Speaking over the phone

[JoeySL]

Wasn't sure, if was okay to ask this in the 'Texting'-Thread, so I started a new one. Please append to the other thread if I was mistaken. Thank you!

With movie captions I learned that speech that happens off screen should be italicized. Now I keep wondering if I should do this with speech the POV hears over the phone as well.

"Can you hear me?" she asked over the phone.
"I'm listening," someone said. "What do you want to know?"
"I was wondering if you should be speaking in italics or not."

I wonder if this is just normal direct speech, so no italics, or if it should be set apart like texting. Since my characters speak over the phone quite a bit, I keep stumbling over this.

 

[JudiH]

I don't think I'd italicize it. I think it's just conversation.

"I was wondering if you should be speaking in italics or not." That's great!!

 

[Brigid Barry]

Agree that it's just conversation. The difference with visual media is that there are no dialogue or action tags and for accessibility they need to differentiate between the on-screen person and the off-screen person. This is not an issue in books.

 

[CMBright]

1) I would expect phone dialogue to be handled like regular dialogue.

2) If my character could only hear one side of the conversation because they were listening to someone on a phone call instead of being on the phone or listening to someone on speaker, I would not have the side the character could not hear. I would find a creative way to show the silence between lines.

 

[ShadowsFall]

I've never read a book with the phone conversation in Italics. I'd say don't do it.

 

[Norsebard]

It's interesting to read everyone's comments. Before I read the replies, I was going to post, "Yep, all speech that happens off-screen, including telephone conversations, should be italicized."

Well, I guess not, then!

Is this a recent change?

I'm pretty sure that it used to be that all dialogue spoken off-screen - e.g. a neighbor speaking loudly, or news reports on the radio or TV, or ghostly voices from the ether, or indeed the remote half of telephone conversations - should be in italics.

That's how I've done it for the past seventeen years, and I've never had a complaint about that particular aspect. Huh!


Norsebard

 

[Maryn]

Like so much about writing fiction, there aren't hard rules about each esoteric thing that can arise, like phone conversations, words said during long hold times on the phone (Your call is important to us...), texting, words coming from the TV, announcements over the speakers in the grocery store, and so much more.

There are, however, common practices followed by the big-name publishers, usually mimicked by smaller presses and the better self-publishers.

And there's the Chicago Manual of Style, which is not intended for fiction but which makes a damned good effort to cover every esoteric thing. They suggest all personal communication be run into the main text (as opposed to, say, being double-indented and separated, italicized, etc.) and treated as spoken language. (14.222)

To me, that suggests the author would make it clear the person's on the phone, and their conversation would have quotation marks and dialogue tags, not italics, as if the people were in the same room.

If the POV character is overhearing one end of a phone conversation, not participating in it, the part they hear would be treated like dialogue.

Maryn, sure on this

 

[JoeySL]

Thank you all!

I'll treat it as regular conversation then and only transcribe what the POV can actually hear.