: Re: Background speech with foreground dialogue A few days ago, I stumbled upon an issue of the type; meaning I had two characters talking between themselves and another character talking in the background;

@Hamaas631

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I saw an effective example of this in 1634: The Baltic War (David Weber & Eric Flint) recently. The factors that made it work were:

The background speech was in italics (as you've done here).
The passages of background speech began and ended in the middle of sentences.
There wasn't a lot of back-and-forth; for every speech chunk there were at least a few paragraphs of foreground action.
The content of the speech clearly showed passage of time (as suggested by Lauren Ipsum).

As I read this I felt that this was a familiar technique -- surely I've seen it before.

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