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?
Oh, and who said naming your characters A, B, and C was convenient?? I found it down-right confusing
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).]
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.
I do plan to use the interjections/interruptions very sparingly and just needed to know how to add them in. Now I know.
Shawn
Only you know if this will work for your story, but it's worth a try.
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.
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).