Hiya I've encountered a problem when I was writing earlier and have not found anything about it on the internet. I'm hoping that one of you knows how to do this. One of my characters tells the story of how he met the main character (only in this particular chapter) I have written the dialogues between him and the main character. I think it would help the story if he could actually tell somebody else how he met the main character. I'm not sure how to do this though. He would be telling the story to a third person and talk to the main character. I have no idea where the inverted commas go, because as he is telling the story another person the descriptions [red] become part of a dialogue too. Here is a simple example (not from my script) e.g. "I met her on Sunday after my last meeting. She seemed to be angry about something. I went over and started talking to her." "Hi I'm Josh." "She looked at me for a moment and then... etc." "I'm Gemma." "I never saw her again." Can you see what I mean? Is there a rule for that? Thanks for your help.
You have to use single quotes (' '). Here's an example: Edited to add: I think Cogito has a blog post on this. You should be able to find it with a quick search.
I had to work through this for one of my short stories, told in first person POV, but one of the characters is telling the POV character what happened, and what people said. So I had to use single quotes within quotes, much like Thirdwind indicated. If you're interested in seeing the quotes within quotes in a variety of fashions (due to action, dialogue, paragraphing, etc.) you can check it out in the story. The part you'd be interested in starts about 1/3 of the way through. (when Dennis and Marv are in the Restaurant, and Dennis is telling the story about his daughter Janelle, to Marv). Link: "Vegetable Matters" Good luck. It's kind of a tricky thing to do, but not too hard once you get the hang of it.
