All the viewpoint characters in my story are orcs and speak Orcish as their native tongue, but some are bilingual: they use English to talk to humans. Additionally, the main character has a magic power: she speaks with djinns telepathically, and it feels to her like she's talking to herself in her head and hearing herself reply. She does this in Orcish often, but can do it in English if she needs a djinn to deliver a message to a human. Her internal dialogue could easily go on for half a page if she needs, say, a djinn to explain a major plot point to her.

So that's 4 different modes of speech: spoken Orcish, spoken English, thought Orcish and thought English. And the narration of the main character's general thoughts and feelings needs to be distinct from the thoughts she shares with djinns.

Making it apparent in context to the reader which is which is not a problem. I can just say so. However I thought it might be handy to have a typographical convention so once the pattern is established I don't have to spell it out every time.

My first thought was that non-italic text could indicate Orcish and italic text could indicate English. Blocks of right-justified text with no speech marks and no narration could indicate the main character's internal telepathic voice, while all the narration and ordinary speech would be left justified and laid out in the traditional way.

However, I'm concerned that having right-justified blocks might be ugly as heck to the reader and/or look bad in a manuscript. Is there a better way?

Related:

• What is generally the accepted format style for telepathic communication in the midst of verbal communication?

posted over 5 years ago

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Robyn‭

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