Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Interjecting comments

This is topic Interjecting comments in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by nellievrolyk (Member # 1616) on :

I have two characters, let's call them A and B for convenience, who are together telling a story to a third character C. Now both A and B take turns relating their parts of the story in first person.

What I want to do is interject comments from B when A is telling his part and vice versa. Is that at all possible? And if so, what is the best way to do it?

Posted by Rahl22 (Member # 1411) on :

Of course it's possible. I'd consider using ellipses.

Oh, and who said naming your characters A, B, and C was convenient?? I found it down-right confusing

Posted by Balthasar (Member # 5399) on :

I think you're treading on thin ice, but if you do it properly you won't fall in. When people speak, they mumble, they say "umm" and "ah," they pause to swallow, they cough, etc. Unless those things are essential to the story, the writer doesn't include them.

In real life, people interrupt others when they're telling a story. When authors try to imitate this, I find it annoying. I don't want to read all these interruptions, I want to hear the character's story. (This is one of the reasons I didn't finish "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum.) Here is one instance where the art of fiction shouldn't reflect reality.

HOWEVER, if these interruptions or interjections are essential to telling us something, the reader, something about the characters -- if these interruptions have a direct impact on the story itself -- you can and should include them.

In fact, you might want to compare two stories in which the author has one of the characters tell a story. Read the one I mentioned above (which you can find in THE SCIENCE FICTION HALL OF FAME, VOLUME I), and the other is by Theodore Sturgeon called "The Touch of Your Hand," which as a long monologue toward the end of the story with little or no interruptions. (You can find the Sturgeon story in A TOUCH OF STRANGE.)

Hope this helps.

PS -- Of course you can just write what you want to, put it aside for a while, and then see if it works when you re-read it. Come to think of it, that's probably the best way.

[This message has been edited by Balthasar (edited May 26, 2003).]

Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

I'd recommend that you use dashes (typed as double hyphens) to show interruptions, not ellipses.

A said, "There was this girl, see--"

"--yeah! She was really something, man--"

"--right, and she was watching us as we got out of the car--"

"--she was watching me, A. You always think the girls are watching you."

A punched B in the shoulder. "Sure she was. And you're the one she started talking to first, huh?" He turned to C again. "She asked me if I knew the way to San Jose--"

"--as if you know the way to anything but the video arcade, man!"

And so on.

By the way, I have to agree with Balthasar. This kind of thing can be very annoying, so use it sparingly. Less is more, a little goes a long way, and so on.

Posted by nellievrolyk (Member # 1616) on :

Thank you Rahl22, Balthasar, and Kathleen.

I do plan to use the interjections/interruptions very sparingly and just needed to know how to add them in. Now I know.

Posted by srhowen (Member # 462) on :

as Kathleen said less is more, and like a certian way of speaking if you do it right, then the reader starts to "see" the interruptions ect. even if you group the other person's comments together.

Shawn

Posted by Narvi (Member # 1376) on :

One other trick that works well is to seperate the straight story from the discussion. Maybe alternate chapters (or whatever length is appropriate) and put at the top of the uninterrupted ones <character>'s story.... Those passages then don't need quotation marks and the only thing there shuold be the story. In the other chapters the listeners move around, tend the fire, check to see that the hyperspace portal isn't open yet, or whatever, and the tellers interrupt eachother all they want.

Only you know if this will work for your story, but it's worth a try.

Posted by Doc Brown (Member # 1118) on :

It's always hard on readers when more than two people are involved in a conversation. When this happens, it's best to make two people dominant and all others subordinate.

It's easy to write a conversation in which three or four characters play equal roles. But it's a pain in the neck to read it!

This is only the case with prose. Stage plays, movies, TV shows, comic books, radio shows, and just about anything else can have limitless characters play equal parts in any conversation. But the wiring of the human mind seems to place this barrier on written stories. The limitation isn't in your writing, it's in the reader's brain.

Posted by Narvi (Member # 1376) on :

There's a trick for multi-way conversations too -- make each character sound different. If this comes from the content of your story, then great, you're done. If not, give each one a style or accent. Be careful not to overdo it -- you don't want to require effort from your readers. Just turn 's's into 'th's or use Elizabethan terms of address. Check Terry Pratchett's _The_Fifth_Elephant_ for a good example of this.

Posted by FlyingCow (Member # 1198) on :

While this may not be the best idea for submissions, you could always have the two characters speak in different fonts. Keith Olberman and Dan Patrick used this pretty effectivelin in their book The Big Show about SportsCenter, and I used it when I co-wrote a memoir with a friend of mine.

If the fonts are distinctive, it's easy to tell who is speaking when, without other grammatical tricks. Obviously, the styles would also have to be noticeably different (Though when two people are actually writing, that ends up happening anyway).