Here’s a dumb little formatting trick that I will defend to my grave: when Dyiij or Mokallai speak in their Aelythian god-voice, I don’t tag it. No “she said telepathically,” no “his voice boomed in their minds.” I just… make it bold.
— Look, I can’t protect you from Mokallai forever.
That’s it. That’s the whole stage direction. Bold text, dash out front, and you’re supposed to just know this isn’t coming out of a throat.
Why Not Just Say “Telepathically”?
Because “she said telepathically” is exhausting to read fifty times over the course of a manuscript, and it puts the mechanism front and center every single time when what I actually want front and center is the content of what’s being said. Nobody wants a stage direction before every line of a god talking. You want the eeriness of the voice itself.
Bold does the tagging for free. Your eye catches the visual shift before you’ve even consciously parsed a word of it, and that little jolt — oh, this is Different, capital-D — happens instantly, every time, with zero narrative real estate spent on it.
It’s Also Just… Characterization?
The thing I didn’t fully appreciate until I was deep into revisions: formatting can do characterization work that prose usually has to carry on its own. Bold Aelythian speech reads as authoritative and a little detached before you’ve processed a single word of the actual line. That’s tone, delivered typographically, for free, before the sentence even starts doing its job.
Compare that to how much prose you’d need to burn establishing “this voice sounds different, otherworldly, commanding” every single time it shows up. I’d rather spend that word count elsewhere. Let the formatting carry the tone; let the actual words carry the meaning.
The Catch, Because There’s Always One.
This only works because I use it sparingly. If everyone in the book had a formatting quirk, you’d lose the “wait, something’s different” jolt entirely — it’d just be Wednesday. Bold is reserved for exactly two characters’ god-voice, and The Catch, Because There’s
that scarcity is doing half the work. The second I overuse a trick like this, it stops being a signal and starts being wallpaper.
Small thing. Steal it, but steal it sparingly.
Until next time.
~Shiri