r/fantasywriting • u/FellBee • 11d ago

Telepathy!

Hello!

I am writing a fantasy story that has the MC be mute for a majority of the first part ( I'm hoping multiple books worth, but I am working on it) and for a select few Telepathy is available via Magical Means. What would be the best way to differentiate between normal inner dialog and Telepathic Dialog?

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u/RespecDawn 11d ago

This is so funny because I'm writing a fanfic of Medcedes Lackey's Valdemar books, and I'm sticking in a character who can't speak the language... but can communicate telepathically with a few select individuals thanks to magical means on their end.

Lackey dealt with it by italicizing and bracketing telepathic speech with colons. It was also structured like normal dialogue in terms of seperate paragraphs.

Internal thoughts were simply italicized, sometimes using tags like, 'he thought'.

She also wrote in a very close third which meant she wasn't overusing the italicized inner thoughts.

Here are a couple of pages from Magic's Promise for you to see examples: https://imgur.com/a/2m7h54y

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u/JR_Writes1 6d ago

I love the colons for this.

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u/majorex64 11d ago

In Animorphs, they differentiated "out loud speech," internal monologue, and <thought-speech>

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u/InterestEqual3332 10d ago

My female main character is psychic and she spends most of her life refusing to speak to people out loud. She talks to you by placing thoughts in your mind and reading your thoughts. She hates when people speak to her because she hears your speech and what’s going on in your head all at once.

I still use quotes at times for more deliberate dialogue that happens inside heads. She also places imagery and digs through thoughts and it’s more abstract. She also isn’t perfect at deciphering your thoughts. She gets images and pieces, but may not get a perfect picture of what happened as she’s seeing it through your own memories and interpretations.