finish writing this by mid-week to be able to go through and make POV changes if I decide that would work best, and indents are also possible. There's just so much going on here and I want it crystal clear.

Thanks to both of you!

- Erulisse (one L)

[Scarlet]

I would suggest trying a different font style or italic to differentiate.

Something that is visually clear makes things easier.

[DrummerWench]

Jeez, I thought I replied, but apparently I got distracted & never clicked Post ...

Anyway, I'm with Scarlet--if italics are an option for you, they work well to set apart different narratives.

[erulisse]

Thanks all. You've presented me with several options to try when I finish the story this coming week. I'm already using italics, so that may not work farther than I already have, but I'll revisit everything with new eyes.

Thanks again! It's very appreciated.

- Erulisse (one L)

[randy]

Sorry it took me so long to respond. I'll add my support for italics to differentiate thoughts from spoken words. The only thing if have to add is that when you have a person telling a story that involved what people in the story are saying, they'd naturally make liberal use of 'dialog tags' as in, '"Oh sticklebacks!" exclaimed Bilbo', or 'Aragorn reassured the others, saying, "Fear not . . ."'

[erulisse]

Thanks, Randy. I appreciate your weighing in on this.

- Erulisse (one L)

[erulisse]

I just thought I'd let all of you know that the combination of indents and italics seems to have done well to clarify the vagueries of this story. Thanks to all of you for your help and input, it was and is gratefully acknowledged and appreciated.

- Erulisse (one L)

[mollyapple]

Yay! Glad you found a good resolution!